The history of film is a history of interdisciplinarity and intermediality. As Barbara Straumann notes, film is a “synthetic medium which devours and transforms other arts and media together with their respective iconographic traditions and techniques – a process that renders film an intermedial form of expression from the start” (218). That is to say, in its capture of image, sound, and movement, film, from its inception, has also absorbed the associated “traditions and techniques” of its precursors (Straumann 218). Film critic André Bazin, among others, emphasizes this relationship between film and other art forms in his various essays on film and theater, painting, and photography. Media critics, including Marshall McLuhan, Jay David Bolter, and Richard Grusin, also call attention to the way that new media reframe, refashion, and “remediate” older media forms.1

Adaptation can likewise be seen as always already interdisciplinary and intermedial. Residing between media objects, the adaptation represents a “both…and” position; adaptations exist in the liminal space between the medium of the original and the medium of the adaptation. Furthermore, this “both…and” position goes beyond the relationship of source text and product. Rather, adaptations are bound up with not only the authority of the source, but also intervening histories and texts which exert influence, consciously or subconsciously, on the adaptor’s creative vision. Responding to the calls of Vanessa I. Corredera and others to enrich the study of Shakespeare and adaptation through interdisciplinary lenses, this study situates Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) within a history of media, rather than a history of Shakespeare adaptation.2 The film, rich with representational layers, adapts Shakespeare’s source text (itself an adaptation of the historical record) through a panoply of visual styles. Famously, the film moves from a recreated Wooden O theater space through various representational layers: sets connoting “illusionistic theatrical artifice” (Deats 285) for scenes in Southampton and Eastcheap, “illusionistic-stylized” (Geduld 60) sets for scenes of the French court, and “quasi-naturalistic” outdoor shots for the Battle of Agincourt (Geduld 60-61). At the end of the film, Olivier works back through these representational layers, ending where the film began: in the Globe Theater. This chiastic structure (theater to theatrical to fairy tale to cinematic realism and back again through those same layers) demonstrates Peter Donaldson’s argument that Olivier “set out to remedy the limitations of Shakespeare’s medium through the representational amplification film could provide” (62), and, indeed, this assessment reinforces Straumann’s statement about film’s capacity to “devour” other media forms. Olivier’s artistic project here is imperialistic, on behalf of the crown and on behalf of the medium of film. Olivier extrapolates from the account of the English victory over the French in Henry V to project not only the triumph of England (and its allies) in World War II, but also film’s triumph over theater. 

Yet, a media history account of Olivier’s film reveals that while the film can be read as a statement of artistic imperialism, it also can be read as a demonstration of the way that creativity is contingent and opportunistic. In the film can be found multiple traces of media history, including the representational history of theater, painting, and illuminated manuscripts, as well as the technological innovations of high-quality color print and film. Through visual borrowings from art history, Olivier is able to demonstrate film’s capacity to supersede theater in representational ability. Yet, a close reading of the historical coincidences and technological innovations reveals that Olivier is himself subject to creative and technological constraints. These contexts simultaneously decenter Shakespeare as the primum mobile of later adaptations of his work and Olivier as the film’s auteur. Thus, Olivier’s Henry V demonstrates the intermediality at the heart of every film, as it captures, encapsulates, and absorbs the accumulated media history and the associated medial constraints and possibilities.

Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher write that “Intermedial studies is interested in the interaction of similarities and differences between media and the changes that may occur in communicative material when it is transported from one media type to another. It is also interested in how the differences between media types are bridged by similarities on other levels” (3). An intermedial study of Olivier’s film, then, might ask how meaning shifts when theater performance or painting are transported into the film space and how the film is part of a media ecosystem that extends beyond the play text or performance traditions of Shakespeare’s play. As Jens Schröter writes, the term intermediality “attempts to take into account the more and more apparent fact that media do not exist disconnected from one another; rather, they have existed forever in complex media configurations and have therefore always been based on other media” (19). Film has always had a connection, for example, to theater and painting, borrowing their techniques and adapting them to its own purposes and according to its own methods. Like the work of intertextuality, studies of intermediality aim to re-connect the dots, finding the “links (and cross-breeds) between various art forms, and the various disciplines with which we talk about these media” (Schröter 8-9). Adaptation, by nature, is always and has always been intermedial; the medial transposition involved in adaptation means that adaptations are always working across multiple medial systems. An intermedial theoretical lens recognizes that adaptation “is as much about the choice of form and medium as it is about the content these reflect and mediate. All contribute to the ways in which an adaptation is intermediated into something other than the putative source text” (Fischlin, Magill, and Riley 154).

In Henry V, Olivier primarily engages with what Irina O. Rajewsky describes as intermedial reference, a strategy in which a text borrows techniques from other genres, such as the “filmic novel” or, as in the case of Olivier, a “painterly film.”3 Rajewsky writes that intermedial references “by definition imply a crossing of media borders, and thus a medial difference” which “gives rise, or at least can give rise, to the so-called ‘as if’ character of intermedial references, as well as to a specific, illusion-forming quality inherent in them” (54). In other words, an intermedial reference produces an “as if” quality that invites us to view the film as if it were a painting or as if we were watching a play. The film cannot reproduce either paintings or theater; it can only evoke or imitate the other representational media. When an audience sees that painting- or theater-within-the-film, then, they comprehend the reference as part of the medial system being referred to (visual or performing arts) but the film also expands upon that representational mode, coding it as film, thus making the reference both painting and film and neither painting nor film. By creating the “illusion” of another medium’s specific practices (Rajewsky 55), the intermedial reference thus “constitutes itself in relation to the media product or system to which it refers” (Rajewsky 59), absorbing its authority while rewriting its meaning within its own media ecosystem. Olivier’s extended intermedial references in Henry V, to theater, painting, and illuminated manuscripts, thus draw those artistic traditions into the realm of film, rewriting them into his own media ecosystem. This artistic imperialism, on behalf of the film medium, decenters Shakespeare’s authority over the film and positions Olivier as central to the film’s success. Yet, as Daniel Fischlin writes, intermedial adaptations generate meaning “using whatever techniques—intertextual or intermedial—are readily available and presumably, aesthetically compelling” (258). So, while Olivier’s borrowings do decenter Shakespeare, this issue of accessibility and timeliness also decenters Olivier; his choices are historically-determined and impacted by various emerging technologies.

As the film’s earliest critics point out, Olivier reshapes the theater in his film, offering not filmed theater but a new representational mode altogether. Film critic André Bazin praises Olivier’s film for not making “filmed theater”—which Bazin defines as “the photographed play, text and all” (83)—but rather for “[existing] side by side with the theatrical presentation, in front of and behind the stage. Both Shakespeare and the theater however are truly its prisoners, hemmed in on all sides by cinema” (88-89). The film’s famous opening sets the viewer in the space of the Globe Theater in the moments before the opening of a play. The camera, after circling about to take in the views of the playhouse, eventually settles into the perspective of an audience member positioned about halfway between the stage and the galleries. This perspective, which situates the film viewer as if they were watching this production of Henry V, models Rajewsky’s “illusion-forming quality” above (54); it creates the illusion of liveness, of the context of a specific theatrical space, and a sense of on- and off-stage presence and absence. Yet, this perspective is not stable as the camera does not maintain the audience member’s point of view as it would in filmed theater. Instead, the camera moves about the theater, offering closeups, zooms, and various points-of-view shots. This camerawork is fundamentally cinematic; it does not accurately represent the static position of a theater audience, offering instead a privileged viewpoint available only to a film camera.

