Avant-garde Technique and the Visual Grammar of Sexuality in Orson Welles's Shakespeare Films

Authors

Daniel Juan Gil Texas Christian University

Abstract

This essay argues that Orson Welles develops an avant-garde visual grammar that is perfectly calibrated to represent the felt reality of an asocial sexuality that runs through Shakespeare's plays. Welles's films systematically depart from the norm of language-based, face-to-face intimacy that is represented by the shot/reverse shot convention. In turning against this social and cinematic norm, Welles opens a filmic space in which to show non-linguistic or pre-linguistic forms of bonding that are rooted in profound connections between bodies that combine aggression and love and that, unlike the normative ties embodied in the conventional shot/reverse shot, are framed as anything but foundational components of a functional social life.

Author Biography

Daniel Juan Gil, Texas Christian University

Daniel Juan Gil is Assistant Professor of English at TCU in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is the author of Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minnesota, 2006), as well as articles that have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, Modern Language Studies, and Common Knowledge. His scholarship focuses on the ways in which early modern representations of emotions define social connections that depart from the conventional social norms of early modern England.