Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the past decade, attention in the humanities and social sciences has been turning with a new urgency to the phenomenon of globalization. Dramatic changes in the organization of production and social relations, a compression of the time-space continuum, and interpenetrations at the level of politics and culture – all have been singled out as among globalization's constituent components. Other manifestations include deterritorialization and the diffusion of identical consumer goods, as a result of which border crossings have become commonplace and cultural homogeneity normative. One of the most salient incarnations of the global, however, is to be found in film, with Hollywood representing a forceful cinema industry that has put its competitors into the shade. As recent studies such as Global Hollywood (Miller et al. 2001) and Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy (Hozic 2001) indicate, the tendency has been to foster dominant screen images, practices, and expectations that have dictated filmmaking in a variety of styles and environments. This essay argues that, in deploying modes of popular entertainment, editorial restlessness, action-oriented narratives, intertextual borrowings, and postmodern registers, a discrete group of Shakespeare films – Jeremy Freeston's Macbeth (1997), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996), Michael Bogdanov's Macbeth (1998), Michael ... log in or subscribe to read full text