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Feb. 4th, 2023 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAnd to follow up: I also made a vid this year! (for scribe, making me two for two this winter on 'going to someone's house and lying to their face about the fact that I had not been assigned to them in a fandom holiday exchange' ... friendship is a wondrous thing).
(Also on AO3 here)
This is the first proper multi-source vid I have made and also gave me the opportunity to collect a dragon's hoard of Twelfth Nights; since I got some questions in comments, a breakdown of the sources is as follows as well as my impressions of skimming through them very fast looking for matchable clips:
Twelfth Night (1996 film): baby Helena Bonham Carter is here, and also Toby Stephens and Imogen Stubbs. A perfectly solid Twelfth Night with a lot of great moustachio'd-Viola footage but unhelpfully mixes & mashes up its scenes in such a way that I had a hard time finding the most homoerotic visuals until it was almost too late. Antonio is sad at the end, which is helpful, but the camera is very zoomed out and focused on Ben Kingsley while he does it, which is not
Twelfth Night (National Theater Live 2017): this is the one with Tamsin Grieg as Malvolia! I was already fond of this one and got fonder because it was both my highest quality source (visually) and also my most dynamic (in terms of movement and staging; bless the Orsino/Viola boxing scene) and also EVERYONE makes out and visibly emotes and pines at each other in ways that are very clear and viddable, though it still zooms out too far on sad Antonio at the end
Twelfth Night (Royal Shakespeare Company 2017): this is the one with vaguely Ottoman costuming where Viola wears a gold robe and cute little maroon hat; desperately want to see it in full but unfortunately could only find the couple of scenes that they put up on YouTube, which, fortunately for me, were all very homoerotic. Very sad I couldn't fit Orsino painting artistic male nudes into the vid but sometimes one has to murder a darling
Twelfth Night (Public Theater 2018): I got to see this musical version live a few years ago and I'm SO sad the clips that are up on YouTube are so minimal, and for some reason very focused on Sebastian, Antonio, and Malvolio, which did balance out the Royal Shakespeare Company clips that were all Viola, Orsino and Olivia ... anyway the cheery Malvolio in the car trunk, the confused Sebastian in the blue vest and the very earnest Antonio in the do-rag come from here
Twelfth Night (Globe Theater 2012): this is the all-male Extremely Historically Accurate production which unfortunately uses such VERY stylized staging and movement and such stiff camerawork that was shockingly challenging to find good clips for vidding ... felt important however to include nonetheless so whenever something clear and dramatic DID happen I tried to use it
Twelfth Night (1986 film): this is the very 80s one with the David Bowie-esque Viola where they walk off into the air at the end -- it was a very fortuitous find from YouTube which also includes a very baby Geoffrey Rush as Sir Andrew, who unfortunately did not make it into the vid although if I'd had another verse to play with I would have tried to do a sad Sir Andrew verse probably. He was adored once!
Twelfth Night | Dvenadtsataya noch (1955 film): another lucky YouTube find! This is a midcentury Soviet Twelfth Night that I really want to watch in full, I'm so curious about the adaptation choices and what they kept & cut. Unsurprisingly glories less in homoeroticism than most of my other sources, but has a lot of helpful lute-strumming footage, which does help make up for it for my purposes here ...
The Animated Tales: Twelfth Night (1992): big shout out towickedtrue who let me know that a.) this exists and b.) can be found on DailyMotion! Given that this is a whole Twelfth Night squeezed into thirty minutes I did not expect it to be my most important source but in fact this ended up being VITAL and without it I genuinely don't think the vid would have worked at all, those little stop-motion puppets are just so expressive and visually clear about what is happening at all times!
She's the Man (2006): God I love this stupid film. If you're not familiar with it, Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum are here, and they're doing Twelfth Night on a soccer team, and it's a gem! and also very helpful to my specific purposes here for visually signifying We're Getting Weird With Twelfth Night!
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Meel Bros Pictures): special thanks to this three-minute YouTube video for children for another important Moustache Viola
Special thanks also to my betasinnerbrat, shati who kindly let me describe to her at length all the parts of the plot of Twelfth Night that do not appear in She's The Man, and aria who told me (among other very important advice) that I should have more revolving Malvolio, which is TRUE and yet tragically impossible as only one of my sources has actual footage of a Malvolio revolving! This remains my greatest regret.
