Seminar paper: “‘Its beauties and its dangers’: the other and gender in Branagh’s As You Like It (2006)” This paper will explore the role of lighting and camerawork, especially tracking and framing, in the construction of gender and otherness in Branagh’s As You Like It (2006). As the film’s titlecards inform us, the action takes place in a “fantasy” of late-nineteenth-century Japan, “an extraordinary culture,” replete with “beauties and dangers,” in which English emigrants create “mini-empires.” Opening in the peaceful mini-empire of Duke Senior, the lighting choices help the audience to easily identify the villains and the heroes; for instance, the usurping Duke Frederick attacks his brother at night, and is typically shot in dimly-lit, oppressive interiors. The lighting also contributes to the film’s othering and exoticising of Asian culture. For the opening fraternal hostilities, the camerawork draws on the conventions of the Vietnam war movie to present the attackers as monsters from the unconscious, men who have ‘gone native’ and emerge from the dark to threaten the good (Western) self. On the eve of the film’s US release, Branagh remarked in interview that Rosalind “is the longest [female] part in Shakespeare, and she does go on a bit” (LA Times, 2007). Branagh makes severe cuts to Rosalind’s dialogue, and close attention to the camerawork confirms that this adaptation is less interested in her – in the plurality of gender identities and attractions that circulate around Shakespeare’s character, or in the comic community of lovers over which she presides – than in male individuals and their relationship with nature.