Showing posts with label formalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label formalism. Show all posts

Saturday 20 May 2017

From a town in western Russia to the north of England... (stalled / incomplete review of Lady Macbeth (2016))

An accreting assortment of Tweets about Lady Macbeth (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


20 May

An accreting assortment of Tweets about Lady Macbeth (2016) (stalled / incomplete review)



Those born in Russia (or the former USSR) – or who were not, but who study Russian literature – may be in a different relation to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and, because considering it in, its literary and social context – if we are interested in music, we will all know that (so the story goes) Dmitri Shostakovich, looking at an edition of Pravda, found himself there condemned*, and having [to appear] ‘to change his ways’ (again, as the story goes).

One question, amongst many, that the film may pose (not necessarily a bad thing in a film that we should wish to enquire) is whether it commends to us Shostakovich’s opera / libretto, and / or Nikolai Leskov’s original novella (from 1865)…




In modern Russia, the town of Mtsensk lies in Oryol Oblast (a federal subject of Russia)




Film and other references :

* Effi Briest ~ Theodor Fontane




* Lady Chatterley (2006) [adapting** John Thomas and Lady Jane ~ D. H. Lawrence]

* Sunset Song (2015)

* The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ~ Anne Brontë


End-notes :

* Not straightaway, when the work was first performed in Leningrad and Moscow (within days) in January 1934, but around two years later.

** Not 'Based on one of the most scandalous novels of our time', as IMDb asserts (@IMDb), with regard to Lawrence...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)