Othello
Screen

Othello has influenced many film makers, and often the results are adaptations, rather than performances of Shakespeare's text. The UK's National Film and Television Archive holds over 25 20th-Century films containing performances, adaptations or extracts from Othello including Anson Dyer 's 1920 animated Othello, 1921's Carnival and its 1932 remake, the 1922 German film Othello, the 1936 Men Are Not Gods, 1941's East of Piccadilly, George Cukor 's 1947 A Double Life, Orson Welles in Return to Glennascaul and Welles' own Othello, Sergei Yutkevich 's Russian language Othello discussed below, two productions for BBC Television (including Jonathan Miller 's for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, discussed below), Basil Dearden 's All Night Long, a 1988 South African TV screening of Janet Suzman 's Othello, a film of Trevor Nunn 's RSC production with Willard White and Ian McKellen in the central roles, and True Identity – a crime caper in which Lenny Henry 's character Miles lands the role of understudy to James Earl Jones (playing himself) in a production of Othello. Carnival, Men Are Not Gods and A Double Life all feature the plot of an actor playing the title role in Shakespeare's Othello developing murderous jealousy for their Desdemonas. This plot is also shared by the very first Othello -influenced film: the 18-minute Danish 1911 Desdemona. All Night Long reframes the story in a jazz milieu. And Richard Eyre 's Stage Beauty depicts a restoration performance of the play.

The filming of Orson Welles ' Othello was plagued by chaos. A pattern emerged where Welles would collect his cast and crew for filming, then after four or five weeks his money would run out and filming would cease: Welles would then appear in another movie, and using his acting fee would reconvene filming. Scenes in the final movie were sometimes spliced together from one actor filmed in Italy in one year, and another actor filmed in Morocco the next. Welles uses shadows, extreme camera angles and discordant piano music to force the audience to feel Othello's disorientated view of Desdemona. Cages, grilles and bars are frequent images. And the text is heavily cut: Othello's first words are his speech to the Senators from Act 1 Scene 3. The film was critically panned on its 1955 release (headlines included "Mr Welles Murders Shakespeare in the Dark" and "The Boor of Venice") but was acclaimed as a classic upon its re-release in a restored version in 1992.

Sergei Yutkevich 's Russian film, with a screenplay by Boris Pasternak, was an attempt to make Shakespeare accessible to "the working man". Yutkevitch had begun his career as a painter and then as a set designer, and his film was widely praised for its pictorial beauty. The director saw his film as an opposite of Welles': where Welles began his film with a sequence from the end of the story, highlighting fate, Yutkevitch began with his Othello's back-story, thereby highlighting his characters' free will.

Laurence Olivier said that the role of Othello demanded "enormously big" acting, and he incorporated what The Spectator described as his "outsize, elaborate, overwhelming" performance into the film of his National Theatre production. The effect to modern audiences is (in the words of Daniel Rosenthal) "laughably over-the-top" – in keeping with its nature as a filmed stage performance, rather than a performance designed for the screen. The film was a financial success, and earned Oscar nominations for each of Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago and Joyce Redman as Emilia. Subsequent critics have been less sympathetic to Olivier's performance than his contemporary audience had been, tending to read it as racist. As Barbara Hodgdon expresses it: "Oliver's Othello confirms an absolute fidelity to white stereotypes of blackness."

The last of the screen versions to portray Othello in blackface was Jonathan Miller 's for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. Miller is said to have commented that "the play is about jealousy, not race." The TV film of Willard White 's performance as Othello (discussed under 20th Century performances above) has been described by Carol Chillington Rutter as "The one Othello where the women's stories get fully told", particularly praising the dynamic between Imogen Stubbs ' Desdemona and Zoë Wanamaker 's Emilia.

Oliver Parker 's 1995 Othello was trailed as an "erotic thriller", including a ritualized love scene between Othello and Desdemona, and, most memorably, Othello's jealous fantasies of encounters between Desdemona and Cassio. Swiss actress Irène Jacob as Desdemona struggled with the verse, as did Laurence Fishburne, more experienced in expletive-ridden thriller roles, as Othello. Iago was Kenneth Branagh in his first outing as a screen villain. The overall effect was to create, in Douglas Brode's words "the tragedy of Iago" – a performance in which Iago's dominance is such that Othello is a foil to him, not the other way around. The film was described as a "fair stab at turning the Bard into a decent night at the multiplex" but failed to achieve success at the box office.

Other adaptations of Shakespeare's story to be filmed include Franco Zeffirelli 's 1986 film of Verdi 's Otello and the 1956 Jubal which resets the story as a Western, centered on the Cassio character. The play was abridged to 30 minutes by Leon Garfield, and produced with cel animation for the TV series Shakespeare: The Animated Tales. Tim Blake Nelson 's basketball-themed teen drama O reset the story at an elite boarding school. The similarity of the film's ending to the Columbine massacre, which happened while the film was being edited, delayed its release for over two years, until August 2001. A British TV adaptation by Andrew Davies, screened in 2001, re-set the story among senior officers of the Metropolitan Police. And the first decade of the 21st-Century saw two non-English language film adaptations: Alexander Abela 's French Souli set the story in a modern-day Madagascan fishing village, and Vishal Bhardwaj 's Hindi Omkara amidst political violence in modern Uttar Pradesh. The 1997 malayalam movie Kaliyattam is an adaptation set against the backdrop of Theyyam artform of Kerala.
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