To watch or not to watch, that is the question.
Don’t do it. I hate that version. I have a problem with Othello being done in black-face, and Olivier’s is blacker than most, and also he tears his passions to tatters. Also there’s kind of a lack of…
It all very much depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a good introduction to the play’s plot, characters, and themes, Parker is the way to go. He uses visual metaphors, mise-en-scene, and camera angles to masterful effect in replacing the great reaches of text he has to cut. Watch for his visual motifs: veils, daggers, water, flames, and hands; black/white/red conjunctions; and shots that put Iago in significant relation to other figures on the screen—and most especially in his direct address to the camera.
The Hopkins version is the way to go for a very conventional full-text production. Stick with it. It’s a sleeper, and doesn’t really catch fire until Act Two. But lord, when Othello starts to go mad, it’s truly chilling. Hopkins does a “brownface” version, in that he plays Othello as Arabic, not so much a POC as an outsider in Venice.
The Olivier version isn’t to everyone’s taste; its acting style is that slightly stylized, post-WWII, pre-Method staginess that feels overblown to some, and the blackface doesn’t help. But note that England doesn’t have the same bitter history of minstrelsy that we do, so the taint wasn’t as strong, and Olivier’s performance remains a touchstone for better or worse.
Now, for a true monument on film, watch the Orson Welles version. It is cinematic genius. Welles could never get the financing he needed—it took years to finish, and the sound was never fully produced—but his sheer technical knowhow and artistic vision makes his film extraordinary. (The last time I taught it, people came into class hating it. “I couldn’t understand the dialogue,” they said. “The sound was too shitty.” So we watched several scenes without sound, and talked about the visual language, and by the time class was over, those same people loved it.)
Here are some notes from Samuel Crowl’s chapter on Welles in his book Shakespeare on Film, which point out the kind of task that faces a filmmaker converting Shakespeare to celluloid:
Ø “Once again Welles used black and white photography to stunning effect, this time as a visual emblem for the racial issues at work in the play. Welles brilliantly moves Iago and Othello in and out of sunlight and shadow until they merge, as Welles intended, ‘in one murderous image like a pattern of loving shadows welded’” (Crowl 31).
Ø Chiaroscuro: “Film is a reflection, a series of shadows projected on a wall, and wElles employs the very essence of film as a key metaphor for translating Shakesepare’s play from stage to screen” (Crowl 32).
· “Orson Welles’s Othello provides an example of the way film can organically appropriate an image or series of images from Shakespeare’s text to visualize the translation of the text into the film’s narrative” 153).
· “From the film’s opening iris shot of Othello’s face on his funeral bier, to the final overhead shot of Othello and Desdemona on their marriage-murder bed, the key perspective of Welles’ camera is downward, often peering into underground vaults and sewers. The camera is most frequently placed above the action, forcing us to peer down through circular openings, or windows, or twisting staircases to try to see what is submerged. We are placed in the same relationship to the action as Othello is to his own psyche. Just as Othello is manipulated by Iago, we are manipulated by Welles’ camera to look down and in to discover something ugly” (153).
· “This image pattern is extended into the famous Turkish bath scene, Welles’ version of 5.1. The film score’s mandolins underline the frenzied excitement of the scene, which contains thirty-seven cuts in just two minutes of film time. The atmosphere of the Turkish bath shares the dankness of the sewer scene, the sense of water dripping everywhere, and violence exploding in an enclosed space. The latticework of the cistern cover in the earlier scene is here echoed by the wooden slats in the floor, through which Iago repeatedly stabs his sword, trying to kill Roderigo scurrying for safety beneath. Shots of Iago’s sword plunging through the slats, accompanied by the frenzied mandolins mixing with the sounds of water oozing in the close atmosphere, recall the earlier cistern scene and prepare for Welles’ handling of Desdemona’s murder immediately after the Turkish bath scene” (154).
· We hear Welles intone ‘It is the cause’ as the camera slowly pans to Othello’s face as he approaches the sleeping Desdemona. In the moment he passes through the visual devices Welles has used to establish the landscape fo the play: shadows, windows, and a many-pillared subterranean room that bears an eerie resemblance to the pillars and ceiling of the Moroccan cistern. Othello moves in and out of the shadows to the bed, where he suffocates Desdemona with the spotted handkerchief and where we see yet another overhead shot, this time of Desdemona’s surreal face beneath the handkerchief, struggling for breath” (154).
· “Othello’s face becomes entirely swallowed in shadows as the speech ends and the cover is slowly pushed across the opening, shutting off the camera’s access to Othello’s ruined world. Othello, determined not to ‘Keep a corner in a thing I love / For other’s uses’ (3.3.276-7), ends up, in the visual daring of Welles’ film, creating just such a foul cistern as the final image of his tragic marriage” (154).
…sorry, got a bit carried away here. ‘Scuse.
I’ve got a real thing for Orson Welles’ work. I mean, dude was a bona fide genius. But he was also fascinated—obsessed, really—with glimpses into secret places. The descriptions Prof is quoting here showcase it, with the downward look into these dripping, confined spaces where the action is happening, like you’re spying on the story through cracks and holes.
It’s an incredibly powerful technique, for multiple reasons that make it pretty much perfect for film (framing, lighting, the intensity generated by a sense that this isn’t meant for you, the way it makes the viewer complicit in the scene by providing them with the role of eavesdropper, and the sense of voyeurism that creates). And I dunno, besides all that, I’ve found those little glimpses resonate with me, too. Things like the hint of the world outside a window on a set—you’re not really looking through it, but you can catch a little impression of what’s outside (incidentally, in an Orson Welles film, those impressions were NEVER an accident; he put intense work into these details).
For me, it’s a half-open door, or the hidden curve of a garden path, and the way they imply another world, unfurling just beyond where you can see. Temptations into Faerieland. I’ve always wondered just what it was that grabbed him about it.
Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello