The weeklong double bill of two Orson Welles films, starting Friday at Facets Multimedia-which pairs the restored 1952 Shakespearean classic “Othello” with its 1979 post-mortem “Filming `Othello,’ ” offers a unique and wonderful opportunity to go backstage on the filmmaking process with perhaps the century’s single most gifted-and tragically wasted-filmmaker.
And one of its best raconteurs as well. If “Othello” dazzles us through its stylistic brilliance and scintillation, “Filming `Othello’ ” dazzles us because of Welles himself, holding us spellbound, in his early 60s, with his still-undimmed brilliance as memoirist and tale-spinner.
That, sadly, is almost all Welles the filmmaker has at his disposal to film in what proved to be the last movie he completed as director: just Welles the performer, clips from “Othello” itself and, as sidekicks, his two lifelong friends and theatrical associates, Hilton Edwards and Micheal Mac Liammoir (who played Iago to Welles’ Othello in the movie).
Somehow, though, it’s enough. “Othello,” shot and put together on the run over four years, while Welles acted in other overseas films to pay for it, shot so discontinuously that an actor in one scene may actually be conversing with an actor in a different country, won the 1952 Grand Prize at the Cannes Fllm Festival. Though underrated by some American critics at the time, it’s one of Welles’ major achievements.
As the jealousy-inflamed Moorish hero, driven to madness by the conniving Iago’s lies about his faithful wife, Desdemona, Welles gives a magisterial performance. And, while the sneering, effete and sinister Mac Liammoir deviates from today’s customary portrayal of a more outwardly “honest, honest” Iago, he still raises theatrical chills.
It’s the visuals, however, that make “Othello” great: those unmistakable virtuosic set-pieces and frames. “Othello” shows Welles operating at the height of his powers-but under extreme difficulty. That difficulty is the subject of “Filming `Othello,’ ” in which Welles, with a kind of bemused backward-looking affection, offers a catalog of cinematic hardship. It’s not really a hard-luck story. It’s the ultimate backstage show-in-trouble anecdote-with, in this case, the happy ending of an eventual classic.
Facets is at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. Call 312-281-4114.
– The Film Center at the School of the Art Institute continues its contemporary Hong Kong film series Thursday with the first of three movies, based on the writings of Lillian Lee, scenarist and original novelist of “Farewell My Concubine.” Thursday’s picture, “The Last Princess of Manchuria” (1990), directed by Fong Ling-ching, is a sort of spinoff of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 Oscar winner “The Last Emperor”-with one of the emperor’s romantic errors dramatized. To be shown this Saturday, the two others-Clara Law’s 1989 “Reincarnation of the Golden Lotus” and Ronnie Yu’s 1993 “The Bride With White Hair”-based, respectively, on some pornographic Chinese folk tales and a Ming Dynasty sword-and-sorcery epic-are among the most visually sumptuous of recent Hong Kong movies.
The Film Center’s “Kafka on Film” series, meanwhile, offers two films featuring actor-and, in one case, producer-Maximilian Schell. The first is his creditable 1969 adaptation of Kafka’s “The Castle,” directed by Rudolf Noelte, with another character named K., trapped in another maze of paranoia. The second, the 1992 “Labyrinth”-directed by onetime Czech New Wave director Jaromil Jires (“The Joke”), is a less successful attempt to give Kafka’s fictions direct resonance by juxtaposing them against the tidal wave of Hitlerite anti-Semitism. The Film Center is at Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard.
– One of last year’s finest documentaries, “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” plays at 11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. Chomsky, world-renowned linguist and radical intellectual, is profiled in a collage style that juggles interviews and public appearances from several decades. It’s a rare portrait of an intellectual that actually stimulates the intellect. Simultaneously, on the Music Box’s other screen, the great 1953 Howard Hawks musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” once again offers Marilyn Monroe’s all-time showstopper “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
