Ut Pictura Kynesis: Pictorial Art in Romeo and Juliet Film Adaptations

The presence of pictorial art in the various film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been traditionally expounded as part of an exercise in stylization and historical localization. Elaborating upon a comparative and revisionist approach, which draws on Douglas Lanier’s (2014) “rhizomatic” methodology, this paper reexamines the interaction between pictorial art and film rhetorics in the five major sound film adaptations of the play released, to date, for Western mainstream audiences. Exploring a representative selection of scenes evidences how the use of pictorial material in these productions aims to satisfy an aesthetic and historicist need while also serving a dialogic and discursive function. In so doing, this study demonstrates that Romeo and Juliet sound film adaptations have made use of pictorial art as a means to (re)negotiate the meaning of the literary text in response to their particular historical-social conditions and commercial interests. Ultimately, therefore, the analysis posits these productions as distinct ekphrastic media and proposes that they be reassessed as complex semiotic configurations, founded upon an exercise of textual, pictorial and kinetic transmediatization.