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The Tragedy of Othello -- the Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, 1951)

First of all, let me say that I am happy that no one has gotten around to "cancelling" Welles or his Othello, given the present's understandable sensitivity to blackface. It may be that this is a film that's simply not on the radar of any culture-warriors of the left or the right. Or perhaps we're seeing a rare instance in which the historical context of the performance --  makeup included -- are being taken into consideration. It's certainly notable that Welles hasn't exactly blacked-up for his role as Othello. He's more precisely sporting a kind of proto-spray-tan, which gives him the sunbaked complexion of George Hamilton. 

But perhaps just as important, Welles is portraying possibly the most complex, well-rounded Black character in all of European literature. For Welles, mounting Othello is part and parcel of his self-effacing but extraordinarily well-documented anti-racism. In addition to overt political statements on the subject, we have his all-Black Macbeth in Harlem, his Brazilian project, and arguably even Touch of Evil wherein Welles' own Quinlan is represents the corrupt gringo power structure vs. Charlton Heston's upright (and again, bronzed) Federale.

Apart from all of those external considerations, Othello is an unusually compelling piece of cinema. Welles, as if understanding the implicit weight of the stony palaces and battlements where so much of the action takes place, employs fleet camerawork and dissonant, angular editing to invest his film with an impressive motility. The opening funeral procession, which has been compared with Bergman and Dreyer, actually struck me as being in conversation with late Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky), with its shadowy figures poised against a white sky, lugubriously etching themselves upon the screen. The remainder of the film abandons this gravity, moving actors and camera angles this way and that, providing the foreground pleasures of castle intrigue that so deftly accompany Shakespeare's larger concerns.

Disorientation is the order of the day, with the screen striated by nets and iron bars, the film space riven with ambivalence, vaulted and infinite one minute, closing in the next. And although Welles and the other actors acquit themselves admirably, the show belongs to Iago. Irish thespian Michéal Mac Liammóir plays him as a force on inexplicable, toadlike evil, and we are left to conjecture as to his possible motives. In Welles' Othello, Iago seems to have a supernatural ability to be everywhere at once, making mischief and promoting gossip. He enters the frame suddenly in full grotesquerie, almost like a Batman villain. In this way, Welles makes him a part of the physical arrangement, the perverse architecture of the play.

Filming Othello (Orson Welles, 1978)

Made for West German television, Filming Othello is partly a making-of, partly an audiovisual lecture by Welles about his essential filmmaking philosophies, and above all an opportunity for an artist to look back at a decades-old project with a critical (not to say dispassionate) eye. I suppose this could be called an essay film, in the sense that Welles brings in a lot of digressive material but it always hovers around a few primary questions. Why make Othello in the first place? Was Othello a good adaptation? And how did the circumstances of its making inscribe themselves on the finished work?

As we learn, many creative decisions were a direct result of the stop-and-start nature of the production. Welles' primary backer went bankrupt, so he had to abandon his more ambitious strategies for on-the-spot fixes. Most notably, the murder of Rodrigo takes place in a makeshift Turkish bath because none of the actors had their costumes. (They were held up at customs.) But as Welles articulates in his orotund yet affable manner, the aesthetic dominant of his Othello eventually became chaos and disorder, a once-stable social order torn asunder. The four different cinematographers, the location shooting on multiple continents, and the separation of single scenes, one shot from the next, by months or sometimes years -- all of this resulted in a thoroughgoing discombobulation that, as one might expect, divided critics at the time of its release.

And although Welles ends Filming Othello on a rueful note ("I wish I were looking ahead to making Othello, instead of looking back on it. [...] Promises are more satisfying than explanations"), the difficulties he faced in making this film are almost as enlightening as the final work itself. A less troubled production might've yielded a more traditional adaptation, but the real Othello is truly Wellesian, both in its auteurial integrity and its lending itself more easily to a host of entertaining anecdotes. It's art as analysis, and vice versa.