3/5/2023 0 Comments Orson welles othello![]() And yet - and yet, slowly, Sergei (Valentin Popov) realizes there’s something missing from life in this socialist workers’ paradise. But what if all those singing tomorrows are no longer that promising? There’s a remarkably free insouciance in the three childhood friends that enjoy their first breaths as adults - military service completed, jobs and residence secured, dances, parties, music, flirting, girls. To be alive in Moscow, at twenty, in 1960, with the future ahead of you. A new version finally surfaced in 1965 as I Am Twenty and, though awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, fell through the cracks of the Iron Curtain even after its 1987 restoration, until the director’s work started, a few years ago, being reappraised in various festival retrospectives. Khutsiev was forced to return to the editing table. Kaplovoi Gorky Film StudioĪnother film that has suffered the indignity of multiple versions is Georgian director Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty it was initially finished in 1961 as Lenin’s Gate, but, after denunciations from the Russian authorities (Nikira Khruschov included), Mr. Khutsiev and Gennady Shpalikov with Valentin Popov, Nikolai Gubenko, Stanislav Lyubshin and Mariana Vertinskaya cinematography by Margarita Pilikhina music by Nikolai Sidelnikov production designer Irina Zakharova editors R. I AM TWENTY (1961/1964) Directed by Marlen Khutsiev Written by Mr. Welles’ both polymath creators present and alive in every single frame of the film, even if the latter artist gains the upper hand. To be sure, this is as much Shakespeare’s Othello as it is Mr. Welles reaches its core through purely visual means - sight lines, camera angles, staging - with a vivid sense of modernity that contrasts to other film versions of the Bard. ![]() What is remarkable is how, while playing fast and loose with the structure of the play, Mr. This Othello isn’t as much Othello’s as it is Iago’s play, but there’s nothing fascinating or magnetic in his archetypal villainy, relished by Mr. A black man and a woman are forever resented for their difference and for their desire to be together in defiance of rules that, it turns out, were never meant to apply to them. The walls, chambers, cloisters of Venice become obstacles, traps, prisons for characters doomed by the outwardly genteel but inwardly prejudiced society represented by Iago and Roderigo (Robert Coote). Welles’ conception of Othello and Desdemona as mere puppets trapped in a labyrinthine web of lies, patiently woven by the villainous Iago, played by Micheál MacLiammóir as an all-seeing, all-powerful inverted “deus ex machina”. The film’s stop-start production makes all the sense within Mr. Francesco Lavagnino’s intrusive score is like the gossip of Venice permanently poisoning our mind, its constant cloying presence slithering its way into the background, dulling our senses - designed that way so we can understand where Othello’s sense of unease and paranoia comes from. Yet, even among all the usual production problems, ownership issues and multiple edits that pursued the director after the Citizen Kane affair, Mr Welles’ singular, expressionist, heavily theatrical vision for the tragedy stands out, crystalline and stark. release rather than to the original 1952 director’s cut that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Many specialists consider it a travesty of the director’s own intentions, closer to the 1955 compromise Mr Welles put together for U. The genealogy of this Othello is quite convoluted: the only currently available version is daughter Beatrice’s controversial 1992 restoration, one that has legally superseded all other versions and kept them out of circulation. His Desdemona, the stunning Suzanne Cloutier, is dubbed in the final version by actress Gudrun Ure, and Mr Welles himself overdubbed many of the secondary performers’ voices. Even Mr Welles, playing the lead, looks clearly physically different throughout the film’s short length. It’s not so much the film that Mr Welles had in mind as the film that could be done: a heavily abridged take on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the Moor of Venice that stitches together material shot over three years in different locations, with different crews and even different casts. What are we to say of Orson Welles’ Othello? As so many films in the protean filmmaker’s career, this is not so much a finished work as one of his projects constantly in progress, upgrading and updating. ![]() Aldo and George Fanto music by Francesco Lavagnino production designer Alexander Trauner editors John Shepridge, Jean Sacha, Renzo Lucidi and William Morton Mercury Productions ![]() OTHELLO (1952) Directed and written for the screen by Orson Welles with Micháel MacLiammóir, Robert Coote, Orson Welles and Suzanne Cloutier cinematography by Anchisi Brizzi, G.
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