Macbeth (Vol. 69) | Arthur Lindley (essay date 2001)
Arthur Lindley (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: Lindley, Arthur. “Scotland Saved from History: Welles's Macbeth and the Ahistoricism of Medieval Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2001): 96-100.
[In the following essay, Lindley considers Orson Welles's film version of Macbeth as a powerful influence on later filmic representations of the European Middle Ages.]
I want to consider Welles's Macbeth in a different frame from the usual ones, viewing it less as a Shakespearean or Wellesian film than as a medieval one. From its opening words, the film stakes a claim to historicity—claiming to depict the period of Christianity's first penetration of a barbarian world—that is belied by virtually everything that follows: the visual invocations of westerns and film noir, the anachronistic grotesqueries of costuming, the fabular simplification of character to the demands of a parable about the resistible rise of gothic...
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