This chapter considers how, in six successful Shakespeare films, exclusively cinematic formal methods of depicting battle serve to interpret and transform the plays’ perspectives on warfare. Special emphasis is placed on the concept (and deployment) of dialectical montage first developed by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal 1929 essay, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Though Eisenstein’s relatively rigid theory of montage has been endlessly appropriated, expanded and, at times, openly rejected by filmmakers and scholars alike, it remains ground zero for realist cinematic treatments of warfare and a key of sorts for deciphering individual filmmakers’ ideological orientations to their subject matter. The chapter argues that even the least overtly political film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays tend to reveal a certain preoccupation with the ethical, ideological, and, of course, hermeneutic implications of representing battle scenes in a medium that all but demands their representation.

Richard Wright was a cinephile, and Bigger was born at the movies. This essay traces the history of stage and film adaptations of Native Son between 1941 and 2019, a history animated by Wright’s unyielding commitment to cinema and the no less rigid institutional racism of the American film industry during his lifetime. It begins with the American film producers that pursued the rights to Wright’s bestseller upon its release, aiming to whitewash the novel so that its Hollywood adaptation could circulate in a national film distribution system overdetermined by Jim Crow audiences. It then examines the two international productions of Native Son that Wright actively shaped: a play directed by Orson Welles; and a film, starring Wright himself, produced in Argentina and directed by Pierre Chenal in 1951. It concludes with assessments of the adaptations that have succeeded Wright’s efforts on the stage and screen, most recently Nambi E. Kelley’s play (2016) and Suzan-Lori Parks and Rashid Johnson film (HBO, 2019).