Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine's Richard III

Peter S. Donaldson

Though Gorky's review may be the first example of a response to cinema that linked the new medium to death, Antonia Lant's researches have shown that related ideas of living death, spectral life, and mummification were already a pervasive presence in the discursive world into which film was introduced. Magic lantern "phantasmagoria" date from the late 18th century, and by 1801 were actively advertising the appearance of "phantasms or apparitions of the dead or absent, in a way more illusive than has ever been offered to the eye in a public theatre."In the course of the century such shows acquired a close association with ancient Egypt, its cult of the dead and its practices of entombment and mummification. "Egyptian" elements were introduced into the shows and into the design and architecture of the display spaces, and in time these associations were transferred to cinema. For example, the Egyptian Hall in London, where magic lantern shows took place in association with Egyptian decorative motifs and Egyptian funereal themes became a cinema exhibition space as early as 1896. The new art of cinema could be construed as even more closely connected with ancient Egypt than the magic lantern shows ad been:

Films about mummies coming to life began very early, with George Melies (Cleopatre, 1899) and there are dozens of examples in the silent era. Sound film continued the tradition with Karl Freund’s The Mummy in 1931, a series of Warner Brothers mummy films in the 1940s, and many others. A website for the "Media, Culture and Society" course at the American University of Cairo declares it "the movie genre that will not die," and current examples include new versions of The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns directed by Stephen Sommers. If cinema was, in Gorky's phrase, a kingdom of shadows, it was so, in part, because of early connections between cinema and the cult of the dead which would prove durable..

The idea that cinema itself is the realm of the absent, the departed, or the dead is less frequently exploited in Shakespeare films than in vampire and mummy films, but Lant’s work offers a particularly resonant way to think about connections between those genres and moments in filmed Shakesespeare when, as Lant puts it, "far from the conquest of death [...] the arrival of cinema seemed to invite an encounter with death" One might look again at those flimsy transparent Hamlet ghosts that appear in the earliest Hamlet films as doubles for the medium, or at Kozintsev’s poetic and powerful Hamlet ghost as an emblem of the director’s conception of his medium and his art, or at Michael Almereyda’s ghost, at once evanescent and disturbingly real, whose disappearance into a luminous soft drink machine tropes on the current state of cinema as adjunct to product placement. Welles’s "mummified" Desdemona in Othello, smothered in her wedding/winding sheet also suggests links with the tradition Lant discerns, as do the complex metacinematic implications of the Brook King Lear, in which Scofield's poignant appeals to the absent film audience in direct address to the lead into his hallucinatory colloquy with the dead Cordelia. Brook’s film, shot in frozen Jutland in anachronistic black and white frequently alludes to silent cinema, beginning with the opening sequence, in which an unnaturally mute and still congregation wait outside the royal chamber, and specifically to Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. Brook keeps us aware of the possibility that the medium itself might fail, lose its soundtrack, stick at a splice and show a still frame, move forward uncertainly, revert to the soundless, colorless, fragmentary and almost (but not quite) lifeless numbness and isolation of the king's mind.

The present essay explores the trope of cinema as necropolis or kingdom of death in one recent film, Loncraine’s Richard III . Like the Brook Lear, this Richard III uses allusions to and techniques characteristic of silent cinema as emblems of death. framing the story of Richard as, in part, an allegory of the role of cinema and other modern media in the institution and maintenance of death-dealing social regimes. The media landscape in the film is broader than that in Brook's Lear , more complex than that analysed by Lant. Richard III is itself a widescreen color film and it uses, reframes, and alludes to many other media, including black and white and silent cinema, 35mm still photography, photograph-based silk screen graphic art, wireless telegraphy and tickertape, recorded and amplified "live" sound and, in the final moments, digital collage. The film uses this wide range of re-framed communications technologies to characterize Richard as a modern, media-reliant dictator, underscoring the other obvious and insistent parallels between Richard and Hitler, English facsism in the 1930s and Nazi terror which the film makes. In the Loncraine film, as in the Richard Eyre National Theatre production of 1990 that preceded it, Ian McKellen’s Richard has affinities with Hitler, but also with Oswald Moseley, and its satire is directed in part against the segment of the English upper class that supported or tolerated fascism in the 1930s. But an even more contemporary relevance is suggested by the wide range of references to contemporary popular culture in the film, by the eclecticism and bricolage that mark it as a postmodern work rather than a period recreation, and especially by the witty anachronisms of its location filming, in which a very contemporary London shows through its several layers of period repurposing. In its evocations of the contemporary world and its media, Loncraine’s Richard III extends Gorky’s trope of cinema as a kingdom of death to the present moment in which media systems are integrated, protean and ubiquitous, and in which political leadership is difficult to distinguish from media celebrity. .

