Shylock’s Silence, Antonio’s Solitude

Abstract

To succeed in stepping out of a firm paradigm is a really notable achievement. The first and maybe the most difficult task is to recognize the very existence of the paradigm. And if this paradigm is of a visual representation, for whatever reason, it seems to be even more difficult. The cinematic adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Holocaust-novel is maybe the best example: tough the novel successfully transgressed the common discourse about the Holocaust, the film version cannot help but become in the director’s hands just another one in the long series of “remakes” of Schindler’s List. Although The Merchant of Venice is not about the Holocaust, as we could see, it became a Holocaust-allegory after the end of the Second World War. Michael Radford’s adaptation has the unquestionable achievement of freeing Shakespeare’s play of the limits of this twentieth-century discourse, and not letting his film join the petrified visual representation of it. Instead, his movie introduces such characters that have fundamental conflicts within them, and these problems of their identity make the central interest of the film.