Merchant of Venice

[jbrooks]

Jedediah Leland,

Thanks for your post. It's great to get these details.

[maxrael]

Is anyone from here going tonight? Or aware of any plans for further showings / Blu-ray release etc.
Very exciting!

[Wellesnet]

‘Merchant of Venice,’ early ‘Othello’ get warm reception in Venice
http://www.wellesnet.com/merchant-of-venice-early-othello-get-warm-reception-in-venice/

[duke_mccloud]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6xBumLVBLY

Clip taken from 'One Man Band' documentary(included in Criterion DVD of F For Fake).

I really hope they release this as a stand alone for home recordings, I hated how Mr. Bongo released Too Much Johnson as an extra in Chimes and not standalone itself...

[londo]

Do you people here believe, we'll see MERCHANT OF VENICE released on DVD/blu-ray sometime soon ?
Or will it become one of these film, Droessler is showing only on conventions and festivals?
There are many like DREAMERS, MOBY DICK, LONDON etc., which never made it to the general public.

[tonyw]

It really should but since TOSOTW did not raise enough money (even before the contract problem) this may make distributors wary. They all want to make money. Somebody else suggested a DVD from the Munich Archives containing THE DEEP etc but nothing has emerged so far.

[Wellesnet]

Merchant to be shown at MOMA in November, along with the DEEP work print:
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film ... ings/25395

[Le Chiffre]

Review of the Lido screening by Alessandro Aniballi (translated from Italian):

Maybe you can’t do better, but you can definitely do less: the restoration of the Merchant of Venice presented at the Lido cannot be defined as a perfect example of philogical or historically accurate operation, full as it is of additional items unrelated to the film itself. Will we see it in the future without any tinsel?

After the first notes, which were written warm on September 2 (see here , in our minute-by-minute), we took a few days to reflect on the restoration of the Merchant of Venice by Orson Welles, presented as a pre-opening of the 72nd edition of the Venice Cinema coupled with the Italian version of 'Othello. We felt it was right to let the impressions settle, yet the underlying feeling - now that the festival is almost over - remains the same, substantially unchanged.

The huge anticipation for the opportunity to be able to witness a new unreleased work of Orson Welles (of which less than ten minutes had been previously known) has become a very black disappointment in the face of a restoration that, for fear of showing it in it’s unfinished state, is made up of many - too many - elements foreign to the film itself.

Yes, perhaps one must speak of this horror of showing things in an unfinished state, because what has been found again and never before seen in the archives of Cinemazero, is probably not enough to sufficiently outline the nature of this fourth and final Wellesian foray into the cosmogony of Shakespeare. But in reality, it seems that there is another underlying problem: the very act of assessing whether the minutes available of the Merchant are sufficient to give us an idea of how it could be is currently an impossible task, because what we saw at the Lido, with all the various additions that have been made more or less arbitrarily from other sources, was guided by a policy that seems not to shine for accuracy to the original Welles project; far from it.

The context in which was born this version of The Merchant of Venice, one of the episodes produced by CBS for the series Orson's Bag, we have already talked about a month ago (see here ). It was therefore a television adaptation which had to respect a maximum term of not more than forty minutes per episode. And Merchant is said to have been completed, so that there was a private screening, but then several rolls of film were stolen afterwards.

As we saw at the Lido it takes 35 minutes; But unfortunately, this does not mean that it lacks only five minutes to get to have all the Merchant. In fact, one of the great hoaxes of this restoration, conducted primarily by Stefan Drössler the Munich Film Museum (which manages all of Welles' unfinished), is to have also inflated the playing time, through captions, still images, and so forth.

However, to begin to clarify the situation, let's briefly list what, in our opinion, was added in an arbitrary fashion:
- the opening words of Welles on the gondola,
- captions placed from time to time to report some of the dialogue of which they have not managed to find the sound track (like a silent film, and thus interrupting the thought assembly of Welles)
- the inclusion of excerpts from a radio play from 1938 in which Welles played Shylock and that again was used to fill moments without audio,
- the music of Lavagnino, also found recently and inserted obsessively without dramaturgical criteria
- the final freeze-frame on the face of Welles in the role of Shylock while in voiceover is heard, yet again, an excerpt from the ’38 radio play, the famous monologue of the usurer jew.

