- F for Fake
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center screens a brand new DCP print of Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation, Othello. Scanned from the controversial 1992 restoration that toyed with the film’s sound design, this 2K digital version is said to retain the film’s visual qualities, which is encouraging considering how many subpar digital versions of classic movies are currently exhibited. As fate would have it, Othello is one of two Welles blind spots I need to remedy (the other being his TV movie The Immortal Story), and though I’d have liked to have seen this infamous 1992 version in the flesh, I’m excited nonetheless to finally catch up with what “may well be the greatest Shakespeare film,” according to Jonathan Rosenbaum.
- The Trial (1962) One of the few films to properly encapsulate that overused phrase “Kafkaesque,” Welles’s adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel is at once his most expressionistic and minimalistic work. His use of extreme angels and meticulous composition evoke the source material’s otherworldly tone, but there’s a sparseness to the characterizations that infiltrates the narrative as a whole; the only thing keeping the film together is Welles’s devilish instincts.
