Intermediality in Orson Welles's shakespearean collage: Competing narrative modes and media in chimes at midnight

Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965) performs a cinematic collage. It adapts several early modern texts across genres and authors, comprising multiple Shakespeare plays, including histories and a comedy; and comprising a history proper, too, as it integrates Holinshed's Chronicles as well.1 The film, moreover, incorporates several narrative modes, which are linked by their shared concern with the past. Indeed, scholars have long observed that Chimes at Midnight positions itself as a sustained meditation on memory and history. Jack J. Jorgens, for instance, states that the film "show[s] the fifteenth century filtered through memory and imagination" (110); and Andrew M. McLean writes that the film "leadfs] the viewer to an understanding of his place in history and of the forces of history as they operate in life" (197). But critics overlook the tension between memory and history in the film. And this reflects a more general oversight in critical treatments of Chimes at Midnight, which have not fully grasped the contests the film stages between and among its various narrative modes and media.Michael Anderegg recognizes one dimension of the inter-medial tension in the film when he contends that the "governing strategy" of Chimes at Midnight is "the rewriting of Shakespeare's text, a rewriting that includes an attempted erasure of writing, a critique of rhetoric, indeed an undermining of language itself" (126). Robert H. Bell takes this recognition further, arguing that "Welles's film [Chimes at Midnight] comprises a critique of language, in ways that resemble the movement beyond language toward spectacle" (20). Anderegg's focus on the film's writing is instructive, and Bell astutely suggests that the film "critiques" writing to ultimately privilege its own visual medium. But Bell does not flesh out just how it does so, and neither critic explains the carefully wrought relationships between the film's multiple writings and narrative modes and media. It is my purpose in this essay to demonstrate how Chimes at Midnight effectively organizes its different narrative modes and media-including memory, history, writing, theater, sound, image, and, more broadly, film-establishing a cinematic hierarchy through various narrative contests that announce themselves at the very outset of the film. In the first section of what follows I will demonstrate how the film presents a logic of containment and displacement to assert its own cinematic predominance among several media, effectively reworking memory, history, writing, and theater in its own moving image.2 In my second section I will explain how the film stages a sustained inter-medial contest between sound ancf image by thematizing it through what Dean A. Hoffman astutely explains as the film's "comprehensive engagement with a matrix of shifting power relations" in Shakespeare's and Holinshed's texts (104).3 I will conclude by expounding Falstaffs key symbolic role in the film's inter-medial dynamics.Welles expressed his investment in the inter-medial aspect of Chimes at Midnight in an interview about the film. When asked by Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio how he conceives scenes, Welles responds, "Music. Music and poetry. It's that rather than simply visual" (160). He goes on to suggest that the visual comes out of these media, saying, "With me, the visual is a solution to what the poetical and musical form dictates"; a solution, as I will conceive it here, to the competing demands of the poetical and musical forms or, as I will call them, the written and aural modes of the film (Cobos and Rubio 160). The visual and kinetic image is also a solution to several other medial modes in the film. Resolving and regulating the "dictates" of the written, aural, and theatrical media as well as the memorial and historical narrative modes that make up Chimes at Midnight, the visual, I will argue, is a "solution" to all of them, indeed the filmic solution of all of them, produced by their admixture, and so contains them all. …