Orson Welles’s Othello

Is it possible the famed death procession at the finale of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) was  influenced by the prologue to Orson Welles Othello (1952). A newly restored print of Othello is being exhibited at Film Forum in connection with the global “Celebrate Shakespeare 2014” commemorations. You have the same chain of mourners, ascending towards heaven, but shot at angles. The angles are the key element in Welles interpretation since they show the distorted lens through which jealousy views the world. Even if Bergman never saw the film, this is a world of archetypes. Bergman and Welles were drawing from the same well. Iago’s (Michael MacLiammoir) words to Roderigo (Robert Coote) about Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) set the parameters of the tone poem Welles is out to create: “He will out of her own goodness make the net that shall enmesh them all.”  Welles’s movie is about framing. As suspicion and malignity are inseminated (“the motive-huntin of Motiveless malignity,” is what Coleridge famously wrote about the play), the camera frantically cross cuts between Iago and Othello. The crowds of soldiers appear on the ramparts, tiny figures overlooking a turbulent sea and then as oddly placed spectators looking down at the unfolding tragedy through a porthole in a roof. At the end Othello’s face will be framed in darkness. As the infernal logic of the tragedy plays out, Othello overhears as Iago baits Cassio (Michael Laurence) on. Then the camera turns to Othello, a grand creature, characterized by what Cassio calls “a free and open nature,” who in the beginning dominated auspicious archways—now reduced to a sad pair of eyes. The ultimate piece of framing is of course the cage in which Iago will eventually be hoisted. Welles inundated the landscape with shadows and it’s probably one of the major faults of the film. Love is never really established amidst all the omens of death, but there’s one curiosity and that’s the  countervailing images of sky against which Shakespeare’s characters are profiled. Like the tiny figures on the battlements, it creates a feeling of perspective that momentarily allows the viewer to step away from the tragedy occurring down below.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, “the greatest movie never made?” The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich’s documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the  deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea’s famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70’s. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol’s Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol’s infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted  Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded “The Dark Side of the Moon” album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky “did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?” and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering “I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky’s recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O’Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who’d worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing  Jodorowsky’s claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch’s Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky’s Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven’s Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky’s says “I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.” That’s no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.

Monday Morning Live

CNN reported on a telekinesis stunt engineered by he producers of the new version of Carrie. A young girl goes berserk in a coffee shop. "Up against the wall motherfucker" is a good expression for the powers she unleashes. It’s Candid Camera and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, a put on which caused mass panic, rolled into one--since the customers have not been forewarned that the girl and her victim are both actors. A similar stunt, this time taking place in a beauty shop, was engineered by the producers of the television remake of the The Exorcist. CNN then went on to document a spate of other videos used to create buzz, including one in which a murder is taking place in an elevator, with bystanders looking on in disbelief. What does the average person do when confronted by a murderer or someone with telekinetic powers? The answer is that they usually freeze up. The videos are hysterical, but they replay the sad story of our contemporary world in which outrageous atrocities occur and the crowd simply gawks, grows paralyzed or simply walks away. The mock elevator murder was particularly unsettling since it brought back Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was stabbed to death back in l964 and whose screams for help were met with inaction. After the humor of these staged events has past, we are reminded that  paranormal happenings are a good description of what is going on in Syria, in Egypt, in Somalia, in North Korea—to name just a few examples of very public bludgeonings from which the rest of the world often turns its head.

The War of the Worlds Part II

What if the Martians land? Will this be one way to achieve world peace on a micro and macrocosmic level? Will the Assad regime and the rebels unite against a common enemy? Will Dennis Rodman no longer be needed as the good will ambassador to Pyongyang (as detailed by the Times, (“Rodman Gives Details on Trip to North Korea,” NYT, 9/9/13)? Will the Argentinians finally place the Falklands on the back burner and join forces with the British? Will the Iranians and the Israelis fall into each others arms and was the recent twitter from President Hassan Rouhani a hopeful sign of the future cooperation that might occur if our world were ever attacked by aliens, or was it just a ruse? Will all the warring couples who are about to get divorced live and let live (certainly you’ve seen those heartening situations when the arguing couple takes time out of their struggle to take aim at the unscrupulous merchant) and will the Hatfields and McCoys in all their present forms suddenly heal their grievances? Will all divisions between men and women, between couch potatoes and those who like to live on the wild side, between blonds and brunettes and especially between black and white suddenly fall apart when faced with the prospect of a Martian Invasion? If Orson Welles famed broadcast of The War of the Worlds is a litmus test, then the answer is a resounding “no!” The approach of the Martians will only cause on thing: panic! If history teaches us anything, it’s that faced with stressful situations, mankind, both individually and collectively, seldom “take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them.” No that would be to simple. So great is the death impulse that self-destruction and the destruction of others appear to be the road more often travelled when calamity strikes.

War of the Words

“Walter O’Malley once said I was so good at it, they should just let me make the whole damn thing up and forget about playing the game.” That’s Nat Allbright talking to the Washington Post in 1982, as quoted in his recent Times obit. Walter O’Malley was the famous Dodgers owner, and Allbright had been conscripted to broadcast re-creations of the goings-on at Ebbet’s Field for radio listeners, using telegraph messages as the raw material for his scripts. Allbright provided details and sound effects like “snapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth that sounded like a bat striking ball” and “tapes of the tide-like murmur of the crowd.” When technology made him obsolete, Allbright created personalized broadcasts for those who wanted them. “A 240-pound would-be jockey rode Secretariat to victory in the Kentucky Derby,” the Times recounted. “Another customer fought Sugar Ray Leonard, saying realism demanded that the customer himself be knocked out.” He also “created games even when the seasons were suspended because of labor strife.” Many gamers still play fantasy football today, but Allbright came from a world where radio produced magic. Listeners really believed what they heard but couldn’t see. That’s why Orson Welles was able to suspend his listeners’ disbelief and create mass panic with “War of the Worlds,” his infamous broadcast of an alien invasion that never occurred.