Entries associated with the tag "Orson Welles":

Thanks to Reader webmaster Whet Moser, here's a scene from Welles's Don Quixote, preceded by a few comments from me from an upcoming interview, "Unseen Orson Welles." As I mention in the last chapter of my book, contrary to the claim of some Italian critics that this sequence is derived from the attack on several windmills in Part 1, Chapter 8 of the Cervantes novel, I think it can be traced more plausibly back to Quixote's attack on a puppet theater in Part 2, Chapter 26--although, as with other scenes in Welles's film, it's a very free adaptation. Meanwhile, the Australian film critic Adrian Martin has kindly sent me a short text (pasted below this sequence) by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a provocative reading of both this scene and the novel. (I've just recalled that the girl in the film is named Dulcie, supporting Agamben's assumption about her identity.)

"Unseen Orson Welles: a conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum" airs on CANTV, Channel 19, on Sunday, October 21, at 5 PM and then again on Monday, October 22, at noon. The interviewer is Mara Tapp. Update: The entire interview is available here.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle--a kind of gallery--is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them--to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea--whom we saved--cannot love us. --Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

As more and more buried treasures have been brought to light on the Internet, half a dozen recent finds seem especially worthy of notice:

 1. We still don't have access to the original version of John Cassavetes' Shadows after critic Ray Carney tracked down the only existing print and showed a video of it twice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2004. I was lucky enough to see it at the time, and even though I regard it more as a fascinating and historically important curiosity than as a lost masterpiece, I agree with Carney, and disagree with Cassavetes' widow, Gena Rowlands, that it should be available to the general public. In the meantime, however, Carney has posted three clips of this version on his website (scroll down a bit). What he's made available is only a little over four and a half minutes from the film, and Carney's name and URL are stamped on every frame, but it's still enough to give one a taste of Charlie Mingus's eccentric original score (especially during the credit sequence)--and enough to support Carney's thesis that this is a finished film, flaws and all, and not a mere work print.

2. On the same site, higher up, one can find links to an invaluable Danish web site with links to a good many interviews with filmmakers and critical pieces (including, I've just discovered, a couple of my own, on Alexander Dovzhenko and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema). There are also several filmed interviews on the same site and, even better, trailers by Godard for eight of his own features.

3. The treasures to be found at YouTube appear to be endless: Alain Resnais' first major short, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953, see photo), written by Chris Marker—admittedly without subtitles (though I've never seen a subtitled print);

4. Orson Welles's unreleased nine-minute trailer for F for Fake, starring his late cinematographer Gary Graver;

5. And three videos of the great jazz pianist Lennie Tristano playing at the Half Note in Manhattan, 1964, in a quintet with his two most gifted pupils, Warne Marsh (tenor sax) and Lee Konitz (alto sax). The visual quality of the videos may be atrocious, but I'm still grateful for these precious mementos, having caught this amazing group around the same time at what may have been the same gig.

6. Finally, as Dave Kehr recently reminded me on his own web site, you can access most of Orson Welles's major radio shows between 1937 and early 1940  for free at another excellent site.

I'd like to beat the drum a little for a terrific new book just published by University of California Press, Catherine Benamou's It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey, which is far and away the definitive book on It's All True, Welles's doomed documentary project about Latin America in the 1940s. Maybe the fact that the same publisher is bringing out a book of mine about Welles in a couple of months gives me a special interest in the subject; I should also note that Benamou, who's been working on her book for well over two decades, is an old friend. (She also arranged recently for the purchase of two major Welles collections by the University of Michigan, which are going by the name "Everybody's Orson Welles." I was privileged to be the first visitor to this mountain of material in Ann Arbor last summer, which is where I collected the stills used on my own book jacket.)

Some readers may be put off a bit by Catherine's academic language, but the fact remains that so much fresh and even startling information is available here—information that corrects countless myths—that if you care about Welles at all, you can't afford to ignore this book.

The received wisdom about It's All True, commonly known as Welles's Brazilian "misadventure," is that he got so carried away by partying at the carnival in Rio that he cost RKO a fortune without any clear plan in mind for the film. Benamou fully demonstrates that virtually none of this scenario is true, and it can be attributed to the studio's successful propaganda in justifying its firing of Welles—thereby dooming The Magnificent Ambersons as well as curtailing Welles's equally ambitious three-part documentary feature, which would have had other segments filmed in Mexico and Peru.

In fact, if Welles was staying up most nights, this was partly in order to meet with his Brazilian collaborators (mainly performers and researchers) to plan the next day's shooting, which would usually start around 8 AM. Arguably the true scandal of what he was doing was political—shooting a documentary whose major characters were all poor nonwhites, to the consternation of many government as well as studio officials.

I sent the following letter to the Atlantic last August. I'm not surprised it wasn't published. But I can't resist reproducing it now that Benjamin Schwarz, the magazine's literary editor and national editor, has shown further signs of his David Thomson idolotry while writing about Cary Grant in the current issue. This time Schwarz calls Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition, the "finest reference book on the movies." (He also offers some other debatable critical judgments, such as calling Sylvia Scarlett "a mess of a picture" rather than an exciting forerunner of the French New Wave in its daring mix of genres.) But before getting to his assertion about Thomson's book, let me reproduce my letter:   

"It seems sadly characteristic of the mainstream reviewing of film books in general and those about Orson Welles in particular that nonspecialists routinely take precedence over specialists--and that biographers who forgo original research for the sake of speculation or invention, and even admit to doing this, can be deemed superior to actual scholars, at least if their biases match those of the reviewers.

"I assume it’s on this basis that Benjamin Schwarz, in the course of reviewing Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: Volume II: Hello Americans, can deem David Thomson’s Rosebud—-a book that to my knowledge isn’t taken even halfway seriously by any Welles scholar including Callow (who doesn’t mention it once in the combined 1,147 pages of this book and its predecessor, The Road to Xanadu)--'the most astute assessment of Welles’s work and personality.'

"As a Welles scholar and critic, and the editor of This is Orson Welles (which Schwarz calls both 'penetrating' and 'tendentious'), I can’t claim to be disinterested. But I’m not asking for Thomson or Schwarz to convert to being simple fans or apologists. It’s legitimate to criticize Welles if the criticism is based on something other than mythology or mere hunches. So it seems reasonable to ask for some clarification about where Schwarz’s judgments are coming from.

 "My own conviction is that Welles’s life, working methods, career, and work have all created ideological disturbances that continue to resonate in our culture, and that it's the job of writers like Thomson to settle such disturbances with satisfying ('astute'?) ways of characterizing Welles. So I’d like to better understand the basis for Schwarz’s judgment.

"To be fair, Schwarz also calls Rosebud 'uneven,' 'idiosyncratic,' and 'superbly written,' none of which I’m quarreling with. But what does he mean, exactly, by Welles’s 'work' and 'personality'--or by his assumption that he and Thomson are qualified to arrive at meaningful conclusions about them? Substantial portions of what I consider Welles’s major work remain difficult or impossible for most people to see--including not just Chimes at Midnight but also Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind, not to mention such earlier works as The Fountain of Youth, Othello (with Welles’s original sound track), and Filming Othello. Thomson not only hasn’t seen Don Quixote or The Other Side of the Wind (which is perfectly excusable); he’s explicitly stated that he has no desire to—-and he shows no interest or even awareness about Othello’s separate versions. Filming Othello (mistitled The Making of Othello in Rosebud) receives a passing slam but no description or analysis, while The Fountain of Youth, a 50s TV pilot, is similarly dismissed as inconsequential without even a reference to its innovative style and method of storytelling. Are these the sort of assessments that Schwarz believes that other writers about Welles should be emulating? If so, why?

"As for Thomson’s treatment of Welles’s personality, he never met the man. Yet this doesn’t prevent him from arriving at conclusions about, for instance, Welles’s class and racial biases, backed up by nothing but wild suppositions and flatly contradicted by the statements of many people who actually knew Welles. What lessons, according to Schwarz, should these people be taking from Thomson about such matters?"

"Yours sincerely,

"Jonathan Rosenbaum" 

Now, an addendum on the subject of A Biographical Dictionary of Film: rather than focus on its omissions and denials, which I've already done elsewhere, I'd like to raise my eyebrows at the notion that the book, whatever its merits as criticism, is any kind of reference book at all. Apart from skeletal and often incomplete filmographies, its facts are few and far between.

Some very sad news from late last week: Gary Graver, the cinematographer who virtually made the last third of Orson Welles's filmography possible, died Thursday night of throat cancer. He’d been in the hospital since June, after shooting his last film, a short, in the south of France—work he characteristically insisted on doing, in spite of his poor health, out of friendship. For anyone who knew Gary, he was just about as selfless, as generous, and as unpretentious as it's possible for someone to be. I think it'll be years before many people realize just how much he did for Welles—which means how much he did for all of us, even though much of this work, such as The Other Side of the Wind, will remain unseeable until someone is willing to pay for its completion. (Among the better known films he shot were F for Fake.) When I was editing This Is Orson Welles, he was endlessly helpful, in every way imaginable.

His association with Welles started around 1969, when he basically turned up on Welles’s doorstep, offering not only to shoot whatever he wanted but to help him acquire the equipment he needed for doing so. A prolific director as well as cinematographer—his directorial credits alone on the Internet Movie Database number 131 titles, while the (incomplete) list of the films he shot comes to 183—Gary worked on all kinds of productions, though exploitation items tended to be his specialty. (According to film historian Joseph McBride, he worked for everyone from Edward D. Wood Jr. to Billy Wilder.)  His widow, Jillian, who phoned me with the news, says that a memorial of some kind for Gary is being planned for early next year in Los Angeles. Surely the best kind of tribute anyone could pay him would be to allow the public to see more of the work he did for Welles over the last decade and a half of Welles’s life, including The Other Side of the Wind. Showtime has been dickering over a deal for its completion for the last several years, and it’s galling to think that Gary never got to see this dream realized, even after decades of struggle.

He'll be deeply missed.