Anniversary of King Lear

 On February 8, 1971, a film adaptation of William Shakespeare's immortal tragedy "King Lear" was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas. The screen version was made by Grigory Kozintsev.

The decision to film "King Lear" came to Grigory Kozintsev while he was working on the film "Hamlet". But it took 5 long years before he could start implementing this solution. A lot of materials have been published about the history of the creation of this film, in particular, here. 

Unlike "Hamlet", the film "King Lear" received much less fame outside the USSR, and practically did not participate in the most prestigious international film festivals. Some foreign film critics tried to explain this by the fact that the script of Kozintsev's film differed from the canonical interpretations and was unusual for foreign admirers of Shakespeare. Sometimes even accusing Kozintsev of a "communist" reading of the great tragedy.

It is likely that the reason for such "bewilderment" of foreign film critics was, indeed, a not quite traditional interpretation of the main idea of Shakespeare's play. While the Western viewer is accustomed to seeing the tragedy of a particular family, a particular king, Kozintsev defined the idea of his film as follows: “Man and history are the theme of tragedy. And then one could list different topics until morning: man and power, society and man. , old age and youth, the fate of the race and one human fate, the fate of a group of people, but also the fate of human thought ... " 

 
Jugu Abraham, a well-known Indian blogger and author of the blog Films That Make You Think, believes that the low popularity of "King Lear" Kozintsev in the West is due to the fact that"Kozintsev’s cinema was banned in the US (Communist propaganda was considered immoral by the Censors in Michigan)".

However, no matter how sophisticated foreign critics and distributors over the film by Grigory Kozintsev, the ratings of the film, posted by users of IMDB and Kinopoisk, are the highest of all the numerous adaptations of Shakespeare's tragedy. And there are at least three or four dozens of them, these adaptations. 65% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film ratings from 8 to 10.

With that said, the rating of Grigory Kozintsev's film "King Lear" by FilmGourmand was 8.106, making it 588th in the Golden Thousand.