The movie Robert Eggers calls “sloppy, primitive and visceral”
Whenever there are any discussions about the most promising filmmakers working today, the name of Robert Eggers is never far away. Ever since his debut feature, The Witch, the American filmmaker has garnered a steadily growing group of devoted fans as well as a healthy amount of critical appreciation and accolades along the way.
While his latest work, The Northman, also earned a lot of praise from the critics, the pinnacle of his directorial career remains his 2019 masterpiece, The Lighthouse. Drawing upon the vast literary experiments of Herman Melville and H. P. Lovecraft, Eggers constructed one of the 21st century’s most elaborate and surreal cinematic explorations of the human condition.
However, that high point of his artistic journey might soon change as Eggers is currently working on a highly anticipated remake of the silent era classic Nosferatu. While it seems like the perfect project for a filmmaker of his sensibilities, recontextualising F.W. Murnau’s magnum opus is no easy feat. That’s exactly why Eggers is probably already seeking inspiration from his cinematic predecessors.
One such work is a movie he named among his favourites while talking to the Le Cinéma Club, saying, “The film is sloppy, primitive and visceral, but I think it has the best verse speaking on screen.” Eggers is referring to Peter Brook’s 1971 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which went beyond the frameworks of the source material to experiment with a different kind of symbolism.
Brook was involved with Shakespeare and the adaptations of his work from the very beginning of his career, but King Lear always held a special interest for him. During an interview, he explained the philosophical foundations behind the simplest of actions in the play.
The director said: “In the cinema, at least in all the films of Shakespeare we have seen, a Gloucester would be forced to stand on a windy heath of some description, although fifty per cent of the extraordinariness of the powerful image is that this is happening on a pretended heath, on the boards of nowhere. A meaning is released by the double nature of the act, a meaning which isn’t there if you isolate one aspect of it. A leap on a bare stage can be done by anyone, and a leap on a heath is just as simple. But Lear gives you both at once in the theatre. So the result is like the idea itself striking you in its purest form.”
Shot in Denmark with a cold and bleak atmosphere enveloping the narrative, Brook’s King Lear was deeply inspired by the absurdist works of Samuel Beckett. Despite receiving a polarising reaction from critics, it’s still a point of interest for Shakespeare fans who also enjoy the Theatre of the Absurd.
Watch the trailer below.
