The opening funeral sequence: an expressionist use of architecture and the geometry of the imageĪ key film in Welles’s development as a filmmaker, Othello was the first of his itinerant European productions, made over a period of years as he grabbed bits and pieces whenever finances allowed. More than any other filmmaker, he situated the plays in imaginative evocations of the worlds in which they were set there is a powerful air of period authenticity, particularly in Chimes at Midnight (which shares with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev the feeling of having actually been filmed in the Medieval world), but also in the second of his Shakespeare films, Othello (1952/1955). He freely cut and rearranged the texts in order to create films which are distinctly cinematic rather than theatrical, evoking the spirit rather than the letter of the original works. Welles’s approach to Shakespeare was not one of slavish fidelity, nor one of trendy updating.

The third, Welles’s masterpiece, was Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff, 1965), a long-nurtured conflation of the history plays Henry IV parts one and two, Richard II and Henry V, with a dab of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which focused on the character of Sir John Falstaff, which is one of the greatest meditations on mortality in all cinema.

The first of these, made remarkably for the budget studio Republic Pictures, was Macbeth (1948), which he shot on stylized sets, steeping Shakespeare’s horror play in a thick atmosphere of Gothic gloom. Orson Welles was arguably the finest cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare, although he only made three features based on the Bard’s works. Darkness and light as visual style and thematic expression in Orson Welles’ Othello (1952/55)

Othello orson welles