Welles does so primarily by placing Othello and the other characters within a tightly bounded premodern environment, which he would later refer to in his insightful documentary Filming Othello (78) as “a whole world in collapse.” Imprisonment looms over the characters in the physical form of pillars, bars, gates, closed doors, and nets. The Moor’s suspicions grow until he goes mad with the thought that “Othello’s occupation’s gone.” Welles’s film maintains this basic plot but makes Othello the lead figure rather than Iago, and spotlights the irony that it is actually the Moor who betrays Desdemona by deceiving himself. Shakespeare’s play follows a spiteful scheme hatched by Iago, a Venetian military ensign, to trick his Moorish commander Othello into believing that the commander’s new bride Desdemona has betrayed him with another man. For Othello, Welles cut more than half of the text and re-ordered much of what remained in order to focus on a man attempting to save himself from free fall. Though Shakespeare’s work is filled with swordfights and suicides, the author’s greatest dramas often consist of people working towards self-understanding. He adhered to unconventional ideas of fidelity, and often ruthlessly chopped up the plays in order to spotlight what he saw as their driving conflicts. During his long and varied career, he adapted several of the plays into radio programs and films as well as stage productions (including a London theatrical production of Othello which he directed and in which he starred while seeking funds to complete his film’s editing). Welles’s Othello was the first film he directed after Macbeth Welles broke with Hollywood while maintaining a lifelong relationship with Shakespeare. They included 1948’s low-rent and highly imaginative rendering of Macbeth, in which Shakespeare’s Scottish warrior tries to raise his mind out of filthy medieval mire. Though his debut feature Citizen Kane (41) had survived in his desired cut, his four subsequent features had been released in truncated versions of his desired originals. Welles was in a transitional period of exile at the time when he went to Europe to make Othello, his first feature film realized without Hollywood studio funding. We will not watch Welles’s rendering of the text to see whether Othello still kills his love but rather to understand why he would do so. The sequence-an invention on Welles’s part-foreshadows the characters’ fates at story’s outset and thereby trades dramatic suspense for reflection. (Three different versions of Welles’s film exist Carlotta has restored the lone circulating one, which was originally made with permission from the late filmmaker’s daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith in 1992.) The dead man and woman are Othello (Welles) and Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), and in the cage is the man who helped drive them towards death: Iago (Michéal MacLiammóir). This scene opens Orson Welles’s 1952 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, now playing at Film Forum in a new digital restoration courtesy of the distributor Carlotta Films. Nearby, soldiers drag another man ahead in chains and throw him into a cage, from which he looks down and sees the march of the mourners’ pageant that bears the lovers’ bodies toward the clouds. Hooded pallbearers chant a Gregorian theme while carrying the two across a rocky plain. Their eyes are closed, and their bodies lie still in separate beds in what looks like eternal peace. Though that version (which reportedly cost over $1 million to improve picture quality, re-synch audio and completely re-record the music in stereo) has been critically lambasted as changing the director’s original vision.The face of a man emerges from darkness, followed by that of a woman. Welles starred alongside Micheál MacLiammóir, Robert Coot and Suzanne Cloutier. There have been several different versions of the film, which was first restored in 1992 by Welles’ daughter Beatrice. In the film, written and directed by Welles, the director himself plays the doomed Moor in the classic tale of sexual jealousy and betrayal shot on location in Morocco and Rome. Though the film won the 1952 Best Picture Award at Cannes, it wasn’t released (in an altered version) in the U.S. Shooting went on for so long that some key roles (including Desdemona) had to be recast, with scenes reshot. Welles poured his own money into the production and found some creative solutions to keep the budget down. The film itself was shot sporadically over a period of three years after the film’s initial Italian producer went bankrupt. Orson Welles’ “Othello,” based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, was a famously troubled production with a long and checkered history.
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