Shakespearean translation as an inexhaustible source: links between verbal text and audiovisual creation in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth

Abstract

The film adaptation of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous works, Macbeth, directed by Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (2015), was acclaimed mainly for its “faithful depiction” of the source text. However, ambiguous elements arise as challenges for the translation process since the person who is in charge of filmmaking must necessarily assume a deliberate position regarding the construction of its images. As in any translation, the transition of a project formulated according to the assumptions of the linguistic code to an audiovisual one implies an interpretive process similar to the one carried out by the reader of a literary text. Although incessantly questioned in the academic field of Translation Studies, the demand for a so-called “fidelity” of the film in relation to the source text remains central to some of the popular criticism available. In the case study analyzed in this paper, the presence of the filmmaker as an individual who translates the famous tragedy into the cinematic format attains well-defined limits, breaching the apparent “narrative neutrality”.  Therefore, this paper aims to illustrate how Kurzel’s reading of the Shakespearean play – which associates the Macbeths' thirst for power to their bitterness in the face of the absence of children – is brought to the screen through the solutions it presents to aspects that remain ambiguous in the text, thus emphasizing interpretation’s fundamental role in the process of translating “The Scottish Play” into a film.