The Tempest | movie | 1979 | Official Featurette - video Dailymotion

Prospero, a potent magician, lives on a desolate isle with his virginal daughter, Miranda. He's in exile, banished from  | dG1fOUxDeDRuMFM4b1E

Transcript

00:00 My BFI Player choice this week is a slice of post-punk Shakespearean strangeness, an

00:04 adaptation of one of the last plays the Bard wrote alone, directed by a rising talent who

00:09 had already made a splash in the film world with the anarchic Jubilee, Derek Jarman's

00:13 The Tempest.

00:14 A lingering perdition, worse than death in this most desolate isle.

00:34 Shakespeare's source play is set on a remote island, where Prospero lives with his daughter

00:58 Miranda, attended by sprightly spirit Ariel and the monstrous Caliban.

01:03 From the earliest days of moving pictures, filmmakers saw The Tempest as rich material.

01:07 The opening scene of a theatrical production was filmed by Charles Urban as early as 1905,

01:12 and a few years later Percy Stowe condensed the entire play into a ten minute short, which

01:17 you can find as part of the BFI's Silent Shakespeare compilation.

01:21 More famously, The Tempest serves as the template for MGM's 1956 sci-fi spectacular Forbidden

01:27 Planet, and inspired an unrealised passion project for Michael Powell, who, along with

01:33 Emmerich Pressburger, is currently the subject of a major BFI retrospective.

01:37 While Jarman's adaptation may be more down to earth than Forbidden Planet, at least superficially,

01:43 it's no less adventurous, with the director radically reworking and restructuring the

01:47 original text to create a film that bridges the gap between theatre and cinema.

01:52 Shooting in the picturesque surroundings of Stonely Abbey in Warwickshire, Jarman, who

01:56 got his first movie break designing the Metropolis-like sets for Ken Russell's The Devils, took inspiration

02:02 from the gothic atmosphere of old Hammer films, and the urban paranoia of Polanski's Rosemary's

02:08 Baby.

02:09 In his playfully stylish film, past and present collide, as if the history of the play itself

02:14 was collapsing into a single moment, simultaneously in and out of time.

02:19 Boasting a superb performance by Hethcote Williams as Prospero, whose daughter Miranda

02:24 is played by rising star Toyah Wilcox, one of several cast members who'd worked on

02:28 Jubilee, and featuring a cheeky, spine-tingling rendition of Stormy Weather by Elizabeth

02:33 Welch, The Tempest is quintessential Jarman, often unruly, occasionally ridiculous, but

02:39 always intriguingly inventive.

02:41 "Heh heh heh heh heh heh."

02:50 "Heh heh heh heh heh heh."

02:51 "Heh heh heh heh heh."

02:52 "Heh heh heh heh heh."

02:53 "Heh heh heh heh heh."