Though these theater scenes, which bookend the film, seemingly celebrate one of England’s premier artistic traditions, the film’s encapsulation—or imprisonment as Bazin would have it—of Shakespeare’s theater decenters both author and play from the adaptation. In a 20 August 1945 telegram from Herbert Kalmus, the American president of Technicolor, to producer Arthur Rank, Kalmus complains about this interpolated material, writing “The beginning and end of the picture are not really part of Shakespeare’s play but an added explanatory panorama which to my mind detracts rather than adds.” He justifies this critique by adding that he is not asking Olivier to cut the Shakespeare content: “Nor would I try to improve upon William Shakespeare in whom you have an excellent author.”4 Kalmus’s objection is not to Shakespeare (this is a Shakespeare film after all and Kalmus ostensibly sees Shakespeare as “an excellent author”) but rather to a visual amplification that seems unnecessary and therefore ought to be removed.5 Yet, these scenes are precisely part of the logic of Olivier’s film; highlighting the physical space of Shakespeare’s theater serves to uphold the institution of theater but also to demonstrate Olivier’s artistic superiority in his work with film.

Film is a medium of reality, and by highlighting the architecture, and thus the artifice, of the theater space, Olivier invites the viewer to not just suspend disbelief but to shatter it altogether. As Bazin points out in his essay “Painting and Cinema,” the film screen implies the destruction of space. Whereas the theater’s architecture and the painting’s frame “mark a contrast between [them] and the real world” and therefore “from the reality that is represented” in them (165), the film screen becomes reality: “what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe” (166). That is to say, while theater and painting highlight their own artificiality through their respective framing devices, the film, grounded as it is in realism and its ability to capture sound, image, and motion, not only insists on its own reality but also absorbs the realities of the other art forms into itself. Bazin continues: “A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal. Whence it follows that if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen within the picture frame, that is if we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as without any boundaries” (166). As before, Bazin’s theory of the centrifugal force of screen space points back to Straumann’s supposition that film “devours” other art forms. This point, while relevant to Olivier’s representation of theater within the film space, bears out more fully in his visual references to two other artistic traditions: painting and illuminations. Olivier’s centrifugal screen sucks up these other art forms, blurring the boundaries between media.

Olivier’s artistic imperialism poaches on other European artistic traditions so that what he refers to as the film’s “painter’s eye-view” (Qtd. Geduld 18) is also a practice of unacknowledged appropriation. The film’s secondary representational level, found in the scenes set in Eastcheap, resembles the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, particularly the work of the Utrecht Caravaggisti whose emulation of Caravaggio’s style included their own use of chiaroscuro and realistic scenes of “low-life” figures (Caravaggisti). The Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerrit von Honthorst, participate in the broader Dutch seventeenth-century fashion for genre paintings depicting scenes of everyday life. As Wayne Franits indicates, the Dutch viewers of these pieces would not have had that phrase, referring instead to various descriptive titles such as “gezelschappen” (merry companies) or “kortegarden” (guardroom pieces) (2). Olivier’s emulation of this style is demonstrated by the lighting and composition of the shots, and, in fact, sketches in the margins of the archival shooting script reinforce that he imagined these scenes as paintings in their composition. Six distinct framed sketches, resembling framed paintings, depict the exterior of the Boar’s Head, Falstaff’s bedroom, and the group shots on the steps—perhaps an inversion of the “merry company” genre. These sketches, attributed to Olivier’s own hand, are rare marginal doodles in the shooting script, and they are by far the most elaborate.

