Chimes At Midnight

Orson Welles - 1965
Have I ever really seen Shakespeare before? Have I lived with art? Welles kickstarts my heart, injects with his syringe of pure cinema elan vital into Shaekspeare's words. Huge long, yet intimate, tracks through rooms as we dance with the people in the enviroment lacking in adornment. Welles is a master of architecture, understanding the geometry of a place, in off-centre framings putting people there. One of the very few true historians. Little camera movements, not so much reframings as the joy of the parlour, of the world, of living in a body.
Straight up dramatic framings are here, off centre often, many low angles. There is a remarkable use of white, with the hrash light on Falstaff's wracked, hairy face. Also note the white robes, and those incredible shafts that do not dazzle but hold up the cathedral.
How does one see a Cathedral? Do I live in it, or do a walk around a museum, a monument? How can me, blood moving of its own accord, continue in this place? What is a battle? Here the scenes are fast-cut chaos, no idea who is who, battle scenes rolling in mud while Falstaff in that huge armour runs around humourosuly. Terrible and absurd.
The language is difficult to pick up, especially as I don't know the plays. The camera stills for moments when we pay special attention (and silence comes in, or rather bursts through at moments, incredibly powerfully).
The film, Shakespeare and Welles' dream, concerns legacy; Hal's strange inversions/ playacting with Falstaff, the father and son rolls and how they play out, copying, breaking from the other.
Did I understand, for me did Shakespeare live, after the nineteenth century does Shakespeare live, except through Welles? The two men's relation, Welles taking Shakespeare; Welles loves, the rest of the world has before only had admiration. Skaespeare is alive, because he is now modernist, or relates to the modernist world rather. How do we have art, the world as the place of our fathers, cold dead stones, products of labour? How do we live among them, where is life breathed into them, can it be?
It is at once breaking from the past, but in the same old enviroments. Welles is discussing happenings, the situationists before they even existed, urban events, counterculture. The life in the old stones; does one feel 'better' than the dead, for being alive? Where is the life, where is the blood, in Shakespeare or in us? What is a word, is it alive?