The Genius of Orson Welles's Shakespeare Films

DOUGLAS BRODE: The whole point is that Shakespeare's plays are really more like a fast-moving screenplay than a normal stage play. Therefore Shakespeare demanded more editing, camera movement, mise en scène, whatever you call the plastic elements of film, it needed more, not less, than other films.

Orson Welles has often been credited as the first person to really use the camera to tell the story in a Shakespeare film. That's not exactly true. There were pioneers who were doing it before, but what's true about Orson Welles is that being the cinematic genius that he was, he used the camera and also editing and sound, and I don't just mean dialogue, but sound effects and music, he used them more creatively in all his films—The Magnificent Ambersons, based on a popular novel, Citizen Kane, which he and two other people wrote for the screen, whatever, adapting Shakespeare, adapting whatever he happened to adapt. Because he was a genius with a camera, he was able to use it more creatively than other people had, and there's no real good done by using tricky camera shots, whether you're talking about Shakespeare or any other subject. They make it more stylish, perhaps, and clever, but they're also superficial. Camera techniques, editing techniques, sound dubbing are only effective when they're used to help to tell the story—and mise en scène, too.

For example, Orson Welles in his film of Macbeth literally creates a special kind of a castle that appears to have been burrowed out of the side of a mountain. The castle turns into a cave, and every time Macbeth goes into it—he playing Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth along with him—the point is, when they walk in, they revert to a more animal form of living, they stop drinking out of goblets and start drinking out of animal horns.

Orson Welles's whole interpretation of the play is that Macbeth is about a guy going back on the evolutionary chain. A man who has learned civilization and is giving it up to go back to savagery. So it's not just a clever-looking set design that he uses, although it is that, but it is—the key word "functional"—it communicates visually his interpretation of Shakespeare, and he does that in his editing, he does that in his camera movements, he does that in his use of sound, and so do Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Olivier, all to certain degrees. No one to the degree of Orson Welles, for the simple reason Orson Welles was the greatest filmmaker, I should say the greatest film director, who ever lived.