The film matches these sketches nearly shot for shot. In the first four sketched frames, Olivier draws Falstaff in bed with Mistress Quickly perched on the edge. The second depicts the group exiting the building. The third shows Pistol leaning his arm against a post. And the final shows the men surrounding Mistress Quickly. The film shots follow the same principles of composition, enhanced by the mostly static camera and the chiaroscuro lighting effects. For example, a sequence of shots depicts Falstaff on his death bed, a scene which takes place off-stage in the play.6 In the first shot, Mistress Quickly is seated next to Falstaff’s bed, with a prominent, unidentified light source coming from the right side of the frame (see Figure 1). In the next shot, the camera shows Falstaff’s friends outside the Boar’s Head Tavern, grouped like a “merry company” in their sadness. The following shot, resembling a framed portrait of Falstaff, obscures his face with a shadow, indicating his inner turmoil at King Henry’s repudiation in 2 Henry IV, the lines of which can be heard in voiceover. As the camera moves inward—and Falstaff becomes more and more distressed—the angle subtly shifts from an eye-level shot to a high angle, emphasizing Falstaff’s powerlessness after Harry’s rejection. The unique visual style of each of these shots recalls the Dutch genre paintings, reinforcing the class status of the characters, their everyday nature, and Olivier’s ability to wield the tools of the masters of the past in film.

Though the Boar’s Head scenes gesture to the film’s interest in visual art, the most extended and acknowledged set of visual references involve the technique and images from the medieval illuminated manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry which was created in the fifteenth century by the Limbourg brothers for the Duke of Berry. Left incomplete due to the deaths of the patron and artists in 1416, it was finished by Jean Colombe (Camille 72). An example of a devotional book of hours, the Très Riches Heures is a medieval form of media combination that links word with image. As Cazelles and Rathofer indicate, “medieval piety looked favorably on the use of visual supports and aids to contemplation, as is readily apparent from the sculpture, frescoes, and stained-glass windows in churches. Miniatures and other forms of manuscript decoration were designed to serve the same function” (205). A book of hours typically contains a collection of prayers, psalms, and other devotional texts with images intended to elaborate upon or focus the reader’s attention on the text. In the “Labors of the Months” portions, the manuscripts typically included “both peasants and nobles at their seasonal occupations and pursuits” (Cazelles and Rathofer 205). Like the Dutch genre paintings, the Labors of the Months depict scenes of everyday life.

In the film, Olivier directly cites images from the manuscript’s labors of the months, reasoning that this book of hours was produced in the same decade when the Battle of Agincourt took place. Like any adapter, Olivier faced the problem of when to set Henry V: in the late sixteenth century (when Shakespeare wrote the play) or the early fifteenth century (when the historical figure Henry V lived and fought the Battle at Agincourt). Olivier takes a blended approach, beginning in the Elizabethan theater and moving backward in time to the fifteenth century. He writes in the program notes that

we decided that the treatment would have to be new, yet in keeping with the period. The middle part of the film especially must have the feeling of the fourteenth century [sic], but we would only achieve this aim if the settings and general composition of the shots caught the spirit of fourteenth century paintings. … Because the film was planned as a ‘painter’s eye-view’ of moving events, we decided to use only painted cut-outs for the background and not solid-built models. (Qtd. Geduld 18)

These “painted cut-outs,” primarily used for scenes set in the French court, portray in flattened perspective the French as static figures, engaging in elitist and conspicuously luxurious activities, given the recent English invasion. The manuscript-inspired scenes work together to dramatize English invasion of French spaces and French texts.

Olivier’s citation of the miniature from January, an image from a New Year’s Day celebration, links the drama with the manuscript through its connection of the Duke of Berry as both patron of Très Riches Heures and character of Shakespeare’s play. In the foreground of the manuscript image, we see a nobleman—presumably the Duke of Berry himself—seated at a bountiful table while receiving New Year’s guests (see Figure 2). Olivier replicates the Duke of Berry’s clothing (blue robes and a fur cap), even though the Duke, like several of the named French nobleman, has no speaking lines (see Figure 3). He exists to be yet another body that is ill-prepared for the approach of the English army. The film visually introduces each of these French Dukes as the Dauphin names them, capturing each one lounging about the French Court, in contrast to the active, energetic English. A guard naps on the floor, the Duke of Orléans holds a jaunty pose with a ball and cup game, and the Duke of Berry, holding a pomander in one hand, examines a manuscript, presumably the Très Riches Heures itself. This wonderful, brief mise en abyme thus encapsulates the artifact that Olivier’s set recreates.

Thematically, there are additional ways that the film references the January miniature that underscores the inaction of the French in Shakespeare’s play. The lettering in the middle of the page reads “approche, approche,” demonstrating the Duke’s accessibility on this festive occasion. While the French feast and imbibe in the foreground, a tapestry in the background depicts a scene from the Trojan War. Yet, one cannot readily see where the tapestry ends and the “real” figures begin. The flattened representative plane is too similar. Thus, the French nobles literally have their backs turned on scenes of war, pursuing pleasure at the expense of good diplomacy. Olivier’s French nobles, likewise, in their positioning within the set-piece, are oriented toward the camera, backs turned to the French countryside outside. Here, as elsewhere in Olivier’s film—and in contrast to the Très Riches Heures—the French countryside is peasant-less. Perhaps this is because in contrast to the nobles, the peasants are fighting the French war.

A second visual reference to the Très Riches Heures positions Henry as the future conqueror of not only France but also Katherine. The manuscript image from June depicts the Duke of Berry’s Paris residence, looking across the Seine toward the palace and the King’s garden (see Figure 4). In the film, Henry, having recently conquered Harfleur, sets his sights on Katherine far in advance of the actual wooing scene. His point of view in the film is roughly that represented in the manuscript image, yet, again, the fields are peasantless (see Figure 5). This establishing shot of the palace dissolves into a shot of Katherine and Alice entering the rose garden for Katherine’s English lesson. Whereas in the manuscript image, the audience is on the outside looking in, the film audience, like King Henry, ultimately moves from the exterior into the interior. That is to say, like Henry, we are in the position of “conquering” France.

The third, and most faithful, reference to the manuscript occurs after the Battle of Agincourt, as the scene shifts from St. Crispin’s day (October 25) to a wintry scene taken from the miniature for February (see Figure 6). Olivier’s set condenses the manuscript image, bringing the church and village in the far background into the foreground image, thus melding the home with the village. He includes other direct visual references from the manuscript, including the beehives, the wattle and daub fence, and the sheepfold. These visual elements remind us of the daily lives of peasants, who are allowed back in the picture now that the battle has been fought (and lost). Most directly, the scene offers a cutaway of the peasants warming themselves by the fire (see Figure 7). In the shot, a female figure like the one in the Très Riches Heures is seated next to the English soldier Pistol. This shot fully brings together play and manuscript; Pistol appears at home here in this French village. Furthermore, another potential visual reference—perhaps to the “Jolly Toper” painting of Judith Leyster or the “Merry Drinker” painting of Frans Hals—brings together the “painterly” repertoire of the film: an English character who looks like a Dutch portrait sits within the landscape of a Medieval French manuscript. To further underscore the English victory over the French, the faces of the French peasants in this scene are obscured, and Pistol wears the armor of the French Constable. In sum, by the time we get to Olivier’s depiction of Act 5, Scene 1, the English have infiltrated not only France but French texts as well, another act of artistic imperialism.

These visual, painterly references extend the literature of Olivier’s frames-within-frames, as well as his shifts in representational styles. Over the course of the film, the play’s narrative arc of the English defeating the French is underscored by the visuals which shift from the French leisurely occupying their territory, to the English threat (through the proxy of Katherine), to the English victory over territory and page. As shown by these examples, the tendency to primarily discuss the stage-to-cinema space transfer in the film and to dismiss the French scenes as simply fairy-tale-like depictions of the court is incomplete. While they do function as a means of distinguishing the effete French men and desirable French women from the gritty, battle-worn but still impeccably dressed English, they also function as an important bridge between representational levels.

