Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet (to be shown here September 5) and King Lear bear witness to the idea that the Soviet epic style which is so well suited to ‘scope with its dynamic compositions the heir to Eisenstein's montages, is also supremely suited to Shakespeare. Kozintsev sets King Lear against a barren and rocky earth, not the no-man's-land of Peter Brooks' existential reinterpretation but a powerfully physical landscape in which to frame Shakespeare's most eloquent statement on human folly and the natural order. The wizened, gnome-like figure of Yuri Jarvet as Lear carries with it a perennial entourage of ragged commoners, the flies to his initial wantonness and, in the end, the ones to whom his fate is clearly linked as he “grows” in stature from monarch to beleaguered philosopher in a barbaric society. Soho News critic Diane Jacobs writes, “The structure, of course, is Shakespeare, but the nuances are Kozintsev's.... There is a marvelously poetic wide-angle zoom-in on Lear and the fool in the storm sequence where they begin no bigger than spots on the sand and are only slowly revealed as men--equal in stature.... This sequence is quickly counterbalanced by the grovelling of Edgar as Tom O'Bedlam in the cave....”