Othello

Shakespeare in Film
at Amherst Cinema

Sunday 4/12   2:00pm only
Introduction and discussion by Arthur F. Kinney, Director of the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Nathaniel Leonard, Associate Director of the Renaissance Center Theater Company.

Thursday 4/16   7:00pm only

Laurence Olivier filmed his own stage version; Orson Welles constructed a flawed but brilliant film; James Earl Jones toured on stage in the part. And all these actors gave heroic dimension to Othello: Olivier gave him effrontery, Welles fury, Jones dignity. Laurence Fishburne now gives him sexuality. Though he may not read the lines as well as his predecessors, his visual presence on the screen is stunning. Exactly as director and screenwriter Oliver Parker intended, Fishburne's Othello is heightened so that he is at least cinematically equal to the Iago of Kenneth Branagh—arguably the English-speaking world's greatest living actor.  Cognizant of Othello's empty unreflectiveness, Parker fills the void with sex and violence, all of it realized through Fishburne's visual presence—made all the more stunning because someone had the ingenious idea of tattooing the side of his shaved head, making him unforgettably iconic.

Director Oliver Parker.  1995, 123 mins.

presented by

University of Massachusetts Amherst
and Amherst Cinema