Othello
On the stage, Orson Welles had an affinity for staging interesting adaptations of Shakespeare. When he turned to film, he eventually continued that affinity. His 1965 film “Chimes at Midnight” is probably more famous, even though it was out of circulation for years, but in 1952, he directed an adaptation of “Othello” that is fascinating to watch not just for his artistic choices, but for how personal it feels he made the story to his own experiences, at the time.
The choice on Welles’s part to play Othello, a moorish general who marries- in secret- the white daughter of a wealthy Venetian father, in blackface seems at odds with how progressively he seemed to view the stage with his Mercury Company before he turned to film, but almost in spite of itself, the decision works. As the film begins to tell the tragedy of Othello, our only glimpses of Welles’s Othello are in wide shots, or in shadow, so we are accustomed to Welles’s presence as Othello before we see his face up close. This allows us to become engaged with the character before we’re faced with the problematic nature of having Welles portray him rather than a Black actor. But there’s a more personal reason, I think, Welles needed to play the character; after “Citizen Kane,” Welles found himself constantly at odds with producers and studios, and even in “Othello,” he had to start and stop production several times in order to raise money and continue filming, something he basically had to deal with for the rest of his life. In Othello, I think Welles saw a reflection of himself, being conspired against the thing he loved the most. In that perspective, it makes all the sense in the world why Welles would play the character.
The three central characters in Welles’s “Othello” are Othello himself; Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), the woman he has secretly married; and Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir), Othello’s junior officer. Even having never read the play myself, this story is familiar in how it has been referenced in other works, or have had other works likened to it. Taken in modern consideration, Othello can be seen as a commentary on the old racist scare of a Black man assaulting (or, as this adaptation puts it, “cursing”) a white woman. This film was a few years before Emmitt Till’s lynching for the lie that a white woman told to her husband about him “whistling” and being “suggestive” about her with his friends; watching it now, seeing how fears are stoked about Othello’s love of Desdemona, it’s hard not to have that in your mind, although the racist trope predates Till, and was a common one in the Jim Crow era. (“The Birth of a Nation” has it as a key plot point in its second half.) Iago is immediately shown as a character not to be trusted by Othello; frustrated that he got passed over by Othello for Cassio, Iago plants seeds of distrust within Othello of Desdemona, but not before getting Roderigo (Robert Coote)- who’s in love with Desdemona- to sow the panic about Othello’s “cursing” of Desdemona amongst her father and the other leaders of Venice. The way Welles stages these scenes, the racial prejudices about his professed love of Desdemona are as obvious as it is whenever someone like Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, or Black Lives Matter is pronounced online- that Welles was able to make a production of this play that stands up against time, that connects with racial inequality we see now, even when he makes the choice to play a Black character himself in the most controversial way a white performer could play said character, is a testament to his storytelling abilities.
While Iago plays on Othello’s jealousies and anxieties about his wife, Welles creates a captivating cinematic experience. There are few filmmakers who figured out how best to utilize black & white photography like Welles did; his use of lighting, camera angles and production design to hide the production’s pitfalls in terms of budget and fractured shooting schedule, while also immersing us in its world is a tribute to his ability to innovate, and work with multiple different people (at least five cinematographers are listed on IMDb) towards a common goal. This film looks marvelous, and is buoyed by a score by Alberto Barberis and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino that gets to the emotional core of the film’s tragedy, which is revealed in the opening sequence (set to a powerful chant), but is no less heartbreaking to get to by the end of Welles’s film. “Othello” illustrates many of the reasons why it’s important not to lose sight of Welles’s full body of work for the ones that have achieved much bigger reputations over the years; even when he had to scrap to get films made, he never stopped challenging audiences.
