Screening: “The Tragedy of Macbeth”

A screening of Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” starring Academy Award-winners Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
With introductions by Professors Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran, the event is open to members of the Yale community.
Screening will be held in the Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York Street, HQL01.
Courtesy of A24 and Apple Original Films, this screening is presented by the Yale Film Archive and the Mack Fund of the Elizabethan Club.
Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” follows nearly two dozen film adaptations of the Scottish play, and Coen’s version functions in dramatic reference to its predecessors. With its intense black-and-white minimalism, grounded in striking performances, critic David Ehrlich describes it as “such a strange hybrid between cinema and theater that it seems to exist in a realm all its own.”
With the film’s physical surrealism, amidst towering sets of German Expressionist architecture, the Coen Macbeth draws upon German, British, and Japanese cinema and theatre, and is itself a bold addition to the lineage of Shakespeare on film.
Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and English, as well as an affiliate of Film and Media Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She frequently writes about contemporary cinema for scholarly and popular venues.
Ayesha Ramachandran is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Program in Renaissance Studies at Yale University. Her first, prizewinning book, The Worldmakers (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides a cultural and intellectual history of “the world,” showing how it emerged as a cultural keyword in early modernity. Her current projects range across early modern poetry and drama, comparative philology, cartography, and oral history. Her new book manuscript in progress is tentatively entitled, Lyric Thinking: Towards a Global Poetics. She regularly teaches courses on Global Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry.