Macbeth on screen

William Shakespeare's ''Macbeth'' has been screened numerous times, featuring many of the biggest names from stage, film, and television.

Film history and significant releases

The earliest known film ''Macbeth'' was 1905's American short ''Death Scene From Macbeth'', and short versions were produced in Italy in 1909 and France in 1910. Two notable early versions are lost: Ludwig Landmann produced a 47-minute version in Germany in 1913, and D. W. Griffith produced a 1916 version in America featuring the noted stage actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Tree is said to have had great difficulties adapting to the new medium, and especially in confining himself to the small number of lines in the (silent) screenplay, until an ingenious cameraman allowed him to play his entire part to an empty camera, after which a real camera shot the film.

Twentieth century

In 1947, David Bradley produced an independent film of ''Macbeth'', intended for distribution to schools, most notable for the designer of its eighty-three costumes: the soon-to-be-famous Charlton Heston.

Orson Welles' 1948 ''Macbeth'', in the director's words a "violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play", was filmed in only 23 days and on a budget of just $700,000. These filming conditions allowed only a single abstract set, and eclectic costumes. Dialogue was pre-recorded, enabling the actors to perform very long individual takes, including one of over ten minutes surrounding the death of Duncan. Welles himself played the central character, who dominates the film, measured both by his time on screen, and by physical presence: high-angle and low-angle shots and deep-focus close-ups are used to distort his size in comparison to other characters. Welles retained from his own 1936 stage production the image of a Voodoo doll controlling the fate of the central character: and at the end it is the doll we see beheaded. The film's allegorical aspect is heightened by Welles' introduction of a non-Shakespearean character, the Holy Father (played by Alan Napier), in opposition to the witches, speaking lines taken from Shakespeare's Ross, Angus and the Old Man. Contemporary reviews were largely negative, particularly criticising Welles' unsympathetic portrayal of the central character. ''Newsweek'' commented: "His Macbeth is a static, two-dimensional creature as capable of evil in the first scene as in the final hours of his bloody reign."

George Schaefer directed Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson in a 1960 made-for-TV film which later had a limited European theatrical release. (The three had also worked together on the earlier ''Hallmark Hall of Fame'' 1954 TV version of the play.) Neither of the central couple was able to adapt their stage acting style to the screen successfully, leading to their roles being described by critics as "recited" rather than "acted".

Roman Polanski's 1971 ''Macbeth'' was the director's first film after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and reflected his determination to "show 'Macbeth''sviolence the way it is ... ecauseif you don't show it realistically then that's immoral and harmful." His film showed deaths only reported in the play, including the execution of Cawdor, and Macbeth stabbing Duncan, and its violence was "intense and incessant". Made in the aftermath of Zeffirelli's youthful ''Romeo and Juliet'', and financed by ''Playboy'' mogul Hugh Hefner, Polanski's film featured a young sexy lead couple, played by Jon Finch (28) and by Francesca Annis (25), who controversially performed the sleepwalking scene nude. The unsettling film score, provided by the Third Ear Band, invoked "discord and dissonance". While using Shakespeare's words, Polanski alters aspects of Shakespeare's story, turning the minor character Ross into a ruthless Machiavellian, and adding an epilogue to the play in which Donalbain (younger son of Duncan) arrives at the witches' lair, indicating that the cycle of violence will begin again.

In 1973, the Virginia Museum Theater (VMT, now the Leslie Cheek Theater), presented ''Macbeth,'' starring E.G. Marshall. Dubbed by the ''New York Times'' as the "'Fowler' Macbeth" after director Keith Fowler, it was described by Clive Barnes as "splendidly vigorous, forcefully immediate... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'."

Trevor Nunn's RSC Other Place stage performance starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as the leading couple was adapted for TV and broadcast by Thames Television (see '' Macbeth (1978 film)'').

In 1992 S4C produced a cel-animated ''Macbeth'' for the series '' Shakespeare: The Animated Tales'', and in 1997 Jeremy Freeston directed Jason Connery and Helen Baxendale in a low budget, fairly full-text, version.

In Shakespeare's script, the actor playing Banquo must enter the stage as a ghost. The major film versions have usually taken the opportunity to provide a double perspective: Banquo visible to the audience from Macbeth's perspective, but invisible from the perspective of other characters. Television versions, however, have often taken the third approach of leaving Banquo invisible to viewers, thereby portraying Banquo's ghost as merely Macbeth's delusion. This approach is taken in the 1978 Thames TV production, Jack Gold's 1983 version for BBC Television Shakespeare, and in Penny Woolcock's 1997 ''Macbeth on the Estate''.Forsyth (2000, 289–290) ''Macbeth on the Estate'' largely dispensed with the supernatural in favour of the drug-crime driven realism of characters living on a Birmingham housing estate: except for the three "weird" (in the modern sense of the word) children who prophesy Macbeth's fate. This production used Shakespeare's language, but encouraged the actors – many of whom were locals, not professionals – to speak it naturalistically.

Twenty-first century

Twenty-first-century cinema has re-interpreted ''Macbeth'', relocating "Scotland" elsewhere: '' Maqbool'' to Mumbai, '' Scotland, PA'' to Pennsylvania, Geoffrey Wright's ''Macbeth'' to Melbourne, and Allison L. LiCalsi's 2001 ''Macbeth: The Comedy'' to a location only differentiated from the reality of New Jersey, where it was filmed, through signifiers such as tartan, Scottish flags and bagpipes. Alexander Abela's 2001 '' Makibefo'' was set among, and starred, residents of Faux Cap, a remote fishing community in Madagascar. Leonardo Henriquez' 2000 '' Sangrador'' (in English: ''Bleeder'') set the story among Venezuelan bandits and presented a shockingly visualised horror version.

In 2004 an "eccentric" Swedish/Norwegian film, based on Alex Scherpf's Ice Globe Theatre production of ''Macbeth'', was said by critic Daniel Rosenthal to owe "more to co-director Bo Landin's background in natural history documentaries than to Shakespeare." More conventional adaptations of 21st-century stage productions to television include Greg Doran's RSC production filmed in 2001 with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter in the central roles, and Rupert Goold's Chichester Festival Theatre ''Macbeth'' televised in 2010 with Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as the tragic couple. The cast of the latter felt that the history of their stage performance (moving from a small space at Chichester to a large proscenium arch stage in London to a huge auditorium in Brooklyn) made it easier for them to "re-scale", yet again, their performances for the cameras.

In 2006, Geoffrey Wright directed a Shakespearean-language, extremely violent ''Macbeth'' set in the Melbourne underworld. Sam Worthington played Macbeth. Victoria Hill played Lady Macbeth and shared the screenplay credits with Wright.Rosenthal (2007, 127–128) The director considered her portrayal of Lady Macbeth to be the most sympathetic he had ever seen. In spite of the high level of violence and nudity (Macbeth has sex with the three naked schoolgirl witches as they prophesy his fate), intended to appeal to the young audiences that had flocked to ''Romeo + Juliet'', the film flopped at the box office.

Justin Kurzel's feature-length adaptation ''Macbeth'', starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, was released in October 2015.

Also in 2015, Brazilian film ''A Floresta que se Move'' (''The Moving Forest'') premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival

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