King Lear in Snapshots.

Although I am not much of a movie critic, I thought Brooks' version of King Lear was portrayed quite poorly. I was confused at first as to what was even going on, largely due to the unrealistic qualities of the actors. Although that may have been due to the time it was filmed, I still spent awhile just looking at each one deciding if they were even real people. I think that while some of the major points were clear, (ie. Edmund and Edgar's battle, and Goneril and Cordelia's death) the over dramatized execution of it made it all the less realistic and all the more confusing. I was also confused and shocked at how the clip ended. We see a slow progression of violence until the battle between Edgar and Edmund, then all the sudden it seems like snapshots of all the characters dying. If i had no previous experience with reading the play twice and seeing it portrayed in film a different time, I'm not sure I would even understand what was happening, and most certainly not why it was all happening.

To me, Brooks' version is more like a group of unexperienced actors memorizing the lines of Shakespeare's King Lear and simply reciting them. The lack of other actors/extras in Brooks' added to this. While he might have been trying to take a more intimate stand by not adding extras, I think that Kozintev's use of so many extra's made it even more intimate because the specific characters became the center of attention in the whole town.  Because we don't even see Lear's reaction to Cordelia's hanging in the clip of Brooks' version, it made Lear's reaction in Kozintev's so much more prominent in my mind. It was almost as if you could hear Lear's soul "howl, howl, howl[ling]" (5.3.308) throughout his first sight of her body all the way until after he dies too.  I thought Kozintev did a much better job on transforming the play into a film, and making it seem all the more realistic while still highlighting key events.