Yesterday evening at the Curzon cinema in Soho, five short experimental animated films had their premiere screening as the culmination of the ‘Still Shakespeare’ project. Still Shakespeare is a collaboration between Film London Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), King’s College London, Th1ng and Sherbet which aimed to produce original films based on my research on Shakespearean iconography. The project was launched in May 2015 at a workshop at King’s supported by the Cultural Institute. I presented ideas about the ways in which images play a role in our modern understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, and the ways in which images can become detached from the plays and acquire their own meaning. The project intended to explore some of these images in short films – reanimating the Shakespearean still and finding connections and meanings in four hundred years of Shakespeare’s visual afterlife. The films each have an image or a collection of images as their starting point, and use a variety of methods to animate and explore them. 

Neck and Neck by Shaun Clark is inspired by Othello - in particular, by visual interpretations of the play’s climactic murder scene. It uses digitally drawn animation interspersed with live action to explore the sexuality and violence inherent in that scene and in the relationship between Othello and Desdemona.  

Ophelia 2.0 by Sharon Liu is inspired by the death of Ophelia in Hamlet, a scene which – though not staged in Shakespeare’s play – has inspired a huge number of artworks, most famously John Everett Millais’ Ophelia of 1852. The film meditates on Ophelia’s sensations and feelings in her final moments, intervening in a visual tradition which has shown an overwhelming tendency to treat Ophelia as a spectacle rather than a character.  

Love-In-Idleness by Kim Noce, inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, depicts the brief, intense sexual encounter between Titania and Bottom using 2D animation made with charcoal on paper. Focusing on the transformations undergone by these characters, the film also makes references to transformations in visual culture surrounding the character of Titania across the history of the play. 

Let Me Not be Mad by Meghana Bisineer, inspired by King Lear, uses a mixture of mixed-media drawn animation, pin hole photography and live action to explore the mental state of the king as he wanders on the moors in a storm. It responds to Romantic era visual treatments in which the king’s inner turmoil was reflected by the storm.  

The Waking Dream by Farouq Suleiman and Ben Sayer, inspired by Macbeth, plays with the motif of ‘bloody hands’ running through the play and its afterlife, particularly the familiar image of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and frantically washing invisible blood from her hands. It uses a collage of repurposed images from the history of the play to pursue this emblem through Lady Macbeth’s distracted consciousness.