Event Details

All the way from the University of Ljubljana, internationally acclaimed scholar Prof Gregor Modor will give a startling & philosophical analysis of Ernst Lubitsch's adaptation of Hamlet.

Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be (1942) was filmed during World War II, and takes place in the early period of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Yet the film focuses on the story of a theatre group, on actors, and on the metaphysical question of what makes up a convincing performance. Some early critics suggested that this is not the way to tackle a dire political situation, and that the portrayal of Nazis as humans, with their own sense of humor and theatre, was disrespectful to the plight of the Poles. For the film, however, the political action and the metaphysical implications of a theatrical performance are not alternative procedures, but are rather closely linked to one another, and in this respect Lubitsch follows Shakespeare’s own staging of power. We shall pursue this argument, firstly, in the analysis of the series of Shylock monologues in the film (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”), focusing on the hyper-theatricality of each repetition. Secondly, we will analyze the series of encounters between two main characters, the Nazi Colonel Ehrhardt and the Polish actor Joseph Tura, especially their last encounter. We will compare the encounter between Ehrhardt and Tura to the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet and argue that it functions as the primal scene – in the Freudian meaning of the term – of the film as such. Their encounter is comical, yet at the same time both politically and metaphysically completely serious: the film shows us two visions of Hamlet, and with that, two visions of modernity, embodied in a Nazi Colonel and a Polish actor. The film seems to suggest that there is no defeating Nazism without a thorough understanding of the theatricality of power as such – a Shakespearean lesson that is vital also for our contemporary conjuncture.

Biography:

Gregor Moder is a senior research associate of philosophy and teaches “Philosophy of Art” at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His works include Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (2015, in Slovenian), Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017), Antigone. An Essay on Hegel’s Political Philosophy (2023, in Slovenian, forthcoming in German with Turia+Kant), and an edited volume on The Object of Comedy (2020, with Jamila Mascat). His latest work is a volume edited with Ivana Novak called The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch: Comedy Without Relief (2024).