Filming ‘Othello’

Orson Welles – 1978 – USA

Technically this was Welles’ last completed feature prior to the 2018 release of The Other Side of the Wind. It’s probably his most inconsequential film, which is not saying a lot since he never made a bad or boring film. It was intended as the first in a series of documentaries Welles was to make about his own career, but none of the others materialized. It’s hard to comprehend now, but in the years before home video and the internet, many films could vanish almost completely after an initial theatrical run. Othello (1952) was one of many such Welles films that languished in obscurity for decades, occasionally exhibited at festivals and retrospectives, but mostly unknown to the public. Welles’ films suffered especially, many being international productions with murky ownership issues that resulted in them popping up in mutilated form, to the extent that it would later take historians and restorers tremendous effort to identify the truest versions. Welles’ Italian co-production Othello – shot over several years and on multiple continents – is a case in point. In Filming Othello, the filmmaker recounts the project’s difficult production. It’s divided into three sections; Welles sharing his thoughts with the audience directly; a conversation between Welles and two of the film’s actors; and a Q&A session after a screening in which Welles takes questions from students. Welles’ detractors aren’t likely to be won over, since the film is essentially a forum for the director to try and revive the reputation of his own work. Having said that, and although Welles was sometimes known for a certain narcissism, the fact of the matter is that he is quite blunt about Othello’s deficiencies, most of which I (and other admirers) don’t necessarily agree with at all, since the film’s raw and patchy style is certainly part of its appeal, making it radically different than anything emanating from Welles’ native country at that time. His techniques and effects prefigured both the Nouvelle Vague and the New American Cinema of the late 50s and 60s. Filming Othello is interesting and well worth seeing by Welles enthusiasts, but it’s much more of a sedate and traditional film than anything else he ever did, intended as it was for TV and classroom showings, and which is why it’s not always listed among his filmography. It gets nowhere near the ambitious, experimental, genre-bending presentation of F for Fake (1973), which (before 2018) was typically, and appropriately, listed as his last real film.