Elsewhere, I have used the term media allegory for Shakespeare films that make media history a central part of their reworkings of the text, as Olivier’s Henry V does by creating an implicit narrative of the transition from stage to film as it establishes parallels linking Henry’s reign, Shakespeare’s London and wartime Britain. Later examples, including Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1987) , Peter Greenaway;s Prospero’s Books (1992) and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996), Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) offer a markedly less optimistic account both of history and of media in transition than Olivier’s , as does Loncraine’s Richard III. But like Olivier, these filmmakers take Shakespeare as predecessor, recasting the metatheatricality of the Shakespeare text as cross-media critique.

Loncraine's media references begin not with cinema but with the older and more immediate medium of the telegraph. The very first shot — before the credits — is an extreme close up of a teletype machine, receiving a message. We see each letter as it is imprinted and moves away from the flywheel: RICHARD GLOUCESTER IS AT HAND. HE HOLDS HIS COURSE TOWARD TEWKESBURY. A hand reaches into the frame to tear off the tape, and a longer shot discovers banked rows of machines chugging out a sea of paper ribbons in a busy command headquarters. Less than a minute later, Gloucester is at "at hand" indeed, as his tank breaches the walls. Seen first as dark figure in a gas mask, he is suddenly beside the overcomfortable Prince of Wales, who just before was enjoying a luxurious supper and a glass of wine. Seconds prior to Richard's entrance, the approach of the tank is registered in tiny domestic details: the barking of a an aged family dog, the rattle of a single wine glass. A single shot dispatches Edward, and another King Henry , but Richard keeps firing gratuitously, the pistol shots becoming sound track to the opening credits, with RICHARD III typed letter by letter on screen in a staccato rhythm as the gun fires, associating teletype and automatic weapons as emblems of the film's intention to connect the character and the play to modernity.

Walter Benjamin's famous essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" characterizes mass media in a way that resonates with this moment in the film. The masses, Benjamin posits, want things brought "very near, very fast." The tickertape does not, of course, literally bring modern warfare into the comfort of an upper class supper, but the echoing mechanical regularity that connects automated typing and gunfire suggests analogies as well as causal connections between modern communications and modern warfare, alike in their implacable replication, immediacy, and "impact". In Benjamin's essay the imagery is more gentle: media (photography, telegraphy) are harmful mostly to "aura" -- to the uniqueness, distance, numinousness upon which previous art forms and social formations had depended. Here, the divinity that hedges royalty is no match for a tank; and rapid gunfire destroys life as well as to aura. Elsewhere in Benjamin (as, for example, in the devastation beheld by the "angel of history" in his next-best known image), the sense of violence, speed and devastation is more palpable, and the association of mass media with the laying waste of nature and humanity more direct, and it is this side of Benjamin’s critique that has been most fully developed in recent media theory. The "masses" want things brought "very near, very fast," but what is brought near by media is the withering of aura, a kind of death, or death itself.

Richard's introduction as a tank commander is followed by a more pastoral scene at court, a modern version of the festivities that mark the "glorious summer" of the Yorkist victory. It is literally pastoral because Richard's gunshots are replaced on the soundtrack by a swing-age setting of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," its refrain, "come live with me" framed by Richard’s murder of the Prince of Wales before it and images of the coughing (dying) King Edward after. Its harmonies are brief, and portentous . The scene is lush, luxurious, insincere, decadent. Lord Rivers is a heedless American roue, grabbing a feel from a stewardess as he disembarks from his plane, chain smoking throughout the ball, even as he dances with his sister Queen Elizabeth. The queen also dances with the invalid king briefly, to show they can do it (but her brother seems a more appropriate romantic match) and then seductively, with her tiny son, in a shot modeled on Doris Day in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

The Duke of Clarence records the occasion. He has a Leica (or Leica copy), an elaborate darkroom set up that is beautifully integrated into his apartments in the palace; a folding flash gun, tripod, time delay shutter. He poses the royal family at a balustrade on a higher floor, rushes down the formal staircase to click the shutter, rejoins them and is included in the shot -- which then instantly appears as a sepia-toned still in the sequence, holds for a moment and stops the action, and then proceeds to fade "up" to full color and movement as filmic time resumes. The sequence embodies, through Clarence, the fantasy that the ongoing movement of events and its photographic representation could be seamlessly and instantly integrated, that life and its grey scale shadow could be one, and that the complex processes of photography could be blended elegantly into the life ways they record. Clarence's set up and his "back room" preparations are shown in detail, yet his idealization of the moment and of the small royal society to which he belongs survives the "revelation of the apparatus." This is an ambitiously inclusive world, in which the royal family provides its own spectacle, and its own representations of that spectacle. However both on the level of narrative (Clarence) and of allegory, those who do most to create the pastoral image of the court and its Yorkist "summer" will presently become its victims.

