The Tempest

The Tempest (1908)

Prospero and his daughter Miranda must take refuge on an enchanted island. There Prospero, who himself has magical powers, releases the spirit Ariel from a spell, and also meets the savage Caliban. Then Prospero uses his powers to create a tempest that shipwrecks some of the persons who caused his exile.

Date of release
1908-11-07
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (10)
Runtime
12m
Genres
Fantasy, Drama
Director
Percy Stow

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Tempest

The Tempest is a 1908 British-made silent film directed by film pioneer Percy Stow who specialised in trick photography.

Production

The British Film Institute describes Stow's The Tempest as "Comfortably the most visually imaginative and cinematically adventurous silent British Shakespeare film". Unlike William Kennedy Dickson's 1899 film version of King John and Charles Urban's 1905 film of The Tempest, both of which were simply films of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's stage productions, Stow's film was a condensed version of the entire play set specifically for the camera and tells…

Running at 12 minutes long, intertitles are used to link the short scenes but do not use Shakespeare's own prose. Several elaborate scenes were filmed in the studio which drew on Percy Stow's trick-photography expertise, including where Prospero summons up the tempest, which the BFI describes as being reminiscent of the work of the French film pioneer Georges Méliès.

The film is included in the British Film Institute (BFI) DVD compilation Silent Shakespeare, with an optional commentary by Judith Buchanan.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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