Macbeth · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Before a single line of verse, three pairs of hands are working a lump of clay. The witches knead it into a little crowned man and stand the figurine up in the mud, and for a moment the whole tragedy fits in your palm — not a king who falls but a thing that was molded to fall. Welles puts the effigy first on purpose. Hold onto it and the film stops being a chronicle of Scottish politics and becomes something stranger and closer to the ground: a study of a man worked like clay by forces that were already shaping him before he opened his mouth.

Deleuze has a precise name for cinema built this way, and it isn't the one the old menu reaches for. He calls it the impulse-image, and its world he calls naturalism — not the polite naturalism of social detail but the brutal kind, where under the visible setting a savage realm of pure drive and appetite is always churning. He names that buried realm the originary world. The Scotland you see — dripping caverns, a throne sunk into a pit, forked pagan idols, Welles's invented Holy Father pressing a thin Christianity against the dark — is what Deleuze would call the derived milieu, the concrete crust. The clay and the fog are the originary world bleeding up through it. Macbeth doesn't reason his way to murder. He's drawn down a grade. Deleuze's term for that pull is the line of slope: an irreversible downward tilt toward exhaustion and death, and Welles makes it almost geological, his Macbeth growing heavier and more hollowed-out with every scene until he's less a character than a weight settling. This is why the impulse-image opens the film where psychology closes it. Look for nuance and Jeanette Nolan's cold-willed Lady and Welles's brooding Thane can seem crude. Look for drive and compulsion and the crudeness becomes the point: these are not people choosing, they are appetites running their course.

The texture that carries all this is the one Deleuze files under expressionism — the image where light and shadow do the acting and ordinary things take on a non-organic life of their own. John L. Russell (who would shoot Psycho a decade later) lights faces so they surface out of pure black and sink back into it; the studio fog turns every exterior into weather rather than place. In Deleuze's map of the silent schools this is the German line of montage, the one built not from colliding shots but from a continuous gradient of light into dark, where the menace lives in the smoke and the stone. The debt is unhidden. Caligari's painted, jutting caverns externalizing a sick mind are the literal grandparents of Fred Ritter's sets; Nosferatu's shadow-as-threat grammar is in the castle interiors; Faust's fog-and-chiaroscuro cosmos is in the witches' world; and the theatrical pitch Welles asks his cast to hold against stripped architecture comes straight off Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Welles isn't quoting these films. He's finishing an argument they started — that a face emerging from blackness, an affection-image held just long enough to register dread without discharging it into action, can carry a whole interior weather.

The sets matter in a second, Deleuzian way. These womb-like rock chambers don't function as settings for action; they're voids that swallow the human figure and keep it small. Deleuze calls such a space an any-space-whatever — a place drained of its ordinary purpose so that it registers as pure affect, dread with no address. Welles got there by accident and economy, shooting in three weeks on recycled sets, and turned poverty into ontology: the budget that couldn't build a real castle built an unreal one, which is the better one.

And then the strangest crack. To free his camera from live-sound noise — a trick borrowed wholesale from musical playback, the same technique Love Me Tonight had codified — Welles pre-recorded the entire soundtrack and had his actors mime to it. The result is voices that never quite sit inside the bodies, an incantatory verse that floats just off its speakers. Critics called it a flaw. It is closer to a premonition: a small disjunction of what you hear from what you see, the kind of loosening between sound and image that later cinema would build whole grammars of time upon. In a play that is nothing but prophecy and curse — speech arriving before its event — the disembodied voice is almost too apt.

What did Welles do to film with this? He proved Shakespeare on screen could be dream and drive rather than photographed theater or prestige enunciation. Olivier's Hamlet won the Oscars that year by aiming up at art; Welles aimed down into mud and superstition and made the cheaper, more cinematic thing. The studio recut it, softened the brogues, buried it for thirty years. What the restoration gave back was the original strangeness — an aristocratic order rotting from the inside, an expressionist nightmare that Welles would refine into Othello and Chimes at Midnight and that licensed every later filmmaker who treated tragedy as fog, ritual, and the slow firing of a clay man.

Watch it again for the effigy. Once you've seen that the witches make Macbeth before he makes himself, you can't unsee the hands at the start, and the whole film tightens around them.