Clarence, memorializing the moment in the manner of a late Medieval courtly chronicler, but in an anachronistically modern medium, is in turn recorded by the cinematographer, and by Richard. The camera movements that traverse the distances between Clarence and his tripod also mirror Richard's glance, , making connections, watching Clarence, spotting him in the crowd. There's a track from king to Clarence, then men move in to arrest him. Then a shot of Richard and another tracking shot to Clarence, showing that Richard sees the moment of apprehension and may stand in some "insider" or causal relation to it. Next the camera follows Richard as he makes his way to the microphone, taps it, in close-up, and a dissonant screech fills the auditorium, contrasting his choice and use of media with Clarence’s. Both the use of the microphone and the sudden arrest of enemies — or even witnesses —evoke Hitler. As he addresses the mock celebratory soliloquy of discontent not to himself, but to the court, the camera moves in to frame the movements of his brutal, willful jaw and show his teeth in extreme close-up. The shot alludes, perhaps, to the famous long tracking shot in Young and Innocent, in which the camera slowly moves from the upper balcony of an immense dance hall to a close up of the drummer in the band, a close-up tight enough to reveal the flaws in his blackface makeup and discover the murderer's disguise. It may allude, as well, to references to Richard's bite in the Shakespeare’s text ( "Look when he fawns he bites, and when he bites/His venom tooth will rankle to the death" 1.3.290-91;"That dog that had his teeth before his eyes" 4.4.49 and cf.H6Pt3, ,5.6.75). As he speaks, Clarence is led off to the Tower. Clarence’s amateur photography is thus trumped by harshly amplified sound and insincere (though Shakespearean) oratory. But, like Clarence’s idealizing images, Richard’s aggressive and intrusive speech is framed by a highly mobile, wandering camera that also reveals the bad faith and empty self-celebration of the class to which they belong.

Clarence is not a chronicler in the play (still less a photographer), but his long dream bears a kind of witness to moral complexities in the English civil wars which the Tudor histories, and Shakespeare's play itself, in part disavow and misrepresent by making Richard the central character and apparent author of all evil. Clarence’s dramatic role as hapless victim, one in a series leading to the murder of the princes in the Tower, draws attention away from his own insistence that he is not an innocent victim. The events Clarence remembers and repents for offer grounds for a reading of history at odds with the Tudor demonization of Richard, one in which Richard might take his place, with his brother Clarence, as only one more perjured, disloyal, and murderous nobleman among many others in the fifteenth century. If Richard's murder of Clarence helps to bury the complexity of that record in one way, Shakespeare's play does so in another, recording Clarence’s crimes as well as Richard’s, but only in the distracting context of his victimization.

In Shakespeare, the question of the historical record is addressed again when York, on his way to the Tower, asks about its history, and declares his faith that, even if the written "report" had been destroyed, "the truth would live from age to age." His words suggest meanings beyond their immediate context and his own knowledge, pointing to the unwritten traditions through which Richard’s secret crimes would become known, and perhaps even specifically to the handing down of stories from Cardinal Morton (who as Bishop of Ely appears in the Shakespeare's play) to Thomas More, his protege and co-author of The History of Richard III. . The play implies that it is not only the truth about the construction of the Tower, but the truth about the crimes that are soon to be committed in it, that would survive to be enacted on Shakespeare’s stage, and afterward "from age to age." Writing, in this miniature media allegory, is supplemented by living memory and an oral tradition whose repetitions include current performance, which gives present witness of the power of the truth to survive suppression or oblivion. Such an allegory might be extended from stage performance to cinema by means such as those Olivier deploys in Henry V, in which the oratory of the king, its recreation on Shakespeare’s stage and its recasting as epic cinema are stages in an equally optimistic construction of historical continuity through a succession of media. However, Olivier’s own Richard III (1955) is not structured in this way: instead, theatrical, cinematic and televisual allusions and techniques jostle uncomfortably, as Barbara Freedman has shown,and the film begins with a disclaimer of truth, framing Richard’s story as "one of the legends" that have attached themselves to the British Crown. In contrast to the dissonance among media that Freedman finds in the Olivier Richard, Loncraine’s film offers a coherent pattern, but one that retards and reverses the triumphant translatio mediorum of Olivier’s Henry V. Rather than fulfilling and completing the stage, cinema cannot escape its history, falls back into still images, loses color, regresses, and suggests links between current media technologies and practices and those that nourished the growth of fascism and the fetishising of death of fascist leaders.

Richard begins the famous soliloquy at the microphone, but he finishes it in the men's room.]The location functions in multiple ways; intimating the intrusion of "bodies" among the flickering cinematic shadows through evocations of physical aspects of life that still photography does not convey. First the haptic or tactile (Richard's good hand on his penis, shaking the drops off below the frame line; after we see him do this, the concealed "bad" hand will always evoke this moment); then the olfactory (cigarette smoke exhaled through the mouth inhaled through the nostrils sensuously, which in this setting includes a hint of uroboric self-pleasuring). Richard's physical narcissism is here juxtaposed with the pseudo-innocence of the Rivers clan on the dance floor. That the soliloquy bridges these two sets is important for the film's political allegory, but it does not, however, privilege the more "private" space of the men's room with the clarity of unmediated self-disclosure. It is not as if we move from a false public face to a more authentic privy self, for, even though Gloucester addresses the camera directly here and several times elsewhere, he does not warm up to us as audience, does not "play" us as Olivier's Richard always does. His pleasure in discourse, his moments of acknowledgment and communion (such as they are) are reserved in this sequence for his mirror image: this he addresses with real pleasure.

The men's s room set also serves as the first element in the film's creation of a series of underground spaces in which tile floors and walls, large empty expanses, muted colors tending to greys and whites predominate. The "wooing of Ann" takes places in a hospital morgue. These locations develop the visual theme of the city/kingdom of death, and, though shot in color, always tend to a monochrome palette contrasting with the brightly colored scenes of court life. The design of Clarence's quarters in the Tower develops the associations of the morgue/bathroom/hospital world. Initially, Clarence is seen in a grey, tiled room lined with ductwork. He still wears his black formal coat and white shirt, now without collar or tie. His face is pale, drained and deathlike, but, pale as he is, his complexion provides the only hint of color in the image, which is otherwise monochrome. Low illumination, of course, drains the world of color even though a scene may be recorded on a color emulsion, and here Loncraine uses the loss of color in the image to mark the narrowness of the divide that separates life from death. The monochromatic palette also connects the sequence to the doubled images of the royal family in the initial sequence, seen first in color and then in Clarence’s sepia toned prints to later moments in the film, including the death of Edward IV, the execution of Hastings, and the coronation scene, in which black and white and color media alternate or are hard to distinguish from one another.

Through the film, Loncraine momentarily deceives us by framing one medium by another, yet keeps us conscious that we might be tricked, keeps us looking not only for Richard, but for evidence as to how he is being filmed. In the now classic formulations of the "apparatus" critics, the foregrounding of the camera or "revelation of the apparatus" creates the possibility of ideological critique by calling attention to the constructedness of the image. Loncraine foregrounds not the apparatus itself — he never shows the camera filming, for example, as Dziga Vertov or Godard do -- but rather the emulsion and the format (black and white or color, 35mm still, 16mm home movie, 35mm color cinema).

In the second sequence in the Tower, shots through the bars of Clarence's prison (a bluer light, still monochrome, shows rows of windows, the murderers seeking entrance from the keeper in high angle long shot) are intercut with shots of the brightly colored palace dining hall, decorated with fresh flowers, where Gloucester confronts and insults the Queen and Rivers.

The following sequence, in which the murderers enter to Clarence, returns to brown tinted monochrome, with Clarence's very slightly pink flesh the only hint of a wider palette as he soaks in a bathtub (one of six in this wide angle shot of a large bathhouse in the prison with steam billowing up through the slats of the flooring) as. the murderers enter through cross-barred gates behind him. The first gas chamber at Auschwitz was a converted morgue, chosen because the pre-existing ventilation system could be adapted for the rapid clearing of lethal gas. The prisoners, as all know, were told they were entering a delousing shower, and were packed into the chamber so that their body heat would create the temperature necessary to volatilize the Zyglon B insecticide that was shaken down, in solid form, into the chamber through grates above. Clarence is killed in a setting that reprises elements of this scenario (grates above, the naked body in the bath, steam rising from the floor) deepened, perhaps, by the associations bathhouses have acquired in the era of the AIDS epidemic.

Richard Loncraine is not primarily a "horror film" director but there are a number of films in which he concentrates attention on the visual evidences of death, and plays upon the ways in which cinematic representation can make it difficult to distinguish life from death. Close ups can bring the film spectator closer to a dying face than the on-screen characters are, but tight framing also excludes context, and especially the reactions of other characters to the moment of death. The medium, too, is limited to visual and aural cues and cannot convey the tactile quality of the cessation of breath or movement. In portraying the moment of death, Loncraine calls attention, perhaps, to the fact that the cinematic body is not in fact alive. He plays upon the possibilities of cinematic manipulation to unsettle the attention his death scenes demand. A freeze frame, for example, can look very much like the cessation of movement in death; the appearance of the pallor of death might be due to a change in lighting. .As motion is stilled and a dying face on the screen is drained of color, cinema reveals its relation to still photography, and especially to the photographic death mask. In the sequence in which Edward IV dies, for example, the king’s facial movements are tiny, microscopic, his rasping breath very quiet, at last he is still, but we are not sure if the cessation of movement is final until we are cued by a (delayed) cut to the queen's horrified reaction:

