King Lear

Lear is a proud king who, before dividing his kingdom among his three daughters, asks each of them to prove her love in words. Goneril and Regan say more than enough; Cordelia refuses the game and is banished. The kingdom is split in two, and that decision becomes the thing that destroys him. Peter Brook directed, and the whole film was shot in Denmark, in a snowbound and bare winter landscape. It stands close to Beckett’s theatre: nothing consoles and nobody is proved right. Paul Scofield plays Lear and makes no attempt to render him sympathetic. In the same year Grigori Kozintsev was making his own King Lear in the Soviet Union, and the two films are always named together.