scribe, making me two for two this winter on 'going to someone's house and lying to their face about the fact that I had not been assigned to them in a fandom holiday exchange' ... friendship is a wondrous thing). (Also on AO3 here)
This is the first proper multi-source vid I have made and also gave me the opportunity to collect a dragon's hoard of Twelfth Nights; since I got some questions in comments, a breakdown of the sources is as follows as well as my impressions of skimming through them very fast looking for matchable clips:
Twelfth Night (1996 film): baby Helena Bonham Carter is here, and also Toby Stephens and Imogen Stubbs. A perfectly solid Twelfth Night with a lot of great moustachio'd-Viola footage but unhelpfully mixes & mashes up its scenes in such a way that I had a hard time finding the most homoerotic visuals until it was almost too late. Antonio is sad at the end, which is helpful, but the camera is very zoomed out and focused on Ben Kingsley while he does it, which is not
Twelfth Night (National Theater Live 2017): this is the one with Tamsin Grieg as Malvolia! I was already fond of this one and got fonder because it was both my highest quality source (visually) and also my most dynamic (in terms of movement and staging; bless the Orsino/Viola boxing scene) and also EVERYONE makes out and visibly emotes and pines at each other in ways that are very clear and viddable, though it still zooms out too far on sad Antonio at the end
Twelfth Night (Royal Shakespeare Company 2017): this is the one with vaguely Ottoman costuming where Viola wears a gold robe and cute little maroon hat; desperately want to see it in full but unfortunately could only find the couple of scenes that they put up on YouTube, which, fortunately for me, were all very homoerotic. Very sad I couldn't fit Orsino painting artistic male nudes into the vid but sometimes one has to murder a darling
Twelfth Night (Public Theater 2018): I got to see this musical version live a few years ago and I'm SO sad the clips that are up on YouTube are so minimal, and for some reason very focused on Sebastian, Antonio, and Malvolio, which did balance out the Royal Shakespeare Company clips that were all Viola, Orsino and Olivia ... anyway the cheery Malvolio in the car trunk, the confused Sebastian in the blue vest and the very earnest Antonio in the do-rag come from here
Twelfth Night (Globe Theater 2012): this is the all-male Extremely Historically Accurate production which unfortunately uses such VERY stylized staging and movement and such stiff camerawork that was shockingly challenging to find good clips for vidding ... felt important however to include nonetheless so whenever something clear and dramatic DID happen I tried to use it
Twelfth Night (1986 film): this is the very 80s one with the David Bowie-esque Viola where they walk off into the air at the end -- it was a very fortuitous find from YouTube which also includes a very baby Geoffrey Rush as Sir Andrew, who unfortunately did not make it into the vid although if I'd had another verse to play with I would have tried to do a sad Sir Andrew verse probably. He was adored once!
Twelfth Night | Dvenadtsataya noch (1955 film): another lucky YouTube find! This is a midcentury Soviet Twelfth Night that I really want to watch in full, I'm so curious about the adaptation choices and what they kept & cut. Unsurprisingly glories less in homoeroticism than most of my other sources, but has a lot of helpful lute-strumming footage, which does help make up for it for my purposes here ...
The Animated Tales: Twelfth Night (1992): big shout out to
wickedtrue who let me know that a.) this exists and b.) can be found on DailyMotion! Given that this is a whole Twelfth Night squeezed into thirty minutes I did not expect it to be my most important source but in fact this ended up being VITAL and without it I genuinely don't think the vid would have worked at all, those little stop-motion puppets are just so expressive and visually clear about what is happening at all times! She's the Man (2006): God I love this stupid film. If you're not familiar with it, Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum are here, and they're doing Twelfth Night on a soccer team, and it's a gem! and also very helpful to my specific purposes here for visually signifying We're Getting Weird With Twelfth Night!
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Meel Bros Pictures): special thanks to this three-minute YouTube video for children for another important Moustache Viola
Special thanks also to my betas
innerbrat, shati who kindly let me describe to her at length all the parts of the plot of Twelfth Night that do not appear in She's The Man, and aria who told me (among other very important advice) that I should have more revolving Malvolio, which is TRUE and yet tragically impossible as only one of my sources has actual footage of a Malvolio revolving! This remains my greatest regret.
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Date: 2023-02-04 11:11 pm (UTC)I actually love the 1996 Twelfth Night with Imogen Stubbs; I have never managed to write about it, but it has one of my favorite Malvolios, one of the most interesting Festes, and after a ten-year interval I even came around to its Andrew Aguecheek, thanks, Richard E. Grant.
I was also very fond of the 2012 Globe Theatre's, which I have probably tried to describe to you before because it did two characterizations I hadn't seen, namely middle-aged screwball Olivia and non-Byronic Orsino, and Stephen Fry got the balance of Malvolio right.
Mid-century Soviet Twelfth Night WHAT.
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Date: 2023-02-05 01:31 am (UTC)Interesting that you found Rylance's Olivia convincing, rather than just mincing. Screwball is a useful adjective.
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Date: 2023-02-05 02:30 am (UTC)Also its soundtrack. Their setting of "The Wind and the Rain" gets stuck in my head.
