Tempest Fest: Three Takes On Shakespeare's The Tempest

Tempest Fest: Three Takes On Shakespeare’s The Tempest In Honour Of the Fifth Anniversary Of Hurricane Juan

September 2003 saw Hurricane Juan make landfall in Nova Scotia. We have selected three very different film versions of the Bard’s late romance The Tempest to mark one of the most significant climatological events ever to happen in Halifax.

Screenings Wednesdays at 8 pm

September 17- The Tempest

Derek Jarman, Britain, 1979, 96 minutes. Jarman’s occasionally quizzical take on The Tempest blends elements of high theatricality and low camp to deliver one of his more direct and accessible features.

September 24- Prospero’s Books

Peter Greenaway, Holland/UK, 1991, 127 minutes. More than ten years after Jarman’s film, maverick experimentalist Peter Greenaway reconstructed The Tempest as a monumentally linear near-monologue delivered by the late great actor John Gielgud. Featuring Renaissance painting reconstructions, phantasmagorical sets and lots of naked bodies, Prospero’s Books is Peter Greenaway at his most cinematically intense.

October 1- Forbidden Planet

Fred M. Wilcox, USA, 1956, 98 minutes. Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen star in this Freudian sci-fi reconsideration of The Tempest, with Robbie the Robot as Ariel and the Monster From the Id as Calaban in one of the most ambitious of all of Hollywood’s 1950s Space Operas.