On the one hand, analyzing the film’s representational levels decenters Shakespeare as the primary source of the film and centers Olivier as an aesthetic poacher. Yet, on the other hand, a historical reading of the film’s media history shows that an analysis of Henry V also decenters Olivier as the auteur. Critics have long taken it for granted that Olivier appropriates his French court scenes from the Très Riches Heures due to the manuscript’s fame in our own age. Yet, in Olivier’s time, imagery from the Très Riches Heures was a novelty. Even today, access to this manuscript is unheard of as it is locked away in the Condé Museum in Chantilly, France for its preservation. As Michael Camille reports, the manuscript is unviewable in an attempt to conserve, protect, and ensure its monetary value. In this way, the original has essentially ceased to exist; it is known only through a variety of facsimiles of varying quality. Tracing its history of production, printing, and re-printing, Camille indicates that the first color reproductions of portions of the Très Riches Heures were printed in the expensive Parisian art quarterly Verve in 1940. Camille writes that this edition arrived during an era of “nationalistic reverie” in which “those who bought this edition of Verve would no doubt have felt a similar nostalgia [to the duc d’Aumale, who rediscovered the Très Riches Heures in the 19th century] at a time of foreign occupation” (88). Camille quotes writer Adrienne Monnier who comments after this publication that “Before The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry I seemed to perceive, as through a magic emerald the very nature of France; our land and its people dressed in bold colours … beautiful castles in the distance; a comforting sky; our animals near us; our days coloured with hope and finely woven” (Qtd. Camille 88). Due to the success of this 1940 issue, Verve went on to publish another portion of the manuscript only two years later.

Camille’s account suggests, then, that Olivier’s knowledge of the Très Riches Heures emerges not from an academic or aesthetic knowledge of its history but rather from encountering this popular color reproduction only a few years before filming Henry V. The archival record affirms this fact; in a fan letter, dated 14 January 1970, Olivier writes that he was gifted a copy of Verve for Christmas and realized “when I came to be thinking about ‘Henry V’ it was only too natural, even obvious one might say, that the two things should come together.” This influence, so obvious to him, may have surprised another fan, Miss Benedicta J.H. Rowe, who wrote an extensive letter (10 February 1946) in which she catalogued the film’s visual references to various manuscripts she had studied in her time as a student in the UK. Now a nun living in post-war Madras, Rowe saw the film three times in the theater and carefully matches individual shots to manuscript images by memory, identifying connections to multiple manuscripts from her student days. She writes “I had no idea that the film was based on mss illuminations until I saw it, but each in turn was a little shock of delight. Unfortunately three visits to the film were not sufficient to enable me to catch and identify more than a few, especially as I am cut off from books of reference.” Olivier’s reply, after thanking her for her attention to detail, immediately disproves all of her intellectual labor, saying “Actually, most of the designs were first espied in “Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry” which came out before the war in a French publication.” Olivier’s nonchalant reply indicates that the film’s visual design is based not on years of study, or even on the illuminated manuscript tradition in general, but rather the timely publication of an art journal, and an audience interested in seeing these images “animated.”

Olivier’s chance encounter with the Très Riches Heures demonstrates how adaptive choices are subject to historical contingencies, a notion which is further corroborated by the film’s place in Technicolor history. Olivier’s employment of this emerging technology is precisely what allows him to engage with the intermedial references to theater, painting, and illuminated manuscripts. These visual feats relied on the invention of three-strip Technicolor, an expensive technology with limited capacity in the United Kingdom in the early 1940s where there was only one Technicolor camera in the entire country. In contrast to Hollywood, the British film industry was slower to adopt color. When it was used, it was in a more restrained fashion, part of a “wider nationalist discourse [of the British] … [which] claimed differentiation from Hollywood” (Street 193). When British films were made in Technicolor, they focused on the “tasteful” application of color. Sarah Street compares this restraint to the British “discourses about stardom [which] sought to establish British stars as more refined in terms of their class and theatrical origins” (208). Early British Technicolor was used almost exclusively for two types of films: films set in “exotic” locations used Technicolor to emphasize “otherness” and biopics used it to emphasize reality (Street 200). Olivier’s film, with its setting in France and its historical protagonist, does both.

