The Walking Shadow: Welles's Expressionist Macbeth.
1973; Salisbury University; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoAccording to Charles Eckert, Orson Welles's Macbeth is the most controversial Shakespeare movie of them all - touchstone to discriminate the cineaste from the Bardolator.1 Clearly, it is a film one studies less as an illustration of Shakespeare than as an insight into Welles himself. Therefore in what follows, when I choose to discuss Macbeth in terms of Welles's personality, I should make clear that I do not mean to detract from his source. I merely want to recognize an important creative talent who has used Shakespeare as a vehicle for his imagination. The film's deviations from Shakespeare's text, if viewed in this way. will I hope serve to mollify the typical quarrels between academics and film freaks. Although Macbeth is a minor work in the Welles canon, it remains interesting because it is a daring experiment and because it has a significant relationship to the whole of the director's oeuvre. Its significance is suggested by the fact that for ten years, on and off, Welles expended creative energy on adaptations of the play. In 1936, he achieved a major theatrical success in Harlem with the Voodoo Macbeth; a few years later, when he brought the Mercury Theatre to Hollywood, Macbeth was on his list of proposed films; in 1947, his fortunes much declined, he staged Macbeth at the Utah Shakespeare Festival; then at last, under a B-budget deal with Republic Pictures, he turned the Utah production into a film, taking about two and a half weeks for the job and spending $200,000. 2 He has said that he did not set out to make a great movie, only to prove that worthwhile work could be done on a shoestring.3 His haste and cost-cutting show through the final picture in many ways, and yet the film remains both fitfully exciting and highly revealing of its director's personal vision. Every time Welles has adapted Macbeth, his basic strategy has been much the same: he has given it a primitive, exotic setting, and he has tried to extirpate its Renaissance manners. It was precisely this strategy that drew extravagant praise for the Harlem production in 1936. Here, for example, is part of a review by Brooks Atkinson: The witches' scenes from Macbeth have always worried the life out of the polite, tragic stage; the grimaces of the hags and the garish make-believe of the flaming cauldron have bred more disenchantment than anything else that Shakespeare wrote. But ship the witches into the rank and fever-striken jungle echoes, stuff a gleaming naked witch doctor into the cauldron, hold up Negro masks in the baleful light - and there you have a witches' scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theatre art.4 Welles's film was made with similar ends in mind, even to the point of having the witches (now Druid priestesses) fashion a sort of Voodoo doll out of Scottish clay. Everything in the production was designed to make the play more primitive, so that what Welles gains in melodramatic intensity, he loses in complexity. Macbeth as Shakespeare conceived him is only partly a heathen of the moors - he is also, quite unhistorically, a creature of the Renaissance court, and his machinations are partly a representation of that court's plottings, intrigues, and sophistication. Shakespeare's tragic hero commits his murderous deeds in a reasonably civilized world, where Scottish noblemen are welcome at King Edward's castle, where Macbeth and his lady give housing to their sovereign, where one must Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it. This counterpoint between a highly developed social code and the temptations of ambition gives the play its richness of characterization, its psychological nuance. Welles, on the other hand, chooses to set Macbeth in the heart of darkness, emphasizing not psychology but rather the struggle between a ruthless desire for and a rudimentary, elemental need to maintain order. Welles announces this theme in a voice-over narration at the very beginning of the film, immediately after the credits, where Jacques lbert pays homage to Bernard Herrmann by scoring the power theme from Citizen Kane under Welles's name. …
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