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Macbeth 194810/25/2022 In this way, Welles again proves in sync with his literary hero, for the unfolding text has riches deeper than its many famous lines. In a suitably Shakesperean flourish, Welles also pits the symbolically chaotic, primitive pagan against the symbolically orderly, civilized Christian, adding another layer of social tension to an already fraught civilization-in-peril scenario.Īll of this is to say that Welles' Macbeth, while not at first blush a terribly accessible film in 2016, rewards scrutiny: the more one looks and listens, the more one sees and hears. The open-air treatment of the palace scenes emphasizes Macbeth's fear of exposure, and that castle set, like the text, emphasizes height (the destination of "vaulting ambition") and the certainty of tragic falls. That castle is hewn from craggy rock, surrounded by an imposing big-sky backdrop, an ill wind ever blowing. But now I am cabined cribbed, confined, bound in/To saucy doubts and fears." As he says these words, the film has moved, for the first time, to an interior, such as it is: a cavern to contrast the "blasted heath" that here seems to extend from where the witches are famously found all the way through King Duncan's castle of Forres. "I had else been perfect," Macbeth laments, "Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,/As broad and general as the casing air. Similarly, Welles places the action in a surrealist landscape (anticipating later films, like The Trial, and sequences, like the climax of Touch of Evil) that likewise reflects Macbeth's own self-aware horror. Shadows and fog compete with fire and torches, in keeping with lines like Lady Macbeth's "Come thick night/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,/That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,/Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,/To cry, 'Hold, hold!'" The graphic intensity of Orson Welles' black-and-white 1948 film of Macbeth, then, isn't merely for show, but a carefully considered symbolist staging for screen, meant to complement the Bard's immortal poetry. In his heavily symbolist tragedy Macbeth, William Shakespeare consistently describes the interplay of darkness and light, of darkness as death, murder and other "dark" deeds, and of light as life, righteous justice, and truth, shining into the corners where evil lurks.
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