Othello

Dimitri Buchowetzki's Othello, shot at Berlin's Johannisthal Studios for Wörner-Film and released by UFA, is the first major silent adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy. Emil Jannings plays the Moor as a reserved, almost inward figure; Werner Krauss's Iago scampers through Karl Machus's palaces like a stage Vice, planting the handkerchief and staging the jealousy. Buchowetzki opens before Shakespeare's first scene, giving Iago a motive the play famously withholds. Without the verse, the film has to translate rhetoric into gesture and décor. Jannings would soon be Hollywood's first Best Actor; Krauss had already been Caligari.