All these additional elements have thus helped create a new layer, below which Orson Welles' original material winds up being buried. This is to say nothing of other risky interventions, for example, the decision to try to imitate the digital effects made at the time by Welles at Truka Studio (whose process has already been described by the film editor, Mauro Bonanni). In fact, the American filmmaker had found an ingenious solution to emphasize the loneliness and bitterness of the defeat of Shylock (abandoned and robbed by his daughter Jessica): have him walking the streets of Venice while the carnival was in progress, with it’s bursts of fireworks' artifice, whose reflections of colored light would illuminate from time to time the figure of the loan shark. Well, the effects produced by Welles have not been found and so they have tried to recreate them digitally, with very coarse results: the patches of color, in fact, appear jerky, stiff, and do not go off smoothly as it usually happens for fireworks. This may seem like just a detail, but it also seems to be a very significant modus operandi of Stefan Drössler, whose intent is to reconstruct what he himself wanted to do, rather then to restore Welles. But the fact is: no one can have the right to do this, and no one can know exactly how Welles would have done a certain thing, so what is found of his should be left as it is, unless there are precise indications (such as for the full version of Touch of Evil, which we discussed recently with editor Walter Murch ).

If we were to identify the intervention that most of all it seemed anti-philological, this should certainly be identified in the decision to enter into the soundtrack of audio excerpts from the aforementioned radio drama of 1938. Moreover, it will be thought, that it’s OK, since it was also a Merchant of Venice by Welles. But have they not considered the fact that after thirty years Welles might have decided to change something of Shakespearean text? It was not expected that the voice on the radio must be by its nature more stentorian than the film because the microphone in that case is the only tool available to the actor? And that therefore, the acting is completely different? Wasn’t there a realization of the enormous difference in the quality of the material, so that when we get to the recording of '38 it seems that the voices are coming from a gramophone in the next room? All this by the way happens during one of those few fragments which disallows us to fully appreciate the work of Welles; that is, when Shylock speaks with Antonio. Unfortunately, the soundtrack of the last part of this sequence has not been found, and so - in the middle of the scene - you hear voices completely different. Let it be said frankly: the effect is grotesque.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is what happens in the last few minutes of the film, when it the radio play recurs again; and in an apparent inability to comply with all the sores, the choice has been made to instead make a grueling freeze-frame of Welles, in the role Shylock. So this 1938 voice becomes the voiceover, with disastrous consequences. So they who have created this "Frankenstein" felt they needed to put in place at all costs the famous soliloquy ("But a jew has no eyes? A Jew has no hands, organs, dimensions, senses …”). A monologue that evidently was not present in the audio material recently found and about which we cannot know if it was even in the script - found in late June. But, beyond the fact that the monologue was never intended as the final word in any kind of adaptation of the Merchant (Shakespeare puts it in the first scene of the third act), there is a question: what if Welles had decided to remove that scene? Of course, it is very difficult to think it so, but the fact is that if a part - albeit very important - is something you can not find, then rather than opting for a fetish substitute, it is much better to just not put anything.

The last huge concern that we want to point to concerns the opening words, that minute and a half in which Welles rides in a gondola in Venice for a long time and occasionally you can see views of typical buildings set against the water of the lagoon. It seemed immediately apocryphal material, especially for the visual rhythm - there are long shots, zooms that are quite clumsy - a completely different pace from the typical assembly of Orson Welles from that period. After the screening we contacted Mauro Bonanni who, as we mentioned, had edited both the Merchant that the other episodes of the CBS special, and who revealed that he had never seen those pictures. His hypothesis is that Welles had filmed them in order to use them, perhaps as a simple connection between one episode and another, to create a smoother continuity. This means that those images would probably have had, passing over them, superimposed titles or the head or tail of one episode or another. This is is very likely because, even in a previous series for TV (Around the World With Orson Welles), the American filmmaker had used this mechanism, putting himself in front of the camera as he went by train.

It is possible, however, that there are extenuating circumstances for this new restoration: the limited time available and the fact that the script has been found only in late June (but then what help can a script give for a work of Welles, since he changed constantly jokes, scenes, situations?). But in any case, we cannot accept the approach that has been put to this material, because every possible idea of reconstruction is unrealistic (Drössler, during the presentation at Lido, also mentioned the idea - which was then fortunately discarded - to create new voiceovers for actors' parts without sound), and so we feel they should first eliminate the trappings that have been added and undertake a real philological (historically accurate) restoration.

Until then everything remains suspended. Only then can we talk of the Merchant of Venice in terms of aesthetic analysis; as it stands now you can not think about the genius of Welles on camera, putting on stage makeup while becoming the abused Shylock in real time before our eyes. For now we can speak neither of this nor other aesthetic solutions. Everything is suspended until someone responds to this question: is another restoration possible?

************

[Jedediah Leland]

that minute and a half in which Welles rides in a gondola in Venice for a long time and occasionally you can see views of typical buildings set against the water of the lagoon. It seemed immediately apocryphal material, especially for the visual rhythm - there are long shots, zooms that are quite clumsy - a completely different pace from the typical assembly of Orson Welles from that period. After the screening we contacted Mauro Bonanni who, as we mentioned, had edited both the Merchant that the other episodes of the CBS special, and who revealed that he had never seen those pictures. His hypothesis is that Welles had filmed them in order to use them, perhaps as a simple connection between one episode and another, to create a smoother continuity.

Is this the fabled "lost" footage that Graver shot of Welles going through Venice's canals for 'Filming Othello', revisiting all the old 'Othello' locations, which reputedly went missing before they assembled the footage in 1977-8? You see a few seconds in 'Working With Orson Welles', but my understanding is that this had always been missing. Could it possibly have been included among all the material unearthed in Italy?

[Le Chiffre]

That's a good possibility, but it's probably too late to incorporate it into FILMING OTHELLO, unless specific instructions were written down somewhere by Welles.

[Roger Ryan]

It does seem that all the film material Welles claimed was lost or stolen from the late 60s through the mid-70s has all been found in one place!

[jbrooks]

I just came from the Stefan Droessler's presentation of "The Merchant of Venice" at the Museum of Modern Art. I thought the restoration was wonderful. The image is a revelation. It's not perfect but it's a vast improvement over the workprint footage in "One Man Band." There are some color timing issues here and there and some grainier bits, but for the most part, it looks wonderful. It is colorful and sharp and often looks perfect -- like a newly struck print of a well preserved film from the 1960s.

As for the soundtrack, Droessler has replaced the missing dialogue with dialogue from Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater Record of the play. In contrast to Alessandro Aniballi's assessment above, I thought this worked quite well. It's not a perfect solution obviously, but I think it works and is probably preferable to trying to overdub the footage with new actors. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised at how close the line readings from 1938 fit the filmed scenes. I also think the music score works pretty well, though I would probably have to see it again to fully evaluate the score.

The film itself is difficult to judge because it's incomplete. It's a very truncated version of the play, and on top of that, the end of the film itself is missing. Welles apparently intended the film to end with Shylock's "I am a Jew speech." Apparently that scene was never shot -- so Droessler plays the 1938 recording of the speech over a black screen. The 1938 version of the speech works well enough, but I'm not sure that Welles' truncated version of the play is satisfying.

The film has many great shots. It feels like it was shot on a small scale and with TV in mind, but it is obvious that it was Welles behind the camera. It plays like Othello-lite. Also, Welles' performance is wonderful. I think it's one of his greatest performances.

Less wonderful is the character of Jessica. The film is apparently set in the 1800s but Jessica's hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe scream 1969! It's like one of those old Star Trek episodes where the space aliens look like they stepped out of the pages of a 1960s fashion magazine. Also, I don't think the fireworks and carnival inserts work very well -- but those are minor quibbles.

It was a great privilege to be able to see this film in a great print in a semi-complete form. This is a significant addition to Welles' body of work both as a director and as an actor. Congratulations to Stefan Droessler and his team for doing a terrific job.

