Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet: Film Screening

Coinciding with the Jerusalem Quartet’s residency at the Cleveland Museum of Art, in which the ensemble is performing the Complete Shostakovich Quartet Cycle, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society and the CMA present a rare screening of the 1964 Grigori Kozintsev adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, featuring a searing score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Based on a translation by Russian literary great Boris Pasternak, this version of Hamlet is notable for its use of natural settings, its powerful visual representations of imprisonment, and its larger emphasis on the political strangulation of artistic truth. Laurence Olivier, who directed and starred in his own Hamlet in 1948, considered Kozintsev’s the greatest Hamlet on film.