Yet, to shoot in glorious Technicolor was no easy feat. When a film shot in Technicolor, the cameras were rented at a flat rate, and the fee included a “color consultant,” whose job is described as follows:

In the preparation of a picture we read the script and prepare a color chart for the entire production, each scene, sequence, set, and character being considered. This chart may be compared to a musical score, and amplifies the picture in a similar manner. … Subtle effects of beauty and feeling are not attained through haphazard methods, but through application of the rules of art and the physical laws of light and color in relation to the literary laws and story values (Kalmus 145).

This description of the color consultant’s sway over the film’s aesthetic choices was written by the legendary Natalie Kalmus, ex-wife to Technicolor executive Herbert Kalmus and the official “Color Consultant” for the United Kingdom. Known for her dictatorial behavior on set and in post-production, Kalmus was central to the ways color was used in the British film industry.

Kalmus’s influential manifesto – “Color Consciousness” – articulates a theory for the use of color in film.  She writes that, though cinema could “[duplicate] faithfully all the auditory and visual sensations,” it would not reach its full potential without “[augmenting] the mechanical processes with the inspirational work of the artist” (140). In particular, the “medium of color” promised to bring motion pictures into the “realms of art”: “The design and colors of sets, costumes, drapes, and furnishings must be planned and selected just as an artist would choose the colors from his palette and apply them to proper portions of his painting” (140). Advocating the “Law of Emphasis” and color complementarity, she states that color should only be used for items or people of importance within a film. Kalmus writes that “Even when Nature indulges in a riot of beautiful colors, there are subtle harmonies which justify those colors. … The most brilliant flower has leaves and stem of just the right hue to accompany or complement its gay color” (141). So, for example, the image in Henry V of Katherine—clothed in pink to resemble the roses—and Alice—dressed in green as if she is the stem, the support that shows off the princess—demonstrates this view (see Figure 8). Additional uses of color in Henry V suggest other ways that Olivier adheres to the Technicolor industry standards. For example, the use of color to portray the French and English underscores the concern of both play and film to exalt the English at the expense of the French. Kalmus writes extensively on the storytelling potential of various warm and cool colors. She suggests that warm, or “advancing” colors, such as red, orange, and yellow, “call forth sensations of excitement, activity, and heat” (143). Therefore, clothing the English army, particularly Henry, in these colors imbues them with action. On the other hand, colors such as “Dark green, blue, violet, and indigo are cooling, quiet colors. They are tranquil and passive. They do not suggest activity, as do the reds and oranges” (143). Hence, the French court is awash in pastels, gesturing to their idleness.

Though Olivier’s film is recognized for its innovative use of Technicolor form, the film’s visual style is also influenced by Technicolor doctrine and the influence of Technicolor consultants on set. So, while a contemporary review in Time magazine rightly acknowledges that the film’s choices often go “against the shuddering objection of the Technicolor expert” and that Olivier and cameraman Robert Krasker did “many things…with color which Technicolor tradition says must not or cannot be done” (Agee 351), other production choices did follow those rules and traditions. For example, though Olivier insists in the program notes that the use of color in the film is meant to “correspond with the vegetable dyes of the Middle Ages,” he also admits that they had to make “due allowance for variations in colour photography” (Olivier). Olivier’s lofty aims to reproduce color and art forms of a particular period are immediately undercut by his recognition that color photography, a relatively new phenomenon and one that was still being perfected, would of necessity, impact the film’s fidelity to the color palette of the Middle Ages. The release of the Très Riches Heures and the film’s use of Kalmus’s color schemes demonstrate the way that, though Olivier positions himself as the auteur, he is also not truly a sole actor in the aesthetic choices of the film. Though he wants the audience to imagine the past through its reconstruction, that sense of “pastness” exists only due to technological advances in color printing and film.

