Othello (DVD)
Gloriously cinematic despite its tiny budget, Orson Welles’s Othello is a testament to the filmmaker’s stubborn willingness to pursue his vision to the ends of the earth. Unmatched in his passionate identification with Shakespeare’s imagination, Welles brings his inventive visual approach to this enduring tragedy of jealousy, bigotry, and rage, and also gives a towering performance as the Moor of Venice, alongside Suzanne Cloutier as the innocent Desdemona, and Micheál MacLiammóir as the scheming Iago. Shot over the course of three years in Italy and Morocco and plagued by many logistical problems, this fiercely independent film joins Macbeth and Chimes at Midnight in making the case for Welles as the cinema’s most audacious interpreter of the Bard.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New, restored 4K digital transfers of two versions of the film, the 1952 European one and the 1955 U.S. and UK one, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 1995 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles scholar Myron Meisel
- Filming “Othello,” Welles’s last completed film, a 1979 essay-documentary
- Return to Glennascaul, a 1953 short film made by actors Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards during a hiatus from shooting Othello
- New interview with Welles biographer Simon Callow
- Souvenirs d’“Othello,” a 1995 documentary about actor Suzanne Cloutier by François Girard
- New interview with Welles scholar François Thomas on the two versions
- New interview with Ayanna Thompson, author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America
- Interview from 2014 with scholar Joseph McBride
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Geoffrey O’Brien
New cover by Sarah Habibi