Interesting that you found Rylance's Olivia convincing, rather than just mincing. Screwball is a useful adjective.
I wasn't sure of her at first because she seemed so mannered in her first scene with Cesario, but I was won over as soon as he took his leave and she immediately dropped down on a bench and despairingly repeated to herself, "'What is your parentage?'" and facepalmed. It was the first production I had seen where her grief-sunk melancholy was ultimately as misleading as any other surface in the play; I had previously encountered Olivia and Orsino as the so to speak straight parts and everyone else around them mad or fooling or both by turns and the Globe production pitched them as bewitched, bothered, and bewildered as possible without losing hold of the emotional stakes. Her delivery of an impulsive romantic gesture is heroically awkward: "Oh—'tis my picture!" She's flustered with inconvenient love, if she were an actual screwball heroine she would have been Jean Arthur who could be adorably insecure without descending to cringe comedy, assuming I can picture Arthur running onstage with a halberd to break up a fight (and actually, I can; she would only be self-conscious about it once she had stopped both combatants from stupidly killing themselves, which depending on her co-stars could be a real hazard). I liked Rylance's trick of setting her voice low and careful to surprise it into other registers with emotion. The other line reading that has stuck with me over the years is the denouement with Maria's false letter when she begins to laugh at the recall of "such forms which here were presupposed upon thee in the letter" and then catches herself and admits very gently and seriously to Malvolio that he was ill-used. She spent so long cultivating her grief, she had no idea what to do about love when it announced itself; she was as silly in it as Malvolio, it just turned out better for her. Probably,
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Date: 2023-02-05 05:48 am (UTC)I saw the 2012 Globe production live in New York and had a wonderful time with it, though the Olivia didn't work as well for me as it did for you -- I think at that point in time I conversely had seen several Olivias that felt like the butt of the joke and was feeling rather protective of her, and I sometimes felt that Rylance was laughing at rather than with his character. Stephen Fry was wonderful, though, and so was Samuel Barnett's viola. (For non-Byronic Orsinos, the National Theater Live's Oliver Chris is my current favorite -- every time I see that actor in a NTL production he's playing some variant on an endearingly muddle-headed boarding school bisexual bro, and I love that the "patience on a monument" scene happens while he's celebrating an over-the-top 40th birthday party.)
IN FULL TECHNICOLOR!!
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Date: 2023-02-05 06:54 am (UTC)I am confident it intercuts Sebastian called beloved and Malvolio called mad more closely than the original text, because the friction has stuck with me from the first time I saw the film and I unfairly demand it of stage productions now. [edit] It was not my introduction to the play, I just have an enormous number of opinions about it, which is one of the reasons I have never managed to write about it.
I saw the 2012 Globe production live in New York and had a wonderful time with it, though the Olivia didn't work as well for me as it did for you -- I think at that point in time I conversely had seen several Olivias that felt like the butt of the joke and was feeling rather protective of her, and I sometimes felt that Rylance was laughing at rather than with his character.
Fair! I did not get that sense from him, but I was not coming off a run of wild Olivias. I should note that I actually saw a livecast done from the Globe in 2014 and perhaps he had relaxed into the interpretation.
Stephen Fry was wonderful, though
He was. We had hoped he would be. I loved the little hesitant catch before his angrily declamatory "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you"—he almost said something else and the audience would love to know what it was.
For non-Byronic Orsinos, the National Theater Live's Oliver Chris is my current favorite -- every time I see that actor in a NTL production he's playing some variant on an endearingly muddle-headed boarding school bisexual bro, and I love that the "patience on a monument" scene happens while he's celebrating an over-the-top 40th birthday party.
You have described his Theseus and Oberon and he just seems to be living his best life.
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Date: 2023-02-06 08:13 pm (UTC)I also saw it live with Sam Barnett as Viola, and I'm forever heartbroken that they didn't record that version, he was utterly fabulous. I'm a little bit of two minds about the need for actually doing the all-male historically accurate situation, but it did have the distinction of being the only Twelfth Night I've ever seen where Sebastian walked on stage and I actually thought it was Viola until he started talking, which was extremely cool and an insight into how much better the mistaken-identity plots might have worked!
Neutral on Mark Rylance's Olivia, but my dissenting opinion is that I really disliked Stephen Fry's Malvolio. Not that he did a bad job, but he was way too likeable! I think one of the challenges of Twelfth Night is that there comes a point in the play where the Malvolio torture stops being funny and starts being really uncomfortable, and the more odious Malvolio is the longer you can put that off...and poor Fry!Malvolio was so pitiable from the start that basically that entire plot was awful. Which you can do on purpose to make a statement- see the 2017 Malvolia production- but this one didn't seem to be making a point of it in any particular way, just having all the B plot main characters come across as real villains...because?
Of course it's been more than a decade so my memory is a bit hazy, but that's my remembered takeaway!
Also I really must rewatch the 1996 version, which I think I last saw in a middle school drama class...but god do I love an interesting Feste. :D
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Date: 2023-02-07 12:14 am (UTC)I see no reason to refrain!
I also saw it live with Sam Barnett as Viola, and I'm forever heartbroken that they didn't record that version, he was utterly fabulous.
I definitely saw Johnny Flynn as Viola, which delighted me, because I was familiar with him as a musician rather than an actor. Barnett was Sebastian and I appreciated that he was the one with the more conventionally girlish face when you finally saw them side by side. I have to say I am surprised there's no recording of the other version, since a Sebastian and Viola who actually can trade roles should have been a selling point of the production.
it did have the distinction of being the only Twelfth Night I've ever seen where Sebastian walked on stage and I actually thought it was Viola until he started talking, which was extremely cool and an insight into how much better the mistaken-identity plots might have worked!
Nice! I remember that Barnett's Sebastian felt like his own person and not just a stand-in, which is not true of every Sebastian I've seen.
but my dissenting opinion is that I really disliked Stephen Fry's Malvolio. Not that he did a bad job, but he was way too likeable!
That is an entirely valid objection to have to a Malvolio! I did not find it to be the case with Fry, but I have encountered it in the wild and it was how I learned that the play doesn't work for me if Malvolio is merely stuffy: the character needs to be difficult enough to get the audience on the side of the gulling initially and enough of a person to throw them out of it when he really begins to get hurt. He's not Sir Andrew Aguecheek. He can be as sympathetic as you like once he starts breaking apart, but there's no sting if first he hasn't been an insufferable self-righteous martinet.
—Thanks to this conversation, I just realized that there is a strong strain of Malvolio in the DNA of Cash on Demand (1961), which I had somehow missed for more than a dozen years even though I love the film. The debt to A Christmas Carol was obvious at once, but apparently it draws from the other end of the Christmas season, too. I approve of that.
Also I really must rewatch the 1996 version, which I think I last saw in a middle school drama class...but god do I love an interesting Feste.
I really like Ben Kingsley's. I don't know if I consider him a definitive interpretation, but I haven't seen him elsewhere.
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Date: 2023-02-09 03:45 pm (UTC)Reading your description of Cash on Demand, it definitely feels Malvolio-ish! And reminds me enormously of Malvolio Bent the banker from the Discworld books, as well.
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Date: 2024-02-11 02:09 am (UTC)Apparently I lost track of this comment in the whirligig of time, but I think you are totally on point with the Discworld link.
(I would love to have seen the switch-off Sebastian/Viola Twelfth Night.)
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Date: 2023-02-05 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 06:10 am (UTC)Yeah! Olivia seemed pretty happy with one random hot dude suddenly joining her life she could probably roll with two. And even if not he can still be around as a friend!
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Date: 2023-02-05 01:35 am (UTC)This is not the ideal video to take a clip from (taken here by an audience member, unfortunately from above partially obstructed by someone's head) but I remember this scene, starting at a little past 20:00, being extremely hot until it becomes deliberately silly to shake off the UST. I hate to say "you had to be there," but maybe one did?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrOFfgKR2yA
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Date: 2023-02-05 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 05:57 am (UTC)some enterprising individual has in fact put the whole Malvolia one up on Vimeo in two parts!
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Date: 2023-02-05 04:16 am (UTC)(Also, you wouldn't happen to have a download of the NT Live production, would you? I see the guy who plays the Duke also played Theseus in their AMND…)
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Date: 2023-02-05 06:00 am (UTC)(I LOVE Oliver Chris, he plays the same confused boarding school bisexual in every NTL and it wildly endears me every time. In addition to being Theseus | Oberon in the Oberon-and-Titania-swapped AMND where Oberon falls in love with Bottom, he was also in One Man Two Guvnors as the love interest to ANOTHER plucky cross-dressing heroine! God bless.)
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Date: 2023-02-05 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 04:34 am (UTC)Have you seen the 2017 Globe production? I got to see it live, and the disco style worked amazingly well.
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Date: 2023-02-05 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-05 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-06 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-06 08:18 pm (UTC)Also with the accounting of sources I'm super impressed at how many you only had clips from! I couldn't tell at all from the vid that you were working with bits and pieces.
Side note I am so SO sad that I never got to see the 2018 Public Works Twelfth Night, iirc
ETA ALSO I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU CAME TO MY HOUSE FOR A FESTIVIDS WORKING PARTY AND WERE JUST LIKE "OH YEAH I'M WORKING ON YULETIDE INSTEAD" ALL COOL LIKE