From the earliest years of his career, Loncraine has favored such moments. In The Haunting of Julia (1976) the final sequence ends with a similar shot in which Julia (Mia Farrow) dies on screen, but a tight close-up keeps our attention on her still and pallid features and delays the contextual clues that inform us that we have been looking at a dead face. Like Richard III, this earlier film centers on a kind of reversal of post-war mythology, for the haunting of Julia’s house takes its origin from the torture and death of an innocent German child in the post-war British climate of hatred and revenge. It remains unclear for much of the film whether Julia herself is a victim of the haunting, a madwoman for having imagined it, or an unwitting source of evil, and the final sequence resolves lingering doubts only by making the spectator aware of the difficulty of distinguishing visual signs of death from those that would mark her as the successor to the undead spirit that haunts the house. The final sequence In Wide Eyed and Legless [US title The Wedding Gift] (1994), a television drama starring Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, the life-death boundary is treated in a related way, and brings horror elements into a strange and affecting domestic story, in which a middle aged wife suffering from extreme chronic fatigue and wishing to die arranges an affair for her husband as a kind of gift, and attempts, finally successfully, to arrange her own death as well. In a number of sequences, the husband looks into his wife's face (several of these are in the bath), trying to see if she has had a momentary lapse of consciousness or has drowned or died by poisoning herself. In the climax, the lights in the house dim ominously, registering the current that rushes through her body in the bath when she commits suicide by electrocution. We don't know, however, whether this has really happened until he rushes upstairs and we examine, with him, once again, her lifeless face, this time intended to be read as actually dead. As in the Haunting of Julia, the perusal of the image, examining it for signs of life is also thematic; if in Julia the motif captures and hold our attention on the moral issue of the victimization of Germans, here we are asked to consider the complex moral issues surrounding the wife's wish to die rather than suffer the torments of an incurable disease and the sadness of watching her marriage, based so much on activity and vital engagement, drift into long term care burdens for her husband. The moments of ambiguity are torment for the husband; for the audience they provide an invitation to take the unconventional moral stance of the film seriously.

Loncraine's camera in Richard III lingers frequently on the moment of death and on the ways in which that moment is made ambiguous yet "very near" by reproduction in contemporary media., and, like the earlier films, draws the audience into close attention to signs of life or their absence, and thus into partial identification with Richard’s obsessions with death. There were explicit necrophiliac scenes in the National Theater production from which the film derives as well: after Hasting's death, his head is brought (in a fire bucket) to Richard. Alone on the huge stage, he savors the moment, glances about (no one there; only us), and reaches lovingly into the bucket in a kind of erotic ecstasy.

The film weaves a subtle web of sensory details into its portayal of comparable moments. The first death is that of Clarence -- Richard is seen in medium close-up, his withered arm being massaged; the masseur is out of view and we see the pain of the process and a hint of ecstasy in the relief it brings on Richard's face. A package is brought (evidence of Clarence's death within, we think) and the attendant withdraws. Richard draws the brown paper past his nostrils as if savoring a fine cigar, extracts the duke’s spectacles (twins of the ones Richard himself is wearing) and begins to sniff them hungrily when he becomes aware of his wife at the staircase in a lovely low cut satin nightgown. Interrupted and annoyed, he goes to her and dismisses her by rudely reaching past her to shut off the light. The sense of smell, of course, is not, or not delivered as a part of the cinematic experience, but its simulacrum has been used earlier in Richard's savoring and inhalation of his own second-hand smoke, and, grotesquely, in his smelling of his own saliva-coated ring (he's taken it off his finger with his teeth) before he places it on Ann's finger in the morgue. Here, then, Clarence's glasses, the "brothers" to Richard's, evoke the earlier scenes of narcissism, twinning, replication, mirroring, as one pair of spectacles is brought so close to the other as to appear its image, as the odor of the living body of one brother is savored by the other.

Whether stories of Hitler’s necrophilia have a basis in fact or not, they are certainly a part of the legend and its cinematic representation. As early as The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplain's Hitler, when alone, slides into a megalomania and narcissism tinged with erotic intensity (like McKellen) and is obsessed with death. When a visitor admires the dictator's great fish tank and wants to see the fish actually swim, Chaplin replies with delight, "You can't -- they're all dead."

Photographs of the dead Hastings, a noose around his neck offer Richard the next opportunity to savorings the death moment of a victim, and he makes sure he is alone, and puts a record on the Victrola and stretches out on the love seat to enjoy it.

Queen Anne's death, later, is also filmed so that the audience scans her face, eyes open, still and pale on her pillow for signs of life or death, and attends to the image for the "still frame" effect we have seen before as an indicator of the moment of death. We have heard Richard's ominous prediction that she is "grievous sick and like to die." When a tiny spider walks across her face she doesn't move. Whether or not its venom caused her death, the shot recalls the "spider" epithets for Richard used by Queen Elizabeth, and the moment links us, as watchers, to his morbid preoccupations.

