An accreting assortment of Tweets about Lady Macbeth (2016)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 May
An accreting assortment of Tweets about Lady Macbeth (2016) (stalled / incomplete review)
@LadyMacbethFilm Via 'formalism' / Stalin, we know of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but is Shostakovich's opera a rarity ? :https://t.co/oK5RBYnq4T— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 20, 2017
Those born in Russia (or the former USSR) – or who were not, but who study Russian literature – may be in a different relation to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and, because considering it in, its literary and social context – if we are interested in music, we will all know that (so the story goes) Dmitri Shostakovich, looking at an edition of Pravda, found himself there condemned*, and having [to appear] ‘to change his ways’ (again, as the story goes).
One question, amongst many, that the film may pose (not necessarily a bad thing in a film that we should wish to enquire) is whether it commends to us Shostakovich’s opera / libretto, and / or Nikolai Leskov’s original novella (from 1865)…
It seems that @LadyMacbethFilm (2016) desires to be in a period, but not a period-piece, and switches countries as in Lady Chatterley (2006) pic.twitter.com/8o62RsmCjC— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 20, 2017
In modern Russia, the town of Mtsensk lies in Oryol Oblast (a federal subject of Russia)
@LadyMacbethFilm 'Basing' itself on a novella from 1865 (in Dostoyevsky's Epoch magazine), the painterly-composed shots seem more like Caspar David Friedrich pic.twitter.com/2XN9ZTImwq— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 20, 2017
Film and other references :
* Effi Briest ~ Theodor Fontane
Cutting the initial scenario of Nikolai Leskov's novella, and very drastically at the end, @LadyMacbethFilm makes Katherine less like Effi.— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 21, 2017
* Lady Chatterley (2006) [adapting** John Thomas and Lady Jane ~ D. H. Lawrence]
* Sunset Song (2015)
* The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ~ Anne Brontë
End-notes :
* Not straightaway, when the work was first performed in Leningrad and Moscow (within days) in January 1934, but around two years later.
** Not 'Based on one of the most scandalous novels of our time', as IMDb asserts (@IMDb), with regard to Lawrence...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
