Friday, December 01, 2017

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

It must be a dilemma for almost any production of Shakespeare, whether on stage or screen – why are we bothering with all this business of staging, blocking, scenery? Why not just have the audience close their eyes and the actors deliver the lines, given that we're dealing with some of the richest poetry ever written, in the English language or any other? The parts of the plays that Orson Welles fillets to produce his Chimes at Midnight may not contain the very richest of Shakespeare's poetry, but still, the director's solution is admirable in its simplicity: he simply ignores the fact that there might be a problem at all. The slight divergence between image and sound produced by overdubbing suggest that one might do well to watch this film with the sound off, as well as to listen to it in the absence of the images, such is its richness in both dimensions. Welles resists using the images to simplify, clarify or even comment on the language, and simply develops both aspects to the best of his ability in the service of the narrative. The visuals are quite magnificent, with beautiful camera movements married to some at times quite startling editing that never allows the choreography, in itself, to become the point. Of course it recalls nothing so much as Welles, but Bergman, Tarkovsky and even Eisenstein all come to mind at times, as well as some pre-echoes of Béla Tarr, surprisingly, and particularly Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God. (The battle scene is very fine indeed.) And Welles' own performance is quite magnificent, his voice never more precisely deployed. It's instructive to put his Falstaff here against the eponymous Mr. Arkadin (1955) to see all that is best and worst in Welles as an actor. In the earlier film, boldness becomes mannerism, preposterousness and overexplicitness; here, minute attention to detail and great subtlety never become precious or self-regarding, and broadness does not exactly become delicate but is handled with as much delicacy as the delicate aspects themselves. Subtlety does not become an obstacle to directness, but neither do broad strokes do away with nuance and ambiguity. In Chimes at Midnight, this is true of Welles' acting and of his directing both.

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