From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, Shakespeare has inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Directors as diverse as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor have transferred Shakespeare's plays from stage to screen with unforgettable results. Spanning a century of cinema, from a silent short of 'The Tempest' (1907) to Kenneth Branagh's 'As You Like It' (2006), Daniel Rosenthal's up-to-date selection takes in the most important, inventive and unusual Shakespeare films ever made. Half are British and American productions that retain Shakespeare's language, including key works such as Olivier's 'Henry V' and 'Hamlet', Welles' 'Othello' and 'Chimes at Midnight', Branagh's 'Henry V' and 'Hamlet', Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet' and Taymor's 'Titus'. Alongside these original-text films are more than 30 genre adaptations: titles that aim for a wider audience by using modernized dialogue and settings and customizing Shakespeare's plots and characters, transforming 'Macbeth' into a pistol-packing gangster ('Joe Macbeth' and 'Maqbool') or reimagining 'Othello' as a jazz musician ('All Night Long'). There are Shakesepeare-based Westerns ('Broken Lance', 'King of Texas'), musicals ('West Side Story', 'Kiss Me Kate'), high-school comedies ('10 Things I Hate About You', 'She's the Man'), even a sci-fi adventure ('Forbidden Planet'). There are also films dominated by the performance of a Shakespearean play ('In the Bleak Midwinter', 'Shakespeare in Love'). Rosenthal emphasises the global nature of Shakespearean cinema, with entries on more than 20 foreign-language titles, including Kurosawa's 'Throne of Blood and Ran', Grigori Kozintsev's 'Russian Hamlet' and 'King Lear', and little-known features from as far afield as 'Madagascar' and 'Venezuela', some never released in Britain or the US. He considers the films' production and box-office history and examines the film-makers' key interpretive decisions in comparison to their Shakespearean sources, focusing on cinematography, landscape, music, performance, production design, textual alterations and omissions. As cinema plays an increasingly important role in the study of Shakespeare at schools and universities, this is a wide-ranging, entertaining and accessible guide for Shakespeare teachers, students and enthusiasts.

This study reexamines the recognized "canon" of films based on Shakespeare's plays, and argues that it should be broadened by breaking with two unnecessary standards: the characterization of the director as "auteur" of a play's screen adaptation, and the convention of excluding films with contemporary language or modern or alternative settings or which use the play as a subtext. The emphasis is shifted from the director's contribution to the film's social, cultural and historical contexts. The work of the auteurs is reevaluated within present-day contexts, preserving the established canon while proposing new criteria for inclusion.

From the earliest days of the cinema to the present, Shakespeare has offered a tempting bank of source material than the film industry has been happy to plunder. Shakespeare on Film deftly examines an extensive range of films that have emerged from the curious union of an iconic dramatist with a medium of mass appeal. The many films Buchanan studies are shown to be telling indicators of trends in Shakespearean performance interpretation, illuminating markers of developments in the film industry and culturally revealing about broader influences in the world beyond the movie theatre. As with other titles from the Inside Film series, the book is illustrated throughout with stills. Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested further reading in the field.

From The Passion of the Christ to Life of Brian, and from The Ten Commandments to Last Temptation of Christ, filmmakers have been adapting the stories of the Bible for over 120 years, from first time the Höritz Passion Play was filmed in the Czech Republic back in 1897. Ever since, these stories have inspired musicals, comedies, sci-fi, surrealist visions and the avant garde not to mention spawning their own genre, the biblical epic. Filmmakers across six continents and from all kinds of religious perspectives (or none at all), have adapted the greatest stories ever told, delighting some and infuriating others. 100 Bible Films is the indispensible guide to this wide and varied output, providing an authoritative but accessible history of biblical adaptations through one hundred of the most interesting and significant biblical films. Richly illustrated with film stills, this book depicts how such films have undertaken a complex negotiation between art, commerce, entertainment and religion. Matthew Page traces the screen history of the biblical stories from the very earliest silent passion plays, via the golden ages of the biblical epic, through to more innovative and controversial later films as well as covering significant TV adaptations. He discusses films made not only by some of our greatest filmmakers, artists such as Martin Scorsese, Jean Luc Godard, Alice Guy, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lotte Reiniger, Carl Dreyer and Luis Buñuel, but also those looking to explore their faith or share it with lovers of cinema the world over.

Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television examines recent film and television transformations of William Shakespeare's drama by focusing on the ways in which modern directors acknowledge and respond to the perceived authority of Shakespeare as author, text, cultural icon, theatrical tradition, and academic institution. This study explores two central questions. First, what efforts do directors make to justify their adaptations and assert an interpretive authority of their own? Second, how do those self-authorizing gestures impact upon the construction of gender, class, and ethnic identity within the filmed adaptations of Shakespeare's plays? The chosen films and television series considered take a wide range of approaches to the adaptative process - some faithfully preserve the words of Shakespeare; others jettison the Early Modern language in favor of contemporary idiom; some recreate the geographic and historical specificity of the original plays, and others transplant the plot to fresh settings. The wealth of extra-textual material now available with film and television distribution and the numerous website tie-ins and interviews offer the critic a mine of material for accessing the ways in which directors perceive the looming Shakespearean shadow and justify their projects. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television places these directorial claims alongside the film and television plotting and aesthetic to investigate how such authorizing gestures shape the presentation of gender, class, and ethnicity.