In each case, the death moment is associated with a still photograph, a still frame, a moving image sequence so motionless that it is hard to distinguish from a still, a change to black and white emulsion, a shift to monochrome palette and pale tones -- or a combination of several of these devices that reverse the history of the medium, moving from full color sound cinema to its silent and motionless media ancestors.

The English coronation ritual derives, through many changes, from Carolingian practices which themselves are based, ultimately, on Biblical texts concerning the anointing of kings in the Davidic line. The anointing itself is a ritual analogue and substitute for the more wayward and unpredictable descent of divine spirit upon the leaders of Israel in the preceding age of the judges, when personal and literal evidences of charisma or numen determined the succession. Saul, in some sense both judge and king, is a transitional figure, for charisma descends upon him (and leaves him, too) and he is also anointed, as David and all his successors were to be.

Because the anointing of a king at the time of coronation was a ritual of such sanctity, its portrayal in secular media was, and continued to be, into the mid twentieth century, an extremely sensitive matter -- Shakespeare and his immediate predecessors, the authors of the True Tragedy and of the Latin Ricardus Tertius do not present the coronation of Richard on stage. Historically, the coronation of Richard III was itself an exceptional event in several ways. Preparations were somewhat rushed, but plans in place for the coronation of Edward V provided a head start. It was the first "double" coronation since 1308, for Lady Ann was crowned as well as Richard. The ceremony was extended by the addition of a vigil on the night before. A version of the oath was translated into English, printed and circulated. The sacred oil of Thomas a Becket, and the bejewelled eagle containing the ampulla that held it was transferred permanently to Westminster Abbey, in order to bring the ritual closer to the way in which the oil of Clovis was treated in France. The event was simultaneously more elaborately sacral and more "accessible" than most of its predecesors.

In the film, the event is magnificent, but its charismatic status is undermined not only by our knowledge of Richard's crimes, but by his absolutely rigid, grimly unresponsive demeanor, and, especially, by the manner of its presentation on screen. The coronation sequence begins with a shot of Queen Anne, her face impassive, being driven to Westminster in a limousine. The camera lowers to show her thighs, discolored by drug abuse, the tops of her stockings and garter, a dark triangle of shadow between her legs which the hypodermic traverses. As she nods off to the right in the moving car, a dissolve to a "matched" sequence associates her head, borne off into dreams, with the crown on its cushion, carried forward in the procession. As Richard is crowned, it is Anne, in close-up, whose motionless face provides the "reaction shot" for the scene. She is the chief watcher, a member of the audience, rather than, as in history, crowned consort, and we, as spectators, are invited to identify with her, and to watch the pageant through her drugged and impassive eyes. As we cut back to the procession, the image has shifted from color to black and white, and has looped back in time to the beginning of the march.. The sequence is identical to what we have just seen but for the change in emulsion -- Richard is crowned again (he will always be crowned again -- he is perpetually "at hand"), and there is a cut back to Anne, in color as before, apparently in the same spot, watching the procession. But now a wider shot reveals that she is sitting in a chair watching a replay of the moment, with Richard, as a silent black and white "home movie" is shown over and over on a portable screen in the palace. These complex shifts among and analogies between points of view connect our doubled view of the ritual with that of the drugged and dying queen, with the draining of life from her vision, as well as with the king's need for replay and "postmortem" through photographic replication.

The sequence foreshadows the queen's death, and suggests that she is already in a state of living death or zombification, and associates Richard's media addiction with that state. The sequence also provides a motivational link from the coronation to the decision to murder the princes, for we see that no amount of replay will allow Richard to draw contentment or reassurance from the coronation. His recording of the moment and his obsessive replaying of it mark an empty victory and he must turn to more psychopathic measures in order to still his anxieties and fill and inner void. His automatic munching while watching (here and earlier, when he savors the death of Hastings) link him to stereotypes of mindless film or television addicts: in a sense he is a victim of the numbing possibilities of the media he controls.

This anachronistic and fictional filming of the coronation may also be read in relation to the central role which investitures, royal marriages and funerals, and coronations have had in the debates concerning the aura or sanctity of kingship in 20th century Britain. The investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911, the marriage of the future George VI to the future Queen Elizabeth, the funeral of Princess Diana and especially the coronations of 1936 and 1953 were all major events in media history, and in each case there were extended debates about the relation of media coverage and royal mystery. Would the coronation itself be covered or just the procession? What would the role of loudspeaker, audio broadcast, television coverage (as early as 1936) and film coverage be? How might the dignity of kingship be affected by the more than theoretical possibility that someone might hear or watch the proceedings while doing something unseemly if not literally coram rege, then at least in the mediated presence of the august event? In 1936, the "Mass Observation Movement" made a virtue of these fears, choosing Coronation Day as the first of a series of nation-wide autoethnographical surveys, precisely targeting description of the settings and reactions of ordinary people, in some cases randomly observed, to the procession and coronation, its coverage by loudspeaker in London and its radio broadcast throughout Britain and in Europe. Official fears of lese majesté were echoed (and enacted, sometimes self-consciously) in all these settings.

