Sycorax

(Lois Patiño & Matías Piñeiro, Spain, 2021)

In his great book The Secret Language of Film (1995), Jean-Claude Carrière praised Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a totally unrealistic, dreamlike fable that is “truly free of space and time”. Is that why it has invited such radical film adaptations down the decades, from Paul Mazursky to Peter Greenaway?

Now two illustrious names of 21st century cinema, Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro, join forces to allusively conjure an occluded element of the play. This is the witch Sycorax – focused so as to give her body and voice, not in a cheesy ‘woke’ way, but by using only Shakespeare’s words, sundered and rearranged.

Their version of The Tempest, 21 minutes long, is a floating, free, virtual theatre – a film forever in-process – revelling in many possible faces, landscapes and intonations.

© Adrian Martin October 2021