Page 167 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

156 / Shakespeare in the Movies

with an extreme close-up on the face of Othello (Welles), precisely
how his first film, 1941's Citizen Kane, began. Welles offers up two
simultaneous, if seemingly unrelated, actions: the funeral procession
for Othello and Desdemona, crosscut with the raising of frightened
lago onto the wall of Cypress in a makeshift cage. The citizenry
cheer this villain's torture even as they weep for the deceased heroes.
Likewise, Kane began with the protagonist's death, traveling back
in time to trace events that inexorably led to such an outcome. At
the end of both films (and most others by Welles), we conclude
where we began, now with a full sense of what happened and a par-
tial sense of why.
Due to this sense of predetermination, Welles's Othello, unlike
Shakespeare's, is a tragedy of fate. What follows is an attempt to let
us understand an aloof man's dark, distracted mind—whether he is
Welles, Kane, or Othello. Like Kane, Othello is unable to understand
the woman in his life; like Kane, he achieved great power despite
humble origins; like Kane, he alienates friends by failing to treat
them properly; like Kane, he's a public person who finds himself all
alone. The Othello we meet here is a strangely satisfying combina-
tion of Shakespeare's creation and Welles's own continuing protago-
nist, always an alter ego of himself.
Gerald D. McDonald, of the New York Public Library, tagged the
film as "a series of cinematic studies on the Othello theme," instead
of an attempt at faithful adaptation; Welles himself would have
heartily agreed, particularly considering McDonald's afterthought:
"It is the motion picture treated as a distinct medium." McDonald
appreciated Welles's control of cinema's plastic elements despite the
director's tendency to show off more than absolutely necessary:
"The photography is mannered, arresting, often quite wonderful,
with its composition so studied that it verges on abstract design."
Not everyone concurred; Shakespearean scholar Roger Manvel found
that the film's "strictly formal beauty" detracted from the essential
power of the piece by distancing an audience via impressive pictori-
alism that engages the eyes more than the heart or mind, "trans-
form[ing] the scenes into a photographic exhibition."
Yet to deny Welles the right to do this is to deny Welles the right
to be Welles. His aesthetic purpose, beginning with Citizen Kane,
was clearly to forge a new cinematic language as well as an alterna-
tive to conventional Hollywood cinema that immediately involves
an audience with emotions and ideas. Such traditional filmmaking
reached its zenith in the work of John Ford, but the essence of