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ALEKSEI SEMENENKO
Hamlet. Directed by Grigori Kozintsev. Lenfilm, 1964. DVD release RUSCICO, 2000.

Tech specs. Video: 140 (70+70) min, b/w, 16:9, NTSC/PAL. Sound: Mono & Dolby Digital
5.1. Made in Russia, region-free.

Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet was released in 1964. The film has won several international
awards, including the Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival, and become a classic of the
world cinematography, having secured Kozintsev a place in the history of Hamlet canon. The
fact that Kozintsev’s masterpiece appeared on DVD, with restored video and audio, is
absolutely thrilling: to my knowledge, this is the first digitally restored copy of the film, and
for preparing this two-disc release we have to thank Russian Cinema Council (RUSCICO).
RUSCICO provides many high quality films, both Russian classics for the international
audience and foreign masterpieces for the Russian public, but this DVD also includes several
special features on which this review will be specifically focused.

The main and important achievement of this release is a good quality of the film’s digital
remastering. The video allows the viewer to fully appreciate Kozintsev’s use of light: the play
of shadows in richly contrasted black and white images, gloomy northern landscapes of
Estonian shore where the shooting took place, all the visual effects which create the very
atmosphere of ‘Denmark, the prison’. Though, to be objective, I should note that some indoor
scenes became slightly over-contrasted after remastering, which made the actors’ faces gleam
like torches.

The variety of audio tracks in the DVD is amazing; it includes two original Russian tracks (a
mono and a DD 5.1 remix), plus English and French two-voiced (male and female) voice-
over, encoded in six-channel Dolby as well. The quality of the DD remix is very high and
allows audiences to really enjoy the powerful score of Shostakovich.

The choice of subtitles is even more impressive: Russian, English, Spanish, French, German,
and Italian; moreover, it is possible to watch the movie both with the primary and secondary
subtitles at the same time (the secondary sub is placed on the top of the screen), a handy
feature for international audiences. But when I tried to listen to the English voice-over
translation I had my first disappointment. First off, the volumes of translation and the original
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audio track are misbalanced: normally, the voiceover is supposed to be louder than the
original sound so that one could actually hear the translation, but in this DVD it is not; as a
result, the tracks overlap, producing an indecipherable mumble.

Another annoyance regarding voice-over translation is that actors reading the English text are
definitely not native speakers, hence the unclear pronunciation and sometimes unnatural
intonation. In addition to this, one of the dubbing actors made a funny mistake and somehow
exchanged the last two words in Hamlet’s sentence ‘Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool,
farewell!’, and the phrase became ‘Thou wretched, rash, intruding farewell… Fool!’ In that
sense, the French voice-over version was much better.

Special features
The very first impression is that the DVD has plenty of special features on both discs:
interviews with the director Grigori Kozintsev and the leading actor Innokenti Smoktunovsky,
Shakespeare’s biography, filmographies, photo albums, etc. Actually, this list was one of the
reasons why I rushed to order the DVD from Russia, for this material is quite unique and not
easily accessible, especially in digital format. Let us see the extras in detail.

1. A very concise biography of William Shakespeare, text version.

2. ‘Making the film’. A short video (2:44) about the making of the movie, probably an
original TV news report. The report shows some actors preparing for the film, an episode
from the rehearsal of the Mousetrap scene, and the director instructing the actors. Not very
informative but still interesting video.

3. Filmographies, text version. Grigori Kozintsev, director; Dmitri Shostakovich, composer;

Jonas Gritsius, director of photography, and Yevgeni Yenej, art director (called here a
‘production designer’).

4. Photo albums. The first one is called ‘Hamlet: Unity of a Multiplicity’ [sic], (13:39). A
collection of portraits and photos of actors who preformed Hamlet in theatre and cinema, with
names and dates. The second one presents the stills from the film (2:16). Not meaning to be
picky, I might say though, that most of the images are of a poor quality, obviously scanned
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and not very well digitally processed. Both albums are accompanied by the score of
Shostakovich from the film.

5. Interviews with Kozintsev and Smoktunovsky (3:19), probably made for a TV program.
The most interesting video among the extras.

6. Sixteen-second video where Smoktunovsky receives the award on the Moscow Cinema
Festival.

7. Filmographies of the main ten actors of the movie, text version.

8. ‘The World of ‘Hamlet’ [sic]. Another photo album about the illustrative material to
Hamlet in different epochs (02:35). Surprisingly, there is no commentary at all: no dates, no
names. The viewer can only guess who painted this or that picture and what exactly is
depicted there.

9. Two more photo albums: Photo gallery with some pictures from the movie sets (01:17) and
the sketches (20 images) [by Yevgeni Yenej]. Again, most images are poorly remastered, the
photos and sketches are not commented and there is no information on their creator(s).

10. ‘Coming soon on DVD’. Here RUSCICO presents six other films in their series of cinema
adaptations. The ‘trailers’ are: Anna Karenina1 (1967, dir. Aleksandr Zarkhi), War and Peace
(1968, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk), King Lear (1969, dir. Grigori Kozintsev), Ashik Kerib (1988,
dir. Sergei Paradjanov), The Lady with the Little Dog (1960, dir. Iosif Kheifits), and A Cruel
Romance (1984, dir. Eldar Ryazanov).

An interesting feature of these trailers is that most of them are original, made during the
respective periods; Anna Karenine, for example, is a Sovexportfilm production, with intertitles
in French. That is why the trailers are definitely worth seeing as artefacts of the past, but
unfortunately we encounter some technical problems in this section as well. Some trailers are
with English and/or French subtitles, some are dubbed and some have absolutely no language

1
The English translation of the Russian classic is of course Anna Karenin (as Anna Karenine in French), but the
wrong spelling of the name has unfortunately become a sort of bad tradition.
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support. In the trailer of The Lady with the Little Dog, for example, there were supposed to be
some intertitles but the text failed to appear on the screen leaving the background blank.

Final remarks
Apart from the film itself, all the other material in the DVD is not restored, and the quality of
the sound, especially in the interviews, leaves much room for improvement. Also, as I
mentioned before, the lack of commentary almost brings to nought the value of the visual
data, making the DVD quite viewer-unfriendly. Of course, all these details are not of
paramount importance but they do show the attitude of the producers.

Thus, in conclusion I might say that the good impression from the film was somehow plagued
by unprofessionalism with which the special features section was handled. The only question
I had after having watched the extras was: Who are they made for? Obviously not for scholars
because the producers did not even pretend to provide any (scientific or other) commentary
and/or sources. Maybe the special features were targeted at ‘ordinary’ viewers then? But tons
of uncommented images fail to tell much about the movie and only evoke more and more
questions. In other words, the presentation of the extras needs a more systematic approach and
much more attention. I only hope that RUSCICO producers will be more audience-oriented
when making their coming ‘extended feature’ releases, but for the film itself, speaking in
Claudius’s words, ‘our thanks’.