Stephen Dest’s new documentary I Am Shakespeare: The Henry Green Story is a reminder that the full history and power of cinema, a 120-year-old art form uniquely equipped to inspire empathy among strangers, can be distilled into two basic camera shots: the frontal close-up and the three-quarter profile. One angle to show us who we’re looking at, the other to show us who we are.
Dest’s movie tells the story of Henry Green, a young man from Newhallville whose life nearly tears him asunder. On the one hand, Green was a talented acting student at Co-Op High School, a confident and introspective young artist with a big smile and a penchant for Shakespeare. On the other hand, he was an angry and depressed young man who grew up with no money in a violent neighborhood that sits adjacent to one of the wealthiest universities in the world.
The vast majority of the movie sits with Green as he narrates his life story to the camera, facing the viewer eye-to-eye as his words conjure movement from the stillness around him. He tells us how his artistic talent and ambitions led him to the role of Tybalt in a summer production of Romeo and Juliet. His poverty, pride, and aggression found him with three bullets to the stomach after a street confrontation a few blocks from his home.
Stephen Dest and David Brown
Frontal close up of Henry Green in I Am Shakespeare.
Of course, he is not two separate people. Walt Whitman must have been thinking of Green when he wrote that great artists contain multitudes, for each complicated and potentially contradictory facet of Green’s identity is on display throughout I Am Shakespeare, seamlessly interwoven into one portrait of a complex self.
Green’s narration is patient, funny, thoughtful, and precise as he talks the viewer through the tragedies and revelations of his young life. He confesses that assaulting a stranger whom he felt disrespected him gave him a rare feeling of power and control. He identifies the bullet lodged deep within his body as both saving his life and inspiring compassion towards his assailant. Green requires the audience to embrace the heartbreaking confusion of a gray world with no true heroes or villains.
Which brings me back to the top, and to the minimalist symphony that I Am Shakespeare creates with just two camera angles.
For most of the movie, Dest and cinematographer David Brown keep the camera eye trained solely on Green’s face. He is dark-skinned with closely cropped hair and a black t‑shirt, a youthful complexion that occasionally reveals a wrinkled brow and weariness under the eyes. Behind him are wooden shelves lined with books, their spines offering a diverse array of muted colors and literary associations. The lighting is sharp and controlled, illuminating one half of Green’s face and submerging the other half in pools of shadow.
Stephen Dest and David Brown
Three-quarter profile of Henry Green in I Am Shakespeare
As Green tells his story, the camera alternates between looking at him square on and taking a step out and to the side. The viewer is always presented with Green’s face, and the narration remains unbroken, but the sudden, simple shifts in perspective give the impression that we are watching two different people.
At one moment, we are watching a charming, thoughtful adult opening up about his difficult childhood and road to self-acceptance. In the blink of an eye, we are severed from that intimacy and confronted by a young man still coming to terms with being brutalized by himself and his surroundings.
The editing quietly matches the ebbs and flows of Green’s story, lulling the audience into its familiar patterns until suddenly a shift from one angle to another reveals the enormity of just how terrifying it is to be shot and how revelatory it is to see yourself in the shooter.
The film’s minimal, intensely expressive style of shooting and editing puts I Am Shakespeare in a long line of art cinema that finds its visual power in sustained close ups and subtly changing perspectives. Carl Dreyer and Renée Falconetti captured the disorientation of religious suffering and ecstasy in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Errol Morris coaxed pride, doubt, and hints of remorse from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in The Fog of War. Spike Lee and Roger Guenver Smith embodied the complex clashes of race, class, and individual identity in the documentary Rodney King.
With I Am Shakespeare, Dest, Brown, and Green offer another example of what minimally designed, expertly crafted movies are capable of. They can give a sense of the full breadth, beauty, tragedy, and redemption inherent to human identity, all told with just one actor, one story, and two shots.
Thomas Breen photo
Dest, with Henry’s name stenciled on his arm, after the opening night screening at NHDocs.
I Am Shakespeare played to a capacity crowd at the Whitney Humanities Center on Thursday night as the opening film in this year’s New Haven Documentary Film Festival. The festival organizers held an impromptu second screening later in the night to accommodate overflow audiences from the first screening.
In a post-screening talkback, Dest said that earlier this year Green’s body started to reject the intestinal transplant that had saved his life after the shooting. Just a few hours before the screening, Green texted Dest to tell him that he was on his way down to Washington D.C. to get a second intestinal transplant. Dest told the crowd that he was not a religious man but, when it came to Henry, he believed in miracles.
Click on the audio player below to listen to an interview with Dest and Green on WNHH’s Deep Focus.
Click here for a GoFundMe page seeking to raise money to help Henry with the various costs associated with his second intestinal transplant.