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.

Though films on Shakespeare have been made in India since 1923, it is Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragic trilogy, Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014) that has caught international critical attention. The essay examines Bhardwaj’s predilection for Shakespeare, the reception of his films and his auteur’s style of filmmaking and adaptation, which straddles both the global and the local. It argues that his remaking of Shakespeare deploys popular features of Bollywood cinema, e.g. adding back stories and songs, but adjusts them to enable the narrative of the plays to speak to the situations of today. His versions radicalise the women, intervene in Indian contexts and modify the tragic endings. They reflect a poetic sensibility that delves deep into Shakespeare to produce perceptive and layered cinematic visualisations of the plays.

This chapter looks at emotion in Shakespearean cinema by considering two Bollywood adaptations through the lens of Indian aesthetic theory and narrative traditions. Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj adapted Macbeth and Othello as Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006). Both include a masala mix of genres characteristic of Indian popular cinema (melodrama, romance, tragedy, comedy, gangster film), and both break down the boundaries of genre established in the western narrative tradition by Aristotle. Bhardwaj adapts Shakespearean tragedy into tragic tales of contemporary India that traverse quickly between different Hollywood-defined genres and affective tones, pulling the audience through intense emotional terrain evoked by vivid audio-visual stimuli. Bhardwaj’s work can usefully be approached through the co-ordinates of ancient rasa theory which has dominated aesthetic approaches to the arts in India for over two thousand years. The rasas, or emotions, offer an important lens through which to understand how Indian popular cinema communicates powerfully to its enormous global audience, both resident and diasporic, many of whom are drawn to Bollywood’s emotional intensity and generic hybridity. Rasa theory sheds light on Bhardwaj’s achievement, then, but also provides a valuable and fertile apparatus through which to explore Shakespeare’s works more generally on page, stage, and screen.