[jbrooks]

To clarify, only about one third of the original dialogue is missing. The original dialogue exists for the other 2/3rds or so. It's only the missing portions that are replaced by dialogue from the 1938 recording (with inter-titles used for two or three lines that presumably weren't included in the 1938 recording). Some might find the switch from the 1960s voices to the 1938 recording jarring. But -- if one is forewarned -- I think it works fine. The quality of the 1938 recording is surprisingly great, and Stefan Droessler and his team did a great job editing and synching it with the soundless portions of the film.

Also, the film itself is preceded by an introduction by Welles. It was filmed in Venice, and it shows Welles getting off a boat and going over to a chair and makeup table, where he introduces the play as he puts on his Shylock makeup. It then cuts to him doing a drawing of Shylock while he continues to discuss the play. As with the film itself, the soundtrack for half the introduction is missing. But the script apparently remained, and Droessler was able to replace the missing portions of the soundtrack with intertitles. Incidentally, this introduction is not the footage of Venice that Welles shot for possible use in "Filming Othello." This introduction was clearly intended to introduce "Merchant of Venice" to a tv audience. Droessler, however, does have possession of some Venice material that appears as though it was intended for inclusion in "Filming Othello." Droessler showed some of that footage last night as well. And he also showed us Welles' contract for "Filming Othello" in which Welles specifically references the fact that he had filmed some Venice material for the film but that the material had gone missing.

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for the fascinating rundown, jbrooks. I’m glad you found it more enjoyable then Allesandro did. His objections make him sound like more of a purist than I am, as I, like you, don’t necessarily have a problem either with the use of other sources like the old radio program to fill in the gaps of missing material. It all depends on how well it’s done, and from what you say, it sounds like it’s been done pretty well by Drossler and Munich.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, however, but I don’t think Welles’s MERCHANT OF VENICE was ever intended to be seen as a standalone work. It was intended to be seen as the final part of “ORSON’S BAG”, so all the various and wonderful restorations that the Munich museum has already done of the material for that TV special (including SWINGING LONDON and VIENNA) should really be seen together with the new MERCHANT restoration.

The intro to MERCHANT that you mentioned, where he puts on the Shylock makeup while introducing the character, seems not only a neat “back-in-time” twist on the previous intros to the other city segments, but it also sounds reminiscent of the Falstaff bit he did on The Dean Martin Show, which can be seen on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ6v7GHYDbM

This is something that was discussed recently in another thread on the recent photobook from Italy:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2572

Of course, having it as a standalone work is infinitely better then not having it at all, and it’s great to hear that the restoration has been done well. I look forward to seeing it myself, hopefully soon.

[Wellesnet]

Joe Bendel on the MoMA Merchant showing (From "JB Spins):
http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2015/11/unk ... enice.html

Aside from a rather jaunty opening, in which Welles triumphantly returns to Venice (where he also shot Othello) lounging in a gondola, the film is probably the closest in tone to Welles’ The Trial. The entire city seems to be conspiring against Shylock, while wearing sinister carnival masks that weirdly bring to mind Eyes Wide Shut.

John Touhy (From Wellesnet Facebook):

I was at the Merchant of Venice screening tonight. The people who were in the standby line all made it in, so if you are interested in seeing The Deep, I would just show up and get in the standby line. The lecture and reconstructed footage were well worth seeing. MoV was obviously not a finished Welles film, but the reconstruction gave an idea of what he had in mind in adapting the play. And Welles' performance as Shylock was quite moving. Stefan Droessler's presentation and the clips he shared powerfully conveyed the struggles that Orson Welles went through to make his films, as well as the man's sensitivity and intelligence. I left MOMA admiring Welles more than ever. If you are a fan of Welles and can catch one of the remaining presentations, you owe it to yourself to attend.

Drucker (From the Criterion Forum):

It was more of a lecture than anything else, but the restored Merchant of Venice is certainly the best looking color film I've seen from Welles. Stylistically, it was very similar to Immortal Story, but I actually found it better and more powerful overall. The most interesting thing about the restoration is that a whole reel of sound elements is missing (from the important Shylock speech, no less). But Welles had recorded the speech as part of a record series for Columbia records in the 1930s. It just so happens, as well, that he didn't change ANY of the lines from his recording of the speech, but did rearrange them. So the missing sound elements were dubbed in from a recording from 1938, and it really wasn't too bad!