Welles Displacing Air

FILMING OTHELLO (1978)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia 

A friend of mine once told me about a painter who decided to self-promote, literally filming herself as she divulged detailed information about every painting of hers. To my friend, that seemed like unimaginable hubris. Watching "Filming Othello" reminded me of that. After all, it is Orson Welles himself as he discusses the trials and tribulations of making his Shakespearean film adaptation of "Othello." However, since it is Orson Welles with his trombonish, larger-than-life voice that could make ocean waves crash and Iago quake in his boots, this can hardly be called unimaginable hubris. Welles himself even thought he was out of his league to narrate his own inside stories on making "Othello," so there you have it. 

Sitting by a moviola where clips from 1952' "Othello" (a stunning film) are shown, Welles expounds on the making of "Othello" where the budget was so restrictive that reverse shots from certain scenes were sometimes shot years later and in other countries! An Italian producer named Montatori Scalera agreed to finance, though he thought he was initially financing a film version of Verdi's opera "Otello" as opposed to the Shakespeare tragedy. To keep up the financing of the film, Welles took acting jobs (this has been pervasive in his directorial career) and certain key roles, like Desdemona, were recast due to lengthy delays. As an interesting side note, Welles had originally sought financing to do a film version of "Cyrano de Bergerac," which Jose Ferrer later made. Finally, financing came through though no sets were built, only found. Costumes were sometimes borrowed from other productions without permission, and the description of how the famous Turkish Bath sequence was shot (a setting not to be found in the play) is simply remarkable.

In latter segments that divide up the documentary rather fluidly, Welles meets with Micheal MacLiammoir (who definitively played the treacherous, power-hungry Iago) and Hilton Edwards (who played Brabantio) at a Paris hotel as they discuss the film, the characters' motives and a fair amount of time talking about envy and jealousy, specifically Othello's jealousy of his wife Desdemona. Finally, the film ends with a Cambridge, Massachusetts audience who had just seen "Othello" and they ask detailed questions. As Welles makes clear time and again to the college-age audience, films are about unintentional accidents and whatever mistakes occur can sometimes help a film. In accordance with how "Othello" was randomly shot out of necessity, Welles shot his reverse shot reactions to Edwards and MacLiammor separately in his Beverly Hills home, two years later. Astounding.

I found "Filming Othello" enthralling as a conversation piece about the difficulties of making a film, and the exploration of what ended up on the screen versus the original text (the 3 hour play was shrunk to 90 minutes). Welles favors the written play by Shakespeare, although calling it a monumental work of art or more appropriately "one of the great monuments of Western Civilization" is pushing it a bit far for me (I prefer "King Lear," an epic family tragedy). But Welles doesn't inhabit or exhibit any arrogance - he realizes his own limitations and how he was too young to play the Moor from Venice. By the end of the film, it is clear that Welles might have done even more justice to Shakespeare's play had he filmed it later. Listening to Welles talk about "Othello" and, on a couple of instances, act out scenes with the same panache as he had back in the day is truly awe-inspiring and powerful to witness. "Othello" is not one of the great monuments of Western Civilization, Orson Welles is.