Shostakovich in Soviet Cinema | Decoding Shostakovich

Harlow Robinson, lecturer

Hamlet (1964), film by Grigori Kosintsev; score by Dmitri Shostakovich

“To be, or not to be…” One of Dmitri Shostakovich’s favorite literary characters was Shakespeare's Hamlet, the indecisive prince, paralyzed by the vexing sort of moral choices--to collaborate or not to collaborate--that Soviet artists were constantly forced to make. Shostakovich wrote his most highly regarded film score for this 1964 Lenfilm adaptation of Hamlet, directed by his lifelong friend Grigori Kozintsev and starring Innokenty Smoktunovsky in a harrowing performance praised by Laurence Olivier. For Soviet artists and intellectuals, Shakespeare's plays and poems became a language of code signifying resistance to the totalitarian regime. For them, as for Hamlet, said Kozintsev, "the ultimate prison was not made up of stone or iron, but of people.” As Prof. Harlow Robinson will discuss before the screening, Shostakovich's seething score centers on the swirling image of the ghost of Hamlet's father, calling for revenge against injustice, hypocrisy, arrests and executions.