Year: 1967
Country: Soviet Union
Director: Fyodor Khitruk
IMBD: Link

Language : No Language





Khitruk began to work on Othello 67 after being invited to participate in the Expo 1967 in Montreal with a short inspired by the Expo theme “The Man and his World.” The only condition for the submission was that the footage would not exceed a minute long. Eventually, Khitruk’s film together with eleven other selected shorts were compiled into one movie, The World of Man, by Albert Fisher.

The idea for Othello 67 was to represent a condensed version of Shakespeare’s timeless drama. Portraying the tragedy in sixty seconds was a challenging task for Khitruk and art director Sergei Alimov; but at the end, they released a film that, more than about Othello, was a satirical comment on contemporary society.

The film follows a trend of short films burgeoning in the 1960s, among which Khitruk seems mostly influenced by those made by Ion Popescu-Gopo. The Romanian director created films encapsulating stories condensed to an extreme already in the late 1950s (see his Short History, Scurta istorie, 1956); he then further matured a “theory of expressive synthesis” that favored films in the form of animated sketches as short as
fifteen seconds, which he would call “film-pills.” These laconic satirical miniatures presented poignant topical problems and sharp caricatures. As in this trend, Khitruk presented an extremely abridged version of Othello, which becomes a parody not of the drama represented, but rather of the presentation of the drama itself. Despite its brevity, the film has a structure with a beginning, development, and resolution. A driver arrives at a tollbooth, deposits a coin in a screen under the sign “Don’t Waste Your Time,” and in fifty seconds he consumes a sped-up version of Shakespeare’s Othello.

As soon as the film ends, the spectator takes off and disappears in the same fast traffic and labyrinth of streets he came from.

The effect is quite humorous, although the critique is certainly explicit. The film, however, only hints at a deeper criticism of contemporary society that Khitruk would explore further in his later film The Island (1973).

As in all his animated films, the art director Alimov emphasized the conventionality of the images, eschewing a naturalistic representation of reality, focusing instead on conventionalized background, essential details
and most of all flat figures. In Othello 67, Alimov and Khitruk follow this tendency in an extreme laconic way. The characters of the play turn into flat marionettes, their gestures are stylized and accelerated, and the dramatic action synthesized. A theatre stage functions as backdrop to the action; only its color shifts according to the change of act, which is delineated by fleeting titles. The stage is dotted with very limited details and a solid background that accentuates the flattening effect. The characters talk through the incomprehensible sound of a sped-up recording device and swift speech bubbles, which appear and disappear too fast to decode. The spectator does not have enough time to follow and understand what occurs on the screen, but the choice of colors in the background as well as in the characters’ clothing conveys the mood of each act and underlines the nature of each character, especially the dark Iago.

Even the spectators at the booth look like the puppets on the screen, with their quick way of life. A parallel is drawn between the consumption of culture in a pill form and a lifestyle that reaches such a level of speed that it turns the inhabitants into automatons. The film provides a surrogate of a tragedy obtaining a double effect on the original work by Shakespeare and its performance. Not only does a theatre staging, which is by nature not reproducible, become a mechanical reproduced commodity, but its condensed form amplifies the distance from the original play, doubting the value of the result. Thus, the film not only questions the mechanical reproducibility of a work of art in Benjaminian terms but offers a criticism on the reasoning behind any attempt to reduce works of art into a quickly consumable format. Besides, the method of consumption prevents the communal experience of the fruition of the work, reducing it to an isolated experience that does nothing but increasingly estrange the spectator in an already alienating society.

The challenge Khitruk undertook in making this extremely short film was not only a problem but became the theme of the work. Criticism on the speed and alienation that characterize modern society is a theme that will appear again in various forms in Khitruk’s following films, the wittier and lighter of which is the one focused on the cinema world, Film Film Film, which followed soon after. (Laura Pontieri)

[ About file ]

Name: Othello 67.Fyodor Khitruk.1967.WEB-DL.mkv
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:33:51 +0200
Size: 26,002,069 bytes (24.797505 MiB)

[ Magic ]

File type: Matroska data
File type: EBML file, creator matroska

[ Generic infos ]

Duration: 00:00:50 (49.992 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:07:06 +0200
Total tracks: 2
Track nr. 1: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) {und}
Track nr. 2: audio (A_AAC) {eng}
Muxing library: libebml v1.4.5 + libmatroska v1.7.1
Writing application: mkvmerge v88.0 ('All I Know') 64-bit

[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Width: multiple of 32
Height: multiple of 8
Average DRF: 14.740184
Standard deviation: 2.201654
Std. dev. weighted mean: 1.81234

[ Video track ]

Codec ID: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Frame aspect ratio: 16:9 = 1.777778
Pixel aspect ratio: 1:1 = 1
Display aspect ratio: 16:9 = 1.777778
Framerate: 23.976024 fps
Stream size: 25,181,891 bytes (24.015323 MiB)
Duration (bs): 00:00:50 (49.924875 s)
Bitrate (bs): 4035.165428 kbps
Qf: 0.081163

[ Audio track ]

Codec ID: A_AAC
Sampling frequency: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Stream size: 799,880 bytes
Bitstream type (bs): AAC Null
Frames (bs): 0
Duration (bs): 00:00:00 (0 s)
Chunk-aligned (bs): Yes
Sampling frequency (bs): 0 Hz
Mode (bs): unknown

[ Video bitstream ]

Bitstream type: MPEG-4 Part 10
User data: x264 | core | 155 | r2901 | 7d0ff22
SPS id: 0
Profile: High@L4
Num ref frames: 2
Aspect ratio: Square pixels
Chroma format: YUV 4:2:0
PPS id: 0 (SPS: 0)
Entropy coding type: CABAC
Weighted prediction: No
Weighted bipred idc: B slices - implicit weighted prediction
8x8dct: Yes
Total frames: 1,197
Drop/delay frames: 0
Corrupt frames: 0

P-slices: 471 ( 39.348 %) ########
B-slices: 705 ( 58.897 %) ############
I-slices: 21 ( 1.754 %)
SP-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)
SI-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)

[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 14.740184
standard deviation: 2.201654
max DRF: 21

DRF<8: 0 ( 0.000 %)
DRF=8: 1 ( 0.084 %)
DRF=9: 6 ( 0.501 %)
DRF=10: 4 ( 0.334 %)
DRF=11: 114 ( 9.524 %) ##
DRF=12: 105 ( 8.772 %) ##
DRF=13: 40 ( 3.342 %) #
DRF=14: 116 ( 9.691 %) ##
DRF=15: 519 ( 43.358 %) #########
DRF=16: 131 ( 10.944 %) ##
DRF=17: 35 ( 2.924 %) #
DRF=18: 19 ( 1.587 %)
DRF=19: 85 ( 7.101 %) #
DRF=20: 11 ( 0.919 %)
DRF=21: 11 ( 0.919 %)
DRF>21: 0 ( 0.000 %)

P-slices average DRF: 13.467091
P-slices std. deviation: 2.344637
P-slices max DRF: 21

B-slices average DRF: 15.687943
B-slices std. deviation: 1.43183
B-slices max DRF: 21

I-slices average DRF: 11.47619
I-slices std. deviation: 2.647893
I-slices max DRF: 18

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 10-05-2026 01:16:32