“The Barbarous Cronos”: (Post)Colonialism, Sequelization, and Regenerative Authority in Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive (2000)

Abstract

Post-millennial cinematic Shakespeare comes in the wake of numerous successful incarnations of the Bard at the end of the twentieth century, such as John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998) which received seven Oscars at the 1999 Academy Awards. By 2003, Shakespearean incarnations and popular cinema are inflected by a particular filmic trend: sequelization. Characterised by its engagement with notions of continuity, apocalypse, origins, and ‘the promised end', sequelization has already manifested many prequels, trequels, and sequels throughout cinematic culture.1 Increasingly, those productions that claim Shakespeare as their adaptive focus interact with this paradigm in such a way as to cinematically render notions of regenerative interpretation and Bardic authority.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 15 2003: pp. 11-20