Examples Of Paganism In Othello

The dizzying camera drives the tortured and chaotic compositions that grotesque shadows and insane distortions, especially for Iago for he is the agent of chaos. In Shakespeare’s verbal terms Iago’s masterpiece is to reduce Othello’s lyricism to bursts of confused logic shattered syntax, obsessive repetitions and unconscious ponds of pulses. There is a total disintegration and the attempt of the camera to create that sense of vertigo, a feeling of tottering instability culminating of course in Othello’s epileptic seizures, the murder of Roderigo and Othello’s dizzying final fall.

In Venice, Iago’s attempt to sow discord in the scene of Othello’s marriage, he’s put as a shadow in the canal, lurking as a whisperer of a threat possibly. The
Venetian Christianity which in the movie can be seen, is overpowered by Paganism, as the images appear and the perverse use of Othello’s killing of Desdemona is a dark ritual as in if one recalls the wedding in Venice contrary to which Othello puts out the candles of the altar. The sound of the Cyprus winds, shouts of the echoing footsteps, slamming doors, they become so really loud, moving shadows therefore distorting the human figure. Characters are separated by tremendous distances, yet there is an increasing feeling of confinement. Ceilings bear down walls becoming of the world closing in. And in the play, one of Iago’s favourite images is that of the net, the snare, the web making him a fisherman, a hunter, a spider. With as little of web as this reliance, “snare as greater fly” as Iago says, and the camera holds that image before the eyes and plays variations on it. We see it through the grate which Desdemona passes to escape her father. The net that holds her hair in Cyprus, the ship’s rigging the rack of spears and in the fortress in the windows and doors both and Othello’s bedroom in the end and Iago is caught in his own mesh; always hovering above him is the iron cage, where the Sun will scorch him, the gulls would peck at his