Shakespeare and Film: A Question of Perspective

Brutus' inner conflict, his integrity and the intensity of his emotion, are registered in James Mason's face at least as much as in his words, and a series of close-ups show him sweating with the effort of doubt and concern for the ordinary people of Rome.2 When Antony turns to the camera from his rhetorical triumph in the marketplace he fills the screen, while tiny citizens, insect-like, begin looting and wrecking the city behind him. The grainy black-and-white photography, out-of-focus shots, montage sequences, and black spacing reach a climax in the storm scene, where the camera breaks the 180-degree rule, showing Lear in profile at the edges of the screen, in line-by-line alternation from the right and from the left.