Bill Viola & Hamlet 2000

I google-booked A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen and found that someone named Bill Viola, a video/multi-media artist, was thanked in the closing credits of Hamlet 2000. Bill Viola, according to the book, was a big influence on the aesthetic of the film, which has lots of pixelated home video footage, security camera shots (we first see the ghost through a security camera), reflections in glass, etc.

Apparently part of the "To be or not to be" speech was going to be filmed at a Viola retrospective at the Whitney, but it didn't wind up working out. At any rate, turns out Viola is heavily influenced by Buddhism, and the projections, etc., in his art are often cited (including by Viola himself) as having to do with the ephemerality of the self & its interconnectedness to the world, etc.

Innnnteresting, since one might expect the aesthetic in Hamlet 2000 would have to do with dislocation/fragmentation in late-capitalist consumer culture blah blah etc, considering the film's setting: global-corporate, a sterile world of limos, high rises, glass, logos, all buoyed by technology that feels intentionally cold (why is that always the case? I mean zzzzzzzzz seen it), faxes, answering machines, video, video surveillance, etc. Amazing how dated the tech looks in the film--no cell phones, no digital cameras, answering machines instead of voicemail, etc.