Techniques Used In The Dover Castle

An example of an interior shot filmed in the Dover Castle is in the opening scene where Hamlet is giving a speech, John Golden writes in much detail, “Hamlet descends the stairs as he says the famous first line, moving from light to dark, but he pauses momentarily before moving fully into the main chamber. Hamlet looks around at the bones and skulls that litter the crypt on the lines "To die, to sleep”” (Golden). This wonderful, symbolic first scene gives the viewers a taste of what is to come from Zeffirelli and his decision to film in a beautiful, original locations. Time and place are two fundamental ingredients of a story’s setting. The place the director or writers choose creates a mood and atmosphere, determines parameters for the
Therefore, shooting during the day for both interior shots and exterior shots would be the best and probably the only option in some cases, in order to conserve the very limited electricity. For example, in the movie, Zeffrelli, used close-up shots in a few scenes. He might have done this in order to get better lighting on the actor’s faces, because of high ceilings. For night shots, the solution was generators. The problem is with generators comes substantial and constant high levels of noise and this affects audio. With this it is now up to the editors in post-production to fix anything and everything that was thrown off due to electricity issues. Zeffirelli definitely took a gamble with this factor while filming the movie and his gamble paid off, he was able to accomplish an underlying symbol of location and how it directly relates to Hamlet and his own troubles.
Along with electricity there is the problem of running water. Where did the cast and crew find modern bathroom facilities? Could they even wash their hands? It seems like a silly thing to worry about, but in the end it could affect the morale a lot of people and how well things progressed with the filming the movie. At the end of the day, however, it was known that the cast and crew would be going back to their 20th century Denmark hotels where they did not have to worry about any of
A good example of this would be when Ophelia confronts a knight in shiny armor in front of the castle, a castle that shows the century it is taken place in. The knight’s armor seems less authentic, it is almost a clash having them together. Cook exclaims, “Armor is less rigorously authentic than the architecture, raging across several centuries to create such effects as placing Ophelia next to a shinily plated knight at the Mousetrap, signifying a conventionally “chivalric” presence that distinguishes her companion from grittier mailed soldiers and from Hamlet, whose cruelty is played up in the scene” (Cook). A very good point made by Cook, one might not catch upon it, however it was a risk that Zeffirelli took to have the setting detailed greatly to provide realism to the audience. The armor being historically dissonant, relates back to Hamlet as a character because, just like the armor, Hamlet was mad, he did not match the kind of royal he should have been. Taken from an article in Cinema Journal, Ryan Trimm writes, “'Realism here trades on specificity of locale, a particularity guaranteeing authenticity and actuality of the production, a precision mapping geographical and social coordinates. The recent cycle of heritage films, with their strong evocation of place, continues this vein”