Italy drama
1952
bw 92 min.
Director: Orson Welles
CLV: out-of-print collectible
2 discs, catalog # CC1372L
There are two ways of viewing
the film career of Orson Welles which have tended, by and large, to be mutually
exclusive. One can regard it as a fascinating but largely frustrating attempt
to make mainstream Hollywood movies--an effort that yielded one indisputable
triumph (Citizen Kane) and five other brilliant if uneven studio
releases (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady
from Shanghai, Macbeth, and Touch of Evil) hampered by
dealings with studio management. Or one can regard it as the career of a
restless independent making pictures whenever and however he could, a pursuit
yielding not only the aforementioned half-dozen features, but seven
more--Othello, Mr. Arkadin, The Trial, Chimes at
Midnight, The Immortal Story, F for Fake, and Filming
Othello, not to mention substantial portions of at least half a dozen
unfinished pictures as well.
These two opposing views of Welles's career were in effect even before he got
to Hollywood; in the mid-'30s, he was illegally funneling his sizable earnings
as a radio actor into his state-funded stage productions with John
Houseman--much as he would later help to finance his own Othello, shot
piecemeal and on the run, by concurrently acting in several mainstream pictures
that were being made in Europe. By the early '40s he was already confounding
the usual categories not only with Citizen Kane (an independent feature
using studio facilities), but also with the abortive It's All True,
which began as a studio project and ended up as an independent one. And in the
unfinished and still-unseen The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76), he was
staging a no-less unruly shotgun marriage between Hollywood and independent
elements, in a story about Hollywood filmmakers made under defiantly
independent conditions. Unfortunately, given the resources of the multinational
Hollywood apparatus as it exists today, with billions spent annually to promote
only Hollywood product, the independent Welles has received scant attention,
and is often seen only in relation to Hollywood norms rather than on his own
terms.
In the case of Othello, Welles' first wholly independent feature, one
can even speak of two currently available versions of the film corresponding to
these two careers, with the differences mainly detectable in their separate
soundtracks. The original Othello has the soundtrack recorded and mixed
by Welles in Europe between 1949 and 1952. The meticulously revamped version,
released in 1992, was a conscious effort to bring this soundtrack more in line
with contemporary mainstream tastes and procedures--a process that involved
resyncing the dialogue to match lip movements more closely (in part by slightly
stretching or compressing the durations of indificidual shots), rerecording an
approximation of the original score (as notated and then conducted by Michael
Pendowski of the Chicago Symphony), and refashioning the sound effects in a
comparable fashion. This enabled the restorers to yield a stereo soundtrack, an
option unavailable to Welles.
Working on Othello without the resources of Hollywood sound equipment,
Welles aimed for a rawness in such sound effects as crashing waves, colliding
curtain rings, and echoing footsteps. Drawing from his prodigious radio
experience, he partly compensated for his inferior equipment with subtle
atmospheric effects dubbed in later and integrated with the music. Welles
scholar Ciro Giorgini, who recently interviewed several Othello crew
members for an Italian documentary, was told by one of the production
assistants that Welles stroked the strings of a piano to achieve a sound effect
for the opening sequence and ordered a spinetta, an old form of harmonium, from
Florence to produce other effects. Where Lavagnino's score at one point,
according to Welles, used forty mandolins at once, Pendowski's approximation
never used more than three or four. On the other hand, all of the original
music composed and scored for Welles by Francesco Lavignino and Alberto
Barberis and ocnducted by Willy Ferraro was recorded with a single microphone,
whereas Pendowski had the benefit of modern recording facilities.
The "independent" Othello, which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1952 and has long been regarded as a classic in Europe, fared
poorly when it opened belatedly in the U.S. in 1955, bringing in only $40,000.
Reviewers, perhaps influenced by their Hollywood-trained tastes, tended to
compare it unfavorably to Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare films, finding it
amateurish and self-indulgent in relation to the polish and production values
of Henry V and Hamlet. Reviewers in 1992 of the refurbished
version reacted mush more favorably, although the tenor of most of their
reviews suggested that the technical differences between the two versions were
not clearly understood. Viewers and listeners of this edition--which closely
approximates what Europeans saw and heard in 1952--are invited to judge for
themselves.
--Jonathan Rosembaum
