In his book, “Cinema Yesterday and Today,” Réné Clair praised the 1922 Othello as “a film composed with so much intelligence that it can win over the enemies of adaptation.... It may be imagined that the author, imbued with the spirit of the text...thought solely of the images it summoned up. That is the only method of adaptation.... Emil Jannings is an Othello who makes no concessions to the practices of the Opéra. Black-skinned...clumsily sensual, he becomes a stupid child driven by...an almost clownish Iago (Werner Krauss) (whose) monologues and treacherous words...are here translated into movements....” Russian director Dimitri Buchowetzki emigrated after the October Revolution to Germany where he became a noted director of costume dramas.