The Loncraine film embodies and affirms the myth of the degradation of kingship by media representation, but locates the source of that degradation not in the masses’ wish to have the event brought "very near, very fast," but in the narcissistic needs of the ruler. It is not public broadcast that transforms the transmission of the living spirit into a pallid and deathly compulsion, but a private exhibition for the royal family.

The New York Times Magazine cover for Feb. 6, 2000 is illustrated with a striking Joyce Tenneson photographic portrait of Abdullah II of Jordan. His face, hands and just one corner of the arm of a worn red velvet and mahogany chair are fully lit, while the rest of his body is very nearly invisible, his ribbed black sweater that merging with the black background of the cover. The king's face is framed by the red, familiar antique lettering of the magazine section title, which in this context picks up both the color and the traditional associations of the king's chair. The caption, in large block letters across Abdullah's chest, provides a contrast, the starker, more modern typography declaring: "Suddenly (in grey)," "A King" (in white). Then two lines of smaller white characters below explain "Abdullah II of Jordan was trained to be a modern guy, not a Middle East potentate. Is it possible to be both?"

At the upper right corner of the page, again in white, there is a teaser for another story: "Joseph Stalin's Cure for Strep -- by Lawrence Osborn"

The portrait itself shows a man relaxed and pleasant but not entirely comfortable in the role of Times cover personality. He is a new and not quite assimilated media presence, his home remedies not yet household words like those of a more famous ruler who did manage to combine elements of modernity with absolutism. Abdullah's image is new and vivid, and yet (almost microscopically, but tellingly) unkempt, other, and uncertain. This is a debut. As his reign proceeds, his success as media will personality will be watched, will have an influence on what he will be able to accomplish as king and even on how long he will rule.

The Times Magazine cover reminds me of the traditional division of English history into medieval and modern in 1485; of the role of a new medium (printing) in what used to be called "The Tudor Myth," of how central the transition from Richard III, a kind of despot and successor to Tamburlaine on the English stage, to Henry VII was for More, for Polydore Vergil, for Shakespeare and for all the chronicles and editions of chronicles between. I think of the various (modernist) revisions of the idea of Tudor modernity, as for example G.R. Elton's slight shift from Shakespeare's periodization, his locating of the "Tudor revolution in government" in the beaureaucratic innovations of Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII. The "modern" continues to be at least in part defined by a new relation between ruler and ruled made possible by the mechanically replicated verbal and visual images we now call "the media."

Richard III's place in the intertwining of Tudor apologetics in print and in the medium of public theater in the sixteenth century is a central, even defining one. He is perhaps the most vivid character in the English prose histories. His place in the emergence of the English history play is crucial, for the Richard plays not only make the king an intimate, soliloquizing presence, but also import the Marlovian tragedy of one-man tyranny into a recent and English historical setting. The part of Richard was a star role, then as now. Yet, at the same time, his definitive, overdone, histrionic evil marks a period shift, his call for a horse in Shakespeare and earlier sources suggesting the dead end of medieval modes of single combat and the exhaustion of a chivalric code continually corrupted by nearly all the participants on every side of the complex struggles of the fifteenth century. Henry VII is not a star, but a pious soldier of God in Shakespeare, and it is not until Henry V that the term "star" in something like its modern sense will be applied to an English king by Shakespeare or by anyone else.

