Macbeth: How now, you secret, black and midnight hags,
I conjure you by that which you profess, however you come to know it - answer me.
Though you untie the winds and let them fight against the churches;
though the yeasty waves confound and swallow navigation up;
through bladed corn by lodg'd and trees blown down,
though castles topple on their warders heads;
though palaces and pyramids do slope their heads to their foundations;
though the treasure of nature's germens tumble all together,
even till destruction sicken - answer me!
Stephen Regan: What do you find particularly impressive about the Orson Welles' Macbeth?
Kiernan Ryan: Well certainly the black and white manages to make you feel as though...
you're imprisoned in some almost hallucinatory internal universe.
I mean there were strange cavernous underground corridors or rooms,
it's a kind of interior landscape , a 'paysage intérieur' as the French call it,
so as if you're almost moving around inside the subconscious of a character himself…
..when he sinks to the lowest depths of despair, in particular,
so I think that there is something hallucinatory and dreamlike about Shakespeare anyway,
and I think the use of black and white, of monochrome really can evoke that…
..in a way that technicolour often doesn't manage to because of its association…
..with a more naturalistic reproduction, photographic, kind of realism.
The use of shadow and silhouette is very effective in the Welles,
(Stephen Regan) particularly when those shadows coincide with…
..moments in Macbeth's speeches, references to light and darkness.
Sue Wiseman: But in a certain way they're extraordinarily powerful even though...
they're moralised in almost the same way as you find in a Western,
and they were working on a Western set, in that very early…
..the beginning of the light and shade is when he's sitting talking to Banquo...
(Sue Wiseman) ..they're having their conference, he's at the front of the stage…
(Sue Wiseman) ..as it were, or the camera, and yet he's dark, whereas Banquo is light,
(Sue Wiseman) and at the back, and the relationship between the black and white…
(Sue Wiseman) ..as it were, all the way through, works in tension,
(Sue Wiseman) ..but does work always so the lighter is the morally good quality and…
(Sue Wiseman) ..and it seemed extraordinary to get a richness out of that…
(Sue Wiseman) ..while working with a very simple as it were black and white morality.
(Sue Wiseman) It seems amazing.