Don't Put Cordelia in a Corner

With the hanging of Cordelia, Kozintsev doesn’t really show it happen, just the aftermath, and focuses more on Lear’s reaction and “howling” more than the shock value of the hanging itself. In contrast, Brook practically gives us a close up of Cordelia’s neck breaking, and when Goneril kills herself, we also witness her action in a shocking close up. The increased physicality of Brook’s film on the whole could say something about his interpretation of the play; he relies more on the physical actions of the characters, whereas Kozintsev plays more into the pathos of the other characters’ reactions.

In the spirit of the Soviet Union, Kozintsev definitely doesn’t neglect the poverty issue. Lear mentions something akin to this in the play when he blames himself for the state of the poor, but in Kozintsev’s film it is not just an aside; some of the strongest scenes of the film were the ones where the troupes of beggars were walking along the desolate landscape scavenging and wailing. The director’s choice to do this gives us a closer look at not just the horrific state of the economy, but also the tragedy of the play on the whole. Brook does this as well, with the black and white film set against the remote landscape of Denmark, but he doesn’t include sheer volume of poor people that surround the different scenes like Kozintsev does. When Edgar and Edmund duel, in Kozintsev’s production it is a much more dramatic affair not just because of its execution (with Edmund removing Edgar’s mask being much more dramatic than Edgar removing his own in Brook’s version) but because of the number of on-lookers that have all traveled throughout the play to this moment of climax between the two brothers.