Welles Shakespeare schedule

Tentative Schedule: (Please expect changes to be made in the schedule from time to time during the semester--they will be announced well ahead of time both in class and by email).

2. Sound Design (post-production dubbing; non-syncrhonization of sound and image tracks)

5. "Auto-bio" criticism in and out of his films; a legend in his own time and a legend in his own mind

6. Welles "lost" or "ufinished" films. Will he have ever finished making a film?

10. Welles in Europe (French, Italian, and English versions; dubbing versus subtitling)

DQs etc. Are Always Due the day before class by 5 p.m. on Mondays and by 7 p.m. Wednesdays for the rest of the semester.

January 19: The three versions of Othello, the Italian (1951), the French (1952), and the American (1955).

Jack Jorgens' chapter on Welles' Othello in Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 175-90.

Click on image below for the Carlotta website for their 2014 restoration of Othello.

A bit like the Touch of Evil memo --- a shaping influence even in absentia.)

First Paper (700 words) DUE Saturday, JANUARY 30 by 11:59 p.m. Email your paper (as an attachment) to me at [email protected]. Put your name in the subject title or header of your title. Put your name in your paper. You will need a title for your paper and a thesis, an argument that you can state in one sentence. Your thesis should go at the end of your first paragraph. See Paper Guidelines. Grading: If you don't put your name on your paper, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a proper title, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a thesis, it's an automatic E. One third of your grade will be based on your title; one third on your thesis; and one third on the rest of your paper. Btw, you may figure out your title before you write your paper, but usually, you only figure out your thesis by writing your paper and what you think is your concusion needs to be moved up from the end of the essay to the front. Then you are ready to make your final revisions and add a new concluding paragraph. You may also have come up with a new title in the course of writing the paper. And then you are ready to proofread your paper. And then you will have finished writing your paper. Congratulations! :)

Touch of Evil Reconstructed Release of 1998; uses parts of the 1976 rediscovered preview version released on videotape and aserdisc and said to be the "complete restored version."

Touch of Evil Reconstructed Release with Audiocommentary by James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Lady from Shanghai (1947) (jealousy; mirrors; blondes as in Citizen Kane and Othello)

Mr. Arkadin (1955), the "new comprehensive version." (There are seven versions, according to Jonathan Rodenbaum, and eight versions, according to Francois Thomas. For three of them, see Orson Welles, The Complete Mr. Arkadin Criterion Collection DVD set)

Orson Welles' Macbeth 1950 (second, shorter cut, long distance re-edit by Welles at the command of the head of Republic Studios) 86 minutes

André Bazin on "découpage" (everything related to writing / shooting the film between the screenplay and the editing of the exposed film). In his book on Welles, Bazin relates découpage to Welles' depth of field and wild angle lenses. Instead of dictating what the viewer can make of the image, Welles forces his viewer to make meaning from his images.

Sequences thematiques commentees - selected-scene commentary by stage director Stuart Seide. In French, not subtitled.

1. Image (3 min)
2. Music and Sound (4 min)
Le bruit et la fureur - in this video interview, stage director Stuart Seide discusses the theatrical qualities of Macbeth, some of the unique socio-political overtones in Orson Welles' adaptation of the classic play, and the film's visual style. The program was produced by Wild Side Video. In French, not subtitled. (14 min).

DVD 2 :
Le film en version courte exploitée en salles (85')
DVD 3 :
"Vaudou Macbeth" : 4' du Vaudou Macbeth, pièce de 1936 montée par Orson Welles à New York uniquement avec des acteurs Afro-Américains
Enregistrement radiophonique de Macbeth, la pièce, réalisé en 1940 (78')

"Les deux Macbeth d'Orson Welles" : analyse par François Thomas, universitaire spécialiste de Welles (13')
"Welles et Shakespeare" : analyse par Jean-Pierre Berthomé, universitaire spécialiste de Welles (13')
Analyse détaillée des 2 versions du film (26')
Séquences thématiques commentées : l'image, le son et la musique
Le décor : analyse détaillée par Jean-Pierre Berthomé, croquis de Welles à l'appui

Second Paper (700 words) DUE Saturday March 19 by 11:59 p.m. Email your paper (as an attachment) to me at [email protected]. Put your name in the subject title or header of your title. Put your name in your paper. You will need a title for your paper and a thesis, an argument that you can state in one sentence. Your thesis should go at the end of your first paragraph. See Paper Guidelines. Grading: If you don't put your name on your paper, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a proper title, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a thesis, it's an automatic E. One third of your grade will be based on your title; one third on your thesis; and one third on the rest of your paper. Btw, you may figure out your title before you write your paper, but usually, you only figure out your thesis by writing your paper and what you think is your concusion needs to be moved up from the end of the essay to the front. Then you are ready to make your final revisions and add a new concluding paragraph. (Do not repeat yourself in your conclusion.) You may also have come up with a new title in the course of writing the paper. And then you are ready to proofread your paper. And then you will have finished writing your paper. Congratulations! :)

In class, we will all go over each student's paper. I will pproject each paper on the screen at the front of the class. Your grade will be based on your title. We must be able to guess your topic as stated in your opening paragraph. Your title should also be inviting, not just functional. For example, if you were writing a paper on the porter scene in Polanski's Macbeth, you might entitle your paper "Night Porter: Post-Holocaust Uri-Nation in Polanski's Macbeth."

You have three options: 1. Write a persuasive essay on one of Welles's signatures, on one aspect of Welles you see repeated in one or more of his films.

2. Design a blu-ray cover for one of Welles's films that have more than one version. The Criterion Othello cover is fake. http://fakecriterions.tumblr.com The covers of the Citizen Kane blu-ray (jigsaw) and the Criterion Complete Mr. Arakadin (a palimpsest of jigsaw pieces that show parts of the text of the novel and Welles's face made up as Arkakdin) are both inventive. In addition to the cover, you will also have to design the interior of your fake edition.

