The Venice Film Festival is currently on and, as you may have heard, this year it pays homage to Orson Welles, celebrating his 100th birth anniversary by screening two films linked with the city - The Merchant of Venice (1969) and Othello (1952).
Film fans will be treated to the Italian version of the latter, which is slightly longer than the English version.
Welles had prepared it to be screened at the Venice Film Festival in September 1951, but then he retired it from the competition, claiming the film wasn't ready.
Attacked, denigrated and dismissed, but also praised, the film, was eventually presented in 1952 in Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix du Festival.
Taken from William Shakespeare's eponymous play (and with a beautiful soundtrack by Francesco Lavagnino and Alberto Barberis), Othello opens with the funerals of the protagonist (Orson Welles) and his wife Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), the processions carrying the bodies of the deceased creating striking visual symmetries on the screen with the landscapes surrounding them.
The story is then recounted through flashbacks, showing Desdemona and Othello's secret marriage in Venice, the fury of her father and the way Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) manipulates and deceives Othello, filling him with jealousy and prompting him to kill his wife.
Welles was the producer, director and screenwriter, but also played the role of the Moor by painting his face black. Seeing a white actor playing Othello is definitely upsetting, but Welles was undoubtedly good (though MacLiammóir also does a great job as deceitful and devilish Iago).
Yet the characters are almost secondary in this film as one of the most notable things in it remains the fascinating role the various buildings, structures and architectural features play in it.
Othello was indeed filmed over a three year period (from 1949 to 1952) in nine different cities between Morocco and Italy. Welles hadn't managed to secure adequate financing from the Scalera Film Studios, the biggest studios in Italy at the time, and ended up shooting the film in bits and pieces. Whenever the money ran out, Welles would interrupt filming and take acting jobs to raise more funds.
This is the main reason why the setting changes with a scene that starts in one place and finishes in another location, joining together a Tuscan stairway or church basement and a Moorish battlement in an imprecise but intriguing architectural jigsaw puzzle.
All these interruptions, shifts of locations and mixtures of different architectures played in favour of the film.
They are indeed particularly fascinating as they go well with the psychology and behaviour of the main characters.
In Venice Iago's attempts to sow discord are unsuccessful and he can only act like a silent ghost moving on the canals or in the shadows of the palaces, while the beautifully rich architecture of the location protects the main characters from his hate towards Othello.
When the scene moves to Cyprus, things change: Iago triumphs and Othello succumbs to him while ceilings and architectural features become more and more claustrophobic than they were in Venice, closing in on the characters, suffocating them and finally driving the main character towards murderous madness.
As the story develops we see further intriguing locations and juxtapositions of spaces and building: the water in a Portuguese cistern in a town in Morocco plays beautiful optical effects; Desdemona walks like a ghost on an elaborate pavement decorated with a fish scale motif; Othello hides behind columns, meditating murder, his ominous shadow revealing to the viewers the fate that attends his wife.
When he falls into Iago's web, Othello is often framed behind bars, grates and grids to symbolise his imprisonment, but also his guilt at having killed innocent Desdemona.
Architectural elements offered the director the chance to create dramatic moments: staircases, arches, columns and balconies play incredible roles in many of the shots, framing the characters and their actions, creating suggestive settings such as mazes of columns where Welles played with lights and shadows to produce a sense of vertigo in the viewer.
In the end Iago is caught in his own web: confined in an iron cage, he will die scorched by the sun and eaten by birds pecking at his flesh.
The original text was abridged and some scenes had to be entirely changed for financial reasons: when the crew moved to Mogador on the Atlantic coast of Africa (to shoot the Cyprus scenes), costumes didn't arrive because the producer Michele Scalera was broke.
New costumes were commissioned to the local Jewish tailors, but while they were making them (note: the armours were made out of sardine cans - ah, the power of being low of resources and high on resourcefulness...), the murder of Roderigo was filmed in a Turkish bath (that was actually a fish market...).
A final note goes to the other costumes: Welles stated in interviews and in his 1978 documentary Filming Othello that they were based on Carpaccio's paintings. Even though they seem in some cases borrowed from Gino Carlo Sensani's works they were designed by Maria De Matteis (mentioned on this site in connection with King Vidor's War and Peace, and Mario Monicelli's Casanova '70).
The film mainly features heavy damasked costumes and velvet capes with fur elements, rich gold embroideries and cascades of pearls, though Desdemona is mainly clad in white and ethereal gowns to symbolise her purity and innocence (and Othello also suffocates her with a white bedsheet).
You can catch Othello - a noble tragedy concerned with the most ignoble of all passions, jealousy - today in Venice or on 11th September (check out the full Venice Film Festival calendar at this link).
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