Welles' "Deviations" From Shakespeare's Othello.

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."-J Cocteau
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Dear ur3066971:

Regarding your post "Not a fully realized Othello" of Jul-29-2004:

Your criticism of Welles not closely following Shakespeare's original Othello is just one of many such criticisms that I've encountered on IMDb message boards, and elsewhere, about a filmmaker deviating from the original literary work in his cinematic adaptation of it. Your criticism, along with the many other such criticisms is rather one dimensional, in my opinion, and lacks any appreciable amount of reflective thought.

1) I feel that a filmmaker should have unhampered creative freedom to use a a literary work in any way that he sees fit in his cinematic adaptation of it. After all, the filmmaker is as much an Artist as the creator of the original literary work, is he not? As such, the role, nay the duty, of any Artist is to infuse his own personal vision of reality into his work, here being the cinematic adaptation of a literary work. Without granting the filmmaker such unhampered creative freedom, he becomes much less of an Artist, and much more of a mindless puppet, merely parroting the words of the Artist who originally created the literary work. In summary, I feel that a filmmaker can, and should be able to, use the literary work as a mere inspiration, a creative "springboard", if you will, if he so chooses, and be able to proceed from there in any direction that his Creative Imagination and his Social Consciousness takes him.

2) If we are to confine a filmmaker to a strict adherence to the original text in his cinematic adaptation of it, then what is the point of making a cinematic adaptation at all? Then why not just direct a curious member of the public to the literary work and leave it at that? I feel that it is intellectually dishonest, and quite possibly financially fraudulent, to expect the average, ticket purchasing movie fan to receive no more for the purchase price of a movie theater ticket than he would receive from reading the original literary work, perhaps even free of charge at the local public library. In short, a filmmaker's "deviation" from a literary work, that is his Artistic and Creative input in his cinematic adaptation of it, constitutes "value added" to the original work, "value added" being a very common term in the traditions of Western Capitalism, potato chip manufacturers who charge more for their products than would be the consumer cost of an equal amount of raw potatoes being a mundane case in point.

3) The class of film viewing people is larger, more diverse, and much less specialized than the class of people who would be inclined to read a serious literary work. The notable exception to this "rule", of course, is the wide social spectrum of high school students, and college students who are required to read a serious literary work as an assignment in an English class. But even here, how many of these students will ever again read that assigned serious literary work, or even any other serious literary work after their formal education is finished? In short, it is generally a small subclass of the general public who would even consider reading a serious literary work after their formal education. The simple reason for this is that most people find serious literary works to be "boring", uninteresting, a "snnoze fest", and "a good cure for insomnia". As such, a filmmaker who gives a literal rendition of a serious literary work in his cinematic adaptation of it would likely put the typical movie fan to "sleep", either literally or figuratively speaking. As such, for the commercial viability of his film, he usually must invent creative, yet intellectually honest ways of making a "boring" literary work palatable for the more diverse movie viewing public. As such, the filmmaker also has a crucial social function in familiarizing the non-technical, general public in a serious literary work, and giving them at least SOME appreciation of it, where otherwise they would have no appreciation of it at all. To accomplish all this, an innovative, creative, and Artistic filmmaker must often significantly deviate from the text of the original literary work in his cinematic adaptation of it.

For these reasons, among many others, I feel that any criticisms of a filmmaker regarding his "deviation" from a literary work in his cinematic adaptation of it are without a firm, and well thought out basis. As such, reviews of cinematic adaptations of serious literary texts should be completely devoid of criticisms that such cinematic adaptations are somehow inferior because they somehow "deviated" from the source text. A cinematic adaptation of a serious literary work should be reviewed and criticized as would any other instance of Cinematic Art, namely on its own merits as a stand alone film, that is, as an original work of Art.