CONCLUSIE

In a first step in a process you read the text as a reader and watched the adaptations as an audience. Until here, you performed common, everyday roles. Everyday people read or watch something.
In a second and third step, you were asked to study the text closer and analyse the adaptations. You become a scholar. You are a scholar.
In a last step, you became a director, a playwright, a scripwriter, an actor. You were physically swept along in the romantic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Hopefully, together with your fellow students, you realize now that a play is a complex process that incorporates the verbal as well as the non-verbal. Very different realizations of a work on screen may be equally true. It might be argued that in each of these films, a unique and distinctive visual interpretation has been offered of the play.
We would like to conclude this workshop with a quote from an essay written by A. Cirillo about Zeffirelli?s film. It is equally apt to Luhrmann?s version.
It expresses the idea that Shakespeare?s text and modern filmadaptations, tradition and innovation are not opposites but reconcilable.

They have taken an old story, a story not only old in the sense of familiar, happening again and again throughout time, but a story old in the sense that, by our over-revernet attitude towards it, we have petrified it into an Elgin marble; Zeffirelli and Luhrmann have taken this story and restored it to youth in every conceivable way. (?) They brought to the story the ability to paint in the colors, in the music and sound of a modern medium, its meaning in the light of the present and shade of the past simultaneously. (?) made the play live for us here and now. This is an art which makes the past present in terms of the past in such a way that both become one.