There are star turns in McKellen's portrayal in the Loncraine film (but surprisingly fewer than in the stage production). His command of the microphone, his wonderful act as reluctant conscript king, forced to assume the role against his withdrawn and meditative nature, and his manifest skill as dissimulation all continue the process by which, from More to Shakespeare, Richard becomes, rather steadily, ever more central to the story of his reign, ever more distinct, almost ontologically, from the other historical actors, some of whom shared a comparable list of crimes, betrayals and deceptions. Several aspects of this "stardom" receive special attention in McKellen's performance and in Loncraine's framing of that performance: there is astonishing physical work in McKellen's ability to take gloves on and off, light cigarettes with one hand, work a ring off his finger with his teeth. These favored, signature aspects of McKellen's style are much in evidence in the film (though they were perhaps more central to the stage production, in which he changes jackets before the audience with one hand, from Wehrmacht to SS as the fascist allegory came to its climax). In the scene before Richard appears, reluctant, before the citizens of London, he prepares in a space that is literally a star dressing room, with dozens of light bulbs, twin make up women, and an appropriately pouting fussiness on the part of the star himself. However, these elements are relatively muted: we see Richard's success, and indeed, it is a tour de force of role shifting and role playing, but as I read the film, Richard is not a star for us in the same way that, for example, Olivier was in the role, or that Al Pacino strives to be in Looking for Richard. For example, the challenge of making the wooing scene a seduction of the screen audience as well as of Lady Anne, which Olivier responds to with virtuosity and charm and Pacino with obsessive and repeated attempts sexual charisma, is refused. McKellen’s performance there is chilling, effective, even disgusting, but it does not attempt to woo us . McKellen also avoids using the play’s soliloquies to create special relationship with us audience; he does address the camera directly in a number of sequences, but with none of Olivier’s display of wanting to be liked, or of depending on audience reaction. This can be seen by contrasting the joy with which he responds to himself in the mirror in the opening soliloquy, as opposed to the flat tone in which he addresses the camera. And, in any case, the soliloquy does not open the film -- first we see him as a cruel, methodical executioner during the credits, then as a public speaker, beginning the soliloquy as an address to the court. If his direct address style isn't charming or winning, neither is it chilling, it is matter of fact. If his performance as reluctant king is framed as a star turn, it succeeds by a rather lower key performance than we are led to expect, and then, as in the text, there is a gap between what Richard can achieve as performer and what Buckingham must extract from the citizens by more direct pressure. Richard does what is required, brings considerable theatrical powers to bear in doing it, but does not waste more energy than is needed to achieve his aims. What I see as a certain reserve in Richard, his indifference to theatrical or media stardom may have many determinants -- Loncraine and McKellen's interest in the social dynamics that Richard's actions reveal as the true causes for violence is surely among them; this is a film as much about class privilege, class indifference and scapegoating as it is about a single wicked personality. In any case, this reserve makes possible a transition from Richard to Richmond that is startling, and which, in the final moment or two of the film, reshapes ones perception of the McKellen interpretation of the play.

The film ends with a confrontation between Richard and Richmond after a slow pursuit on the upper floors of a ruined building, on the precarious footing of its exposed steel girders. Richard thinks he is alone, turns to see Richmond in a position of advantage, weapon drawn, and falls backward, apparently intentionally, and smiles as he falls, beckoning Richmond to join him as his image becomes posterized, cartoon-like and infernal, engulfing flames rising about him. Richmond, secure in his footing above, fires coldly into the falling body, and then catches the camera's watching eye, looks up and breaks into a shy smile of recognition, as in those 70s television shows in which the performers acknowledge their performance, step out of role and, as it were, take their televisual bows for the camera. Here, the gesture accompanies the very moment at which power passes decisively from Richard to Richmond, that is, at the pivotal moment at which the medieval becomes the modern, in which a hellish, demonic rule yields to a new dynasty, one perhaps equally cold, more casual and banal in its evil.

Richmond's gratuitous firing into Richard's body echoes the ticker-tape regularity of the gunshots in the opening sequence, when Richard fired into the dead body of Henry VI. With these shots, the film comes full circle and Richard triumphs, because his project has been to turn his self-hatred into a deconstruction of the bland, morally vacant and violent society around him. Richard sees Richmond fire and smiles as he falls, reaching his hand out to invite the new king "if not to heaven then hand in hand to Hell," That is, as the style of the film suddenly turns very contemporary, toward digital collage and postmodern pastiche, its frame of reference broadens just as quickly, from the period of time between the wars, or even the greater span between Shakespeare and the present, to allow allusions to the Medieval figures that were Richard's dramatic predecessors, and to the Biblical and post-Biblical passages that speak of a fallen angel and of the flames of Hell.

Richard misses what would have been an even greater triumph, the sight of the ready grin with which the new king turns from this gratuitous act of cruelty to morally bankrupt acceptance of his place in the spotlight. For as Richard falls backward in space and moves into the realm of ancient legend (narrowly missing grabbing hold of his rival's hand), Richmond, caught in a pivotal moment of bad faith, moves closer to our world of media conscious political leaders, mugging for the camera with a smoking gun in his hand. Though he is present in the production far more than other Richmonds on stage and in film adaptations, he was unnamed and unremarked in the early scenes, and hard to read, even neutral in the latter sequences, bland even (or especially) in the sex scene with his new wife which Loncraine added to Shakespeare’s script. Now he takes the stage, or, more precisely, makes his media debut.

The Loncraine Richard III uses the trope of the cinematic kingdom of death as a central feature of its approach to the play, extending the metaphor of cinematic representation as death-in-life to a wide range of media including telegraphy and photography, all framed by the practices of contemporary digitally enhanced moviemaking. If the film's "allegorical" narrative moves Richard from the late middle ages to fascist-leaning England in the 1930s, its media allegory in turn frames that placement in even more contemporary terms, those of the age of media convergence, cross media repurposing and repackaging, and government by celebrity media stars. As the film's final moments transfer power from Richard to Richmond, and he recognizes us at the moment he becomes an insincere politician/star, the film asks us to recognize him, and his world, as ours.