Olivier’s choice of these distinct visual traditions – theater, genre painting, portraiture, books of hours, and Technicolor film – reveals yet another way that intermediality is at the heart of Henry V. A set of similar themes and artistic agendas unite these seemingly disparate aesthetic styles. Each one, for example, elevates scenes of everyday life, making them, if not the subject, a part of the artistic tradition. The Elizabethan stage depicts not just heroes and royals, but also drunkards and prostitutes; Dutch genre painting and portraiture famously do the same. The labors of the month in medieval books of hours include peasants in the same frame as nobility, and Technicolor, though expensive to film, was another way to bring art to the masses through cinema. As a pre-print technology, books of hours would have limited audiences, but were directed at lay people, rather than clergy or scholars. The other traditions each enjoyed immense popularity with diverse audiences: the Elizabethan theater catered to groundlings and gentlemen, Technicolor was part of a concerted effort to bring film to the masses, seventeenth-century Dutch art was produced in uncountable numbers, and an art magazine made the mass circulation of a medieval text possible.

Olivier’s invocation of these forms suggests his artistic agenda included making art for the general public, a group which explicitly included the troops. In a letter to producer Filippo Del Giudice of Twin Cities Films, Olivier writes about the film as a “national gesture,” suggesting that the film be shown in schools and to “British soldiers and Allied soldiers on the fighting fronts … and all of H.M. ships. This … should be a sincere gesture, the idea of which should please the public (and I hope the troops) and should put a sense of reservation on the picture” (6 December 1944). Yet this strategy was not simply a matter of good will or patriotic duty. Olivier continues, “This I think will build up its reputation and intrigue the general public to a further desire to see the film.” This mission was coupled with a “roadshow” strategy for the film’s release, generating enthusiasm and demand by restricting access to viewing the film. In fact, this strategy of avoiding a general release of the film ensured a clamor from audiences for the film. Del Giudice writes in a confidential letter that the overall strategy for release should include the following: “No general release date should be fixed for another one to two years. As I foretold right from the beginning, this picture should be regarded as a revenue goldmine for the next twenty to thirty years…. If we keep this film away from general release, the curiousity of the millions will be greatly increased” (4 December 1944). This strategy, aimed at increasing demand in the long term by restricting supply in the short term, is at odds with the lofty goals of making a Shakespeare film for the masses.

Furthermore, as noble and commercially viable as this might be in theory, the curious millions did not always display the respect or deference that the creative and production team expected. For example, a lengthy letter found in the Olivier archive details the poor audience behavior in Portsmouth where the “public” included children playing hide and seek, “cinema girls” blinding the audience with their torches, and post-show reactions that included very little about the film itself. This behavior was deemed “an insult to Larry” and those few viewers who were there for the art of it left in a “state of rage … They felt their afternoon was completely wasted, and they were surprised that the public was allowed to walk in and out continuously during the great performance.” In other letters, the film was also deemed to not be commercially viable in certain markets, including Germany, and the Americans were denounced for choosing to cut certain scenes without approval. It turns out that “the millions” may have been curious but not necessarily receptive to the high-minded aims of its director, again demonstrating the discrepancy between adaptive aims and the reception of texts.

The distinct visual traditions of Olivier’s intermedial film unsettle the status of both Shakespeare and Olivier, as well as notions of authorial intent. This unsettling nuances an understanding of adaptation as an art form, suggesting its ability to amass markers and traditions of multiple media simultaneously, breaking down illusions of text-to-text transfer. Rather than diminishing the work of adaptation studies, this enriches the field’s vocabulary, allowing a fuller exploration of adaptation as a site of multivocal references within multimedia ecosystems. This dynamic approach to adaptation requires thinking flexibly about adaptation as an intermedial concept involving the absorption of multiple visual, aural, performative, and print artistic traditions.