Word: othellos
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Hamlet or Othello? The book is an exercise in anti-gullibility, an examination of the totalitarian sophistries about the free world which democrats have often uncritically swallowed. The prime myth of the totalitarians. Nazi. Fascist or Communist, is that they are modern, "the wave of the future." In reality, they are as age-old as tyranny. According to the Soviet Union, "an ineluctable law governs history" in their favor; yet it requires nothing less than "a constant reign of terror to crush the plots that might alter its unalterable course." The secondary myths are that the totalitarians are young, strong...
...exterminated: to believe all this, even unanimously-above all unanimously-must lead a people to catastrophe . . . Hamlet is frequently cited as an example of the tragedy caused by thought not followed by action, but, as Bertrand Russell judiciously observes, the totalitarians ought rather to meditate upon the fate of Othello, on the disasters provoked by action not preceded by thought...
...Othello is Orson Welles, surrounded by a number of movie techniques taken from Murder at the Rue Morgue. Any resemblance to a Baroque (as opposed to Mannerist) play written by W. Shakespere, also known as William Shakespeare, is, however, coincidental. Some will feel that all's well that ends Welles, but most will enjoy him for his own sake at the Beacon Hill...
Particularly challenging is Othello, perhaps Shakspere's finest play and certainly his greatest Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). For all its length, Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials; yet Welles has come up with a film exactly 90 minutes long. Obviously this required extensive cutting of the original; and Welles fully realized the impossibility of trying simply to photograph a stage production of the play. The result is not Shakspere's Othello, but Welles' adaptation and interpretation of the Othello tale using Shakspere...
...black-and-white, from a close-up of part of a white robe through all manner of chiaroscuro to a totally blackened screen. Indeed, so prolific are his ideas that some sequences of camera angles and shots speed by too rapidly. And who else would have dared to have Othello's final speech delivered straight upwards by a disservered head? The whole visual treatment, furthermore, is strikingly enhanced by the highly original musical score, featuring a wordless chorus and the forceful clangor of an over-amplified harpsichord...