F-2 Heroes, Villains, and Balkans: Intertextual Masculinities in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus
Presenter Status
Department of English
Location
Buller Room 208
Start Date
31-10-2014 3:15 PM
End Date
31-10-2014 3:30 PM
Presentation Abstract
Filmed Shakespeare often reinvents the poet’s drama by appropriating popular representational devices. One technique, intertextual referencing by means of casting or setting selection, provides a crucial but ontologically unstable means by which the adaptor of Shakespeare heightens relevance and increases appeal. Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 adaptation of Coriolanus (1607/08) instantiates the vexed layers of association generated by means of such intertextuality. By casting himself as the titular general and Gerard Butler as his nemesis Aufidius, Fiennes shorthands filmic intertexts—the Harry Potter oeuvre and 300—that shape a viewer’s access to the Roman play. On the one hand, these intertexts access film idiom to expose mythologies of masculinity grounded in violence as self- defining and self-annihilating. However, complicating the movie’s critique of masculine identity is Fiennes’s choice to film in Serbia and Montenegro as well as to utilize found news footage from the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Fiennes’s recontextualization of the Roman- Volsce conflict accesses a raft of stereotypes of the Balkan male as violent and uncontrollable that yoke an entire European region to the patterns of self-destruction manifested by Coriolanus and Aufidius. Thus, Fiennes’s filmic and historical intertexts inadvertently impress the seal of Shakespearean approval on dubious European stereotypes of the Balkan Other.
F-2 Heroes, Villains, and Balkans: Intertextual Masculinities in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus
Buller Room 208
Filmed Shakespeare often reinvents the poet’s drama by appropriating popular representational devices. One technique, intertextual referencing by means of casting or setting selection, provides a crucial but ontologically unstable means by which the adaptor of Shakespeare heightens relevance and increases appeal. Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 adaptation of Coriolanus (1607/08) instantiates the vexed layers of association generated by means of such intertextuality. By casting himself as the titular general and Gerard Butler as his nemesis Aufidius, Fiennes shorthands filmic intertexts—the Harry Potter oeuvre and 300—that shape a viewer’s access to the Roman play. On the one hand, these intertexts access film idiom to expose mythologies of masculinity grounded in violence as self- defining and self-annihilating. However, complicating the movie’s critique of masculine identity is Fiennes’s choice to film in Serbia and Montenegro as well as to utilize found news footage from the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Fiennes’s recontextualization of the Roman- Volsce conflict accesses a raft of stereotypes of the Balkan male as violent and uncontrollable that yoke an entire European region to the patterns of self-destruction manifested by Coriolanus and Aufidius. Thus, Fiennes’s filmic and historical intertexts inadvertently impress the seal of Shakespearean approval on dubious European stereotypes of the Balkan Other.