Aestheticizaion Of Emotional Violence In Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet(1996)

Among Shakespeare's plays,Hamlet is one of the most well-known.It provides readers a unique experience about their tragedy,delving deeply into powerful themes,plot,form and aesthetic accordingly.With the change of recording technique,Hamlet has became an enduring work in this mass media age and has been portrayed from literary text to stage and to screen.And this play's receiving groups have added from readers to audience,and their understanding toward Shakespeare's Hamlet also has more different perspectives.As we all know Shakespeare has many plays like King Lear,Macbeth,Romeo and Juliet that are similar to Hamlet in portraying violence.However,the film adaptations of Hamlet have played the greatest role in influencing audiences and cultures around the world.That's the reason why this thesis has focused on Hamlet's film adaptation as the research topic.For most of the adaptation works,many modern elements were added into it,for instance,modern scene and settings,weapons and customs,but some of them maintained the plot and lines.Many of the adaptations works have changed the lines of Shakespeare,while others have altered the plot but kept the lines of Shakespeare.Of all the adaptation works of Hamlet,there are four deserving of studying.There are adaptation directed by Laurence Olivier,Franco Zeffirelli,Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda.Take Branagh's Hamlet(1996)as an example,it used film to depict emotional violence,specifically and vividly as seen in Hamlet's revenge of depression and anger,the acolasia between Gertrude and Claudius,Ophelia's despair,etc.Its lines are the most inclusive among all versions of the cinematic adaptation of Hamlet.That's the reason why this thesis is centered around Branagh's Hamlet as the target for the case study.Violence in a tragedy is the part that cannot be ignored,but in Hamlet it is mainly depicted in the emotional portrayal of its characters.And this emotional violence represented in Branagh's Hamlet is different from a traditional film with Aestheticization of violence,which begins from 20 th century and has been changed after the influence of oriental esthetics,made popular in Hollywood in present day.This kind of film just wanted to show the violence to audience and it did not tell the difference between the “beauty violence” and the “ugly violence”,which became a culture with lower taste.It is necessary to pint that in this thesis the aesthetic violence is the violence portrayed after art,and is not the true violence in reality.The violence element satisfied audience desire of emotional vent,but the aesthetic element pull them back to the edge of the code of ethics.The theory of Aestheticization applied in this thesis is not intends to ode violence but to ease people's violent instinct.So under this certain circumstance,it helps the reality with crime rate.Branagh's Hamlet uses the approach of aesthetic to portray the emotional violence which applied a guided and reference meaning for film adaptation about Shakespeare's works in the element of violence.Therefore,this thesis analyzes the emotional violence through the actions and behind the actions in the first chapter,present the lines through the natural performance of the actors,enabled audience learned the charming of Shakespeare's work,and have more understanding for Hamlet under the culture with postmodernism.Then in chapter two,this thesis analyzes the how Branagh applied the Aestheticization of violence in three aspects: visual effect,musical effect and the montage approach.Finally in the last chapter it analyzes the audience response toward Aestheticization of violence and its influences on the psychological reflex of audience to embody the aesthetic values.