On the Road: Reclaiming 'Korol Lir'

Though widely different in many respects, film adaptations of Shakespeare's King Lear share a resistance to the kind of period drama treatment so frequently realized in screen versions of his other tragedies. The 'Lear' narrative is afforded a much wider scope, yet there are few versions accepted into what may be deemed the 'canon' of Shakespeare on screen, and critical debate - both literary and filmic - hinges around consideration of these 'canonized' versions produced by noted 'auteurs' (1): Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir (1970), Peter Brook's King Lear (1971), and Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) are regarded as cinematic works of "high art," worthy of a place alongside the so-called Shakespearean source text. These canonical versions of King Lear are invariably identified as "art house" products, but with the exception of Brook's counter cinematic rendition, they are film texts that operate within the structural frameworks of genre cinema. While, historically, Kozintsev's Korol Lir has fallen into the category of "canonized" Shakespeare on screen, in this article I argue that it should be regarded as a genre product: it shares many of the structural, stylistic, thematic, and ideological characteristics of the road movie, and has much more in common with the ambivalent road movies prevalent during its late sixties production era than with contemporaneous screen versions of Shakespeare's plays. It is a film that has been appropriated by Western academia as a "classic" rendition of the Lear narrative and is thus, one assumes, considered to belong to "high culture" rather than "popular culture"; however, as a writer/director operating within the parameters of Soviet Social Realist Cinema, Kozintsev's work was surely intended for a wider audience. A genre-conscious reading of this seminal text opens up new ways of examining its relationship with Shakespeare's King Lear; it avoids replication of the inherent elitism of Shakespeare on screen criticism and circumvents the more established search for textual parallels, theatrical parallels, and the presence of an auteur signature. Moreover, it demonstrates ways in which the film text has much more in common with genre cinema and with the socialist ideologies that underpin Soviet cinema of this period than with the kind of art house status conferred upon it as a result of its acceptance into "the canon."