Chimes at Midnight · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

In *Chimes at Midnight*, Orson Welles organizes the film's entire moral universe through **deep focus** — a technique he inherited from Gregg Toland on *Citizen Kane* (1941) and now bends to elegiac ends. Edmond Richard's lens holds Falstaff's tavern domain at every depth simultaneously: bodies press into one another in warm, cluttered layers, the camera fluid and intimate among them. Shift to Henry IV's court and the same optical sharpness now renders only cold geometry, pillars stretching into severe distance, the human figure diminished by stone. Depth that once celebrated fellowship becomes the measure of political isolation. But the film's deepest formal achievement is the **crystal-image**: Ralph Richardson's voice, reading Holinshed's chronicle over the action from the first frame, makes the present tense and the elegiac past indiscernible. What we watch unfolding — Hal's carousing, Hotspur's rebellion, Falstaff's raucous treasons — is simultaneously happening and already over, sealed in historical record. The actual and the virtual cannot be prised apart. This is precisely what Deleuze locates in Welles: time crystallized rather than narrated, the past preserved inside a present that knows it is already passing. What unifies these choices is **mise-en-scène** as thematic argument: the tavern sequences move among bodies with a fluid intimacy, while the court scenes impose hieratic stillness and geometric framing — two incompatible regimes of human existence made legible before Shakespeare's language even arrives.