In 1952 Orson Welles adapted and directed Othello for the cinema with himself playing the title role. Though a troublesome shoot that took over three years to complete, Welles' heavily Film-noir influenced movie creates images that match the grandeur and eloquence of Shakespeare's language.
In an excerpt below from an
interview with
Peter Bogdanovich
Orson Welles discusses the characters' Othello and Iago.
PB: Why do you think Othello is destroyed so easily? Do you think he’s a weak man?
OW: He’s destroyed easily because of his simplicity, not his weakness. He really is the archetype of the simple man, and has never understood the complexity of the world or of human beings. He’s a soldier; he’s never known women. It’s a favorite theme of Shakespeare’s. A curious thing about Lear, too: Lear clearly knows nothing about women and has never lived with them at all. His wife is dead – she couldn’t exist. Obviously, the play couldn’t happen if there were a Mrs. Lear. He hasn’t any idea of what makes women work – he’s a man who lives with his knights. He’s that all-male man whom Shakespeare – who was clearly feminine in many ways – regarded as a natural-born loser in a tragic situation. Othello was another fellow like that. Total incomprehension of what a woman is. His whole treatment of her when he kills her is the treatment of a man who’s out of touch with reality as far as the other sex is concerned. All he knows how to do is fight wars and deal with the anthropophagi and “men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders”.
PB: That’s his tragedy, then.
OW: Yes.
PB: He could not imagine a person like Iago.
OW: No, and neither could a lot of Shakespeare’s critics. As a result of which we have eight libraries full of idiot explanations of Iago – when everybody has known an Iago in his life if he’s been anywhere.
PB: There are several moments in the movie which give the impression that Iago does what he does because it’s in his character, rather than that he’s plotting for some particular reason.
OW: Oh, he has no reason. The great criticism through all the years has been that he’s an unmotivated villain, but I think there are a lot of people who perpetuate villainy without any motive other than the exercise of mischief and the enjoyment of the power to destroy. I’ve known a lot of Iagos in my life. I think it’s a great mistake to try to motivate it beyond what is inherent in the action.
PB: You could say he was like the scorpion that followed his own character.
OW: Well, yup [laughs].
PB: Iago is certainly the most interesting part in the play.
OW: Shakespeare is like no other artist when his characters start to live their own lives and to lead the author against his wishes. In Richard II, Shakespeare is absolutely for Richard, but nevertheless he has to do justice to Bolingbroke. And, more than that, he has to make him seem real, human – so that suddenly this man Bolingbroke takes life and pulls off a large part of the play. You see Shakespeare trying to hold him back: nothing doing, Bolingbroke is launched! A very interesting theory has been put forward by some scholars; according to them, Shakespeare not only played small roles, but large ones. They think now that he played Iago and Mercutio – two second-level roles which steal the play from the stars…
PB: You said somewhere that there was an implication of impotence in your Iago.
OW: Yes. I don’t think that is necessary to the truth of the play, but it was the key to MacLiammóir’s performance, that Iago was impotent. It isn’t central, but it was an element that we used for the actor, as a means of performing the part. In the play, it’s pretty clear that isn’t so, and when I did the play in the theatre later, there was no suggestion of it. But I think it’s a perfectly valid way of doing it, though I wasn’t anxious for the audience to understand it, not trying to inform them of it – if the audience can find it, more power to them. To use the Stanislavsky argot, it was basically something for the actor “to use”. I do a lot of that with actors. I’m always making fun of the Method, but I use a lot of things that are taken from it.
PB: Does Othello feel guilt at the end – after Iago’s proven guilty?
OW: Depends on how you play it.
PB: In your picture.
OW: I’ve forgotten, because I remember my performance in the theatre much more clearly than in the movie, and I revised a lot of my ideas of playing it.
PB: Well, then, in the stage production.
OW: I don’t think “guilt” is the right word. You know, Othello is so close to being a French farce. Analyze it! All he’s got to do is say, “Show me the handkerchief,” and you ring down the curtains. Being that close to nonsense, it can only come to life on a level very close to real tragedy – closer than Shakespeare actually gets. And Othello is so blasted at the end that guilt is really too small an emotion. Anyway, he’s not a Christian – that’s central to the character. And Shakespeare was very, very aware of who was a Christian and who wasn’t, just as he was very aware of who was a Southern European and who was a Northern, who was the decadent and who was the palace man, and the outdoor man. These things run all the way through Shakespeare.
PB: There’s an implication at the end that Othello understands, even almost forgives Iago for what he had done.
OW: He didn’t forgive him.
PB: Well, understood.
OW: Yes, it was this terrible understanding of how awful he was which drains him of hate. Because when something is that awful you can’t react to it that way. He becomes appalled by him.
PB: The look between them is filled with ambiguity.
OW: That’s a very interesting moment in the play.
PB: Do you think Othello is detestable in his jealousy?
OW: Jealousy is detestable, not Othello. He’s so obsessed with jealousy, he becomes the very personification of that tragic vice. In that sense, he’s morally diseased. All Shakespeare’s great characters are sometimes detestable – compelled by their own nature.
PB: So are your characters.
OW: Well, you could say it, I think, about all dramas, large or small, that attempts tragedy within the design of melodrama. As long as there is melodrama, the tragic hero is something of a villain.
PB: Why did you give Roderigo a white poodle?
OW: Because Carpaccio’s full of them. And it’s not a poodle, it’s a tenerife – very special kind. We had a terrible time getting it. All the dandies in Carpaccio fondle exactly that dog – it’s almost a trademark with them, like Whistler’s butterfly; they’re always clinging to those terrible little dogs.
Watch the opening scene of Orson Welles' Othello:
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