3. Make a Wellesian trailer for one of Welles' films other than the trailers that already exist for his films. You can story board it and do the voice-over in class.

Options 2 and 3 must look good and teach the viewer / reader some important things about the film.

1. A.K. (dir. Chris Marker, 1985) It appears as an extra on the Criteiron editon of Ran, Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear

2. Billy Wilder 's Death Mills (or Die Todesmühlen), 1945. You can find this on the right of the wikipage linked to your left. The film will pop into full frame.

https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=orson+welles+radio%3D4%3DR88%3A0153&p=1&item=R88:0205

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/lost-orson-welles-film-found-in-italy-1200575409/

The only known print until now was thought to have burnt in a fire at Welles’ home near Madrid in 1970.

“This is by far the most important film restoration by George Eastman House in a very long time,” said Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of film, who supervised the project for George Eastman House. “Holding in one’s hands the very same print that had been personally edited by Orson Welles 75 years ago provokes an emotion that’s just impossible to describe.”

20. Orson Welles Turns Heart of Darkness Into a Radio Drama, and Almost His First Great Film

22. Mel Brooks' History of the World -- Part I

Orson Welles Sketchbook - Episode 4: Houdini/John Barrymore/Voodoo Story/The People I Missed

The jazz artist Nina Simone was intimately familiar with the scorn that this society heaps upon dark-skinned black women. The world she was born into in the 1930s told her in every possible way that ebony skin, a broad nose and full lips offended Eurocentric standards of beauty and made women of her complexion unworthy of admiration.

This mode of contempt was evident in the hiring practices of businesses that made “lightly colored” skin a job requirement for black women. It once dictated the admissions standards of some black sororities and civic organizations that favored near-white applicants, and determined spousal choices in African-American families that wanted desperately to preserve their Eurocentric appearances.

Ms. Simone fought the erasure of dark-skinned women by embracing Negritude. She became militantly Afrocentric in songs like “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” an anthem of the ’60s-era black pride movement, and “Mississippi Goddam,” written after the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

She confronted the perversity of colorism directly in the famous ballad “Four Women,” in which she sang in the voices of black women whose fates were tied to their differing skin tones. The second woman sings: “My skin is yellow/My hair is long/Between two worlds/I do belong/My father was rich and white/He forced my mother late one night.” The fourth — I think of her as Ms. Simone’s alter ego — sings: “My skin is brown/My manner is tough/I’ll kill the first mother I see/My life has been too rough/I’m awfully bitter these days/Because my parents were slaves.”

Ms. Simone was known for salty language, and she would have made herself heard had someone suggested a film of her life starring a light-skinned actress wearing blackface. This describes the film “Nina,” due out this spring. It stars Zoe Saldana, known for her roles in “Avatar,” “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Photo

A controversy erupted this month when the trailer and poster for the long awaited film was finally made public. The Simone estate expressed unhappiness on Twitter. Critics have since pointed out that Ms. Simone’s embrace of her blackness was essential to both her art and who she was as a person, and that any number of talented black actresses could have played the role without darkening themselves or requiring prosthetic help.

Britt Julious pointedly expressed this sentiment in the online music magazine Pitchfork, writing, “To deny an actress who is both capable and physically perfect for the role of Nina Simone is to deny the very viability of dark black womanhood that Simone embodied.” And she asked, “What is art if not from the mind and body of its creator?”

The makeup is problematic on several counts. For starters, it is implausibly done, and it fails to create the illusion of dark-skinned blackness upon which the role relies. It also brings to mind 19th-century minstrel theater, in which white performers blackened their faces to ridicule and stereotype African-Americans in song and dance.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass especially despised this form of theater and saw it as the work of whites “who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

The African-American media mogul Robert Johnson, whose company will distribute “Nina,” accused those who criticized the film’s casting of promoting a skin-tone litmus test for movies. He also declared Ms. Saldana’s coloring irrelevant to the quality of her performance. But if this were true, there would be no need for blackface.

No reasonable person would have raised an eyebrow had Ms. Saldana, who has described herself as black and Latina, gone before the cameras with light skin and straight hair to play, say, a character from Shakespeare or a figure from a novel by Cormac McCarthy or Elmore Leonard.

But “Nina” is a biographical film that seeks to resurrect an iconic, insistently black artist who made it her mission to redeem the worth of people who looked like her. By sidestepping this in casting, the filmmakers repeated the crime of erasure that Nina Simone inveighed against in her life and work.

Zoe Saldana faces criticism over dark makeup in Nina Simone film trailer

Hollywood didn't confine this phenomenon to its depiction of African Americans. White actors including Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine have donned the brown-, red- and yellow-face, too, playing Native Americans, Latinos and Asians, usually to stereotypical effect. Then consider that Forest Whitaker darkened his skin to play Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," and the issue gets complicated: Does that count as blackface, or is it akin to Nicole Kidman's donning a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in "The Hours"? "Ultimately I believe this is about acting and finding the right person for the role, regardless of color," says Charles Michael Byrd, a multiracial rights activist and the author of "The Bhagavad-gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness."

"Could this be social engineering on the part of Hollywood? Perhaps. If, however, by doing so, the casting directors and the producers can nudge this nation's race-obsessed consciousness toward more of a colorblind consciousness, that's a good thing."

Compare the real Bonnie and Clyde to the actors playing them in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) here:

20. Orson Welles Turns Heart of Darkness Into a Radio Drama, and Almost His First Great Film

22. Mel Brooks' History of the World -- Part I

Hollywood’s Fake Version of Nina Simone

Zoe Saldana faces criticism over dark makeup in Nina Simone film trailer