As in Welles’s never-realized first Hollywood project, Heart of Darkness, bestiality and tyranny are seen as opposite sides of the same coin.Īn aristocrat and a populist whose taste was both highbrow and lowbrow - and thus diametrically opposed to the middle-brow, middle-class taste that ruled American culture at mid-century, especially when it came to William Shakespeare - Welles, born in 1915, was as much a child of the nineteenth century as he was a prophet of the twentieth, which meant that his view of Shakespeare harked back to the time when Shakespeare was a staple of American popular “low“ culture, not a prized exhibit in elitist and effete “high” culture. This skyless world of cave dwellers and fog is split obscurely between pagan Druid artifacts that resemble pitchforks and the no less barbaric crosses of early Christianity (the latter signaled by Alan Napier’s Holy Father, a character invented by Welles, whose lines are drawn from those of other characters) - a polarity that only intensifies the atmosphere of moral confusion. The witches’ foaming, bubbling cauldron and Macbeth’s equally unstable consciousness are the closest we can get to any continuous sense of location, and the unabashed B-movie artificiality of the sets confirms that Welles wanted to draft something closer to a charcoal sketch than a finished canvas. Welles’ approach to the material is wildly neo-primitive and so expressionistic that one can never be entirely sure whether the action is taking place in interiors or exteriors the same ambiguity persists in the spoken text, where off-screen internal monologue and on-screen external speech often seem only a breath apart. Welles’ fifth completed feature, it was the first of many that would come out in more than one version, and the first that decisively shifted his public status, against his own wishes, from that of commercial studio director to that of arthouse auteur - a profile that would be deviated from only by Touch of Evil a decade later, the only other studio feature he would ever make. It seems probable that no American film director ever rattled the American mainstream more than Orson Welles, and none of his features rattled that mainstream more than his two versions of Macbeth, made successively out of the same material he shot in 1947, and released successively in the U.S. Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (1999) desire to transcend the barriers separating the classics, the avant-garde, and popular culture remains, I believe, his most enduring legacy. Written for the Olive Films Blu-Ray in 2016.
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