Fluxos do ser e a cena: trajetórias críticas de Hamlet no cinema

Abstract

This thesis examines the contemporary reinscriptions of Hamlet in cinema, investigating how different sociopolitical and cultural contexts reconfigure the Shakespearean text and its structures of meaning. It departs from the hypothesis that each adaptation constitutes a critical gesture toward the canon, functioning as a space of translation and displacement in which the past is reread through new sensibilities and regimes of image. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from adaptation studies, semiotics and intermediality, post-structuralism, and cultural and postcolonial studies, the research proposes a reading articulated on three levels—cultural system, visual and stylistic aspects, and each film’s position within the cinematographic polysystem—taking as its corpus Hamlet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1990), Hamlet 2000 (Michael Almereyda, 2000), and Hamlet/Horatio (Paul Warner, 2020). In Zeffirelli’s film, the tragic body and sensorial dimension of the mise-en-scène reinscribe the sacred and the forbidden, evoking an imagery of flesh and guilt; in Almereyda’s version, technological modernity transforms the prince into a subject mediated by screens and digital devices, revealing a crisis of interiority and presence; in Warner, the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio is reconfigured as a performance of memory and a queer experience, opening the narrative to new forms of affect and identity. The analysis shows that cinema not only translates Shakespeare but also thinks with him, establishing its own modes of reflection on subjectivity, time, and image. The adaptations reveal that the permanence of the text depends on its capacity to be continuously reinterpreted and to embrace new voices, gazes, and corporealities. Drawing on concepts such as différance and the crystal-image, the thesis argues that the filmic versions displace the boundaries between representation and experience, presence and absence, making visible the constitutive instability of the Shakespearean text. Thus, cinematic Hamlet emerges as a field of thought and reinvention, where memory, body, and gaze intertwine in the production of meaning. In this way, we are led to understand that the survival of Hamlet in cinema is a process of continuous translation that reaffirms its critical, aesthetic, and philosophical potency, turning cinema into a space for the reinscription of the tragic and the reinvention of the Shakespearean legacy.