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Monday, April 28
IT'S ALL TRUE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 28 Apr 2008 01:22 AM PDT
In 1942, right after he finished principal photography on his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons,
but before editing on it began, Orson Welles headed off to make a film
in Brazil promoting inter-American friendship. America was at war
and Welles had been convinced by the government that it was his
patriotic duty to undertake this assignment, designed to keep our
neighbors to the south from drifting into the sphere of Axis influence.
Welles, exempted from military service by various ailments, could
hardly have refused. He planned to make an omnibus film mixing
fictional and documentary episodes
-- a kind of essay on aspects of South American culture. He fell
in love with Brazil and groped his way slowly towards a form in which
to convey what he found there, finally settling on the history of the
samba as a key to the society.
His groping frustrated his corporate masters at RKO back in
Hollywood. They were also worried that much of his documentary
footage of Carnival and the samba clubs of Rio showed what they called
"jigaboos" mixing and dancing with white people. It was precisely
this racial diversity that Welles admired in the Brazilian culture.
Eventually RKO pulled the plug on the project. Welles was left
with one camera, no sound equipment, 40,000 feet of black-and-white
film and $10,000. Hoping to salvage something from the adventure,
he headed north to what was then the small coastal village of Fortaleza (below) to make a documentary-like reconstruction of a
legendary event in recent Brazilian history -- the 1500-mile voyage of
four fisherman on a crude sailing raft to present grievances to the
government in Rio.
The voyage made the four men national heroes, and they were received by
Brazil's strongman leader, a sort of populist dictator, who granted the
substance of their demands.
Welles shot most of the footage he needed for this film-within-a-film,
but was never allowed to edit it. After his death, the footage
was assembled into something presentable and included in a documentary
about Welles' ill-fated Brazilian project. The documentary is now
available on DVD:
The episode of the four fishermen, even crudely reconstructed, is
simply stunning. It may be the most beautiful semi-documentary
ever made. Eisenstein's very similar project, done in Mexico a
decade earlier, ¡Que Viva Mexico!, looks like static fashion photography by comparison. Four Men On A Raft, as Welles called the episode, also blows away the semi-documentaries of Robert Flaherty (like Nanook Of the North) and Michael Powell (The Edge Of the World.)
Welles's images are dynamic, lyrical, full of movement and yet also
convey a convincing documentary feel. They are cinematic poetry
of the highest order.
Simon Callow, in his multi-volume biography of Welles, says that if
Welles had shot nothing else in his life but this footage he would have
to be recognized as one of the supreme masters of cinema. This is
true.
While Welles was creating this miracle in Brazil, the executives at
RKO, with the aid of some of Welles' most trusted associates, were busy
mutilating The Magnificent Ambersons.
They blamed the collapse of the South American film on Welles's
procrastination and extravagance, even though he had not exceeded the
project's budget at the time it was scrapped. The vandalism of Ambersons
had a vindictive quality to it, to judge by internal RKO correspondence
on the subject, and the myth of Welles as an irresponsible artist,
created by RKO to justify its actions, which included the dismantling
of Welles' production unit at RKO, haunted him for the rest of his life.
RKO made a point of destroying the footage they cut from Ambersons, although Hollywood figures like David O. Selznick begged them to preserve it, but the It's All True footage somehow survived. It includes ravishing Technicolor sequences shot in Rio, some of which can be seen in the It's All True documentary . . . and the material for Four Men On A Raft. (The color images above are not from the film.)
Do
yourself a favor sometime and have a look at the material on the DVD --
unfinished as it is, it's still one of the treasures of 20th-Century
art.
Friday, April 25
WARSAW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 25 Apr 2008 03:34 AM PDT
[With plot spoilers . . .]
Mr. Arkadin,
Orson Welles's very strange film from 1955 (also known as Confidential Report), is a kind of parody of an
international suspense thriller -- with a cartoonish expressionism of
style that sometimes verges on the Gothic, on the perfectly preposterous. Welles plays
the fabulously wealthy tycoon Gregory Arkadin, a man who is not at all what he seems to be
-- and he plays him in a false nose and a bad beard and an even worse
wig that seem to make a joke of the whole proceedings.
Arkadin is ostensibly trying to keep the secret of his scandalous past
from his daughter, but this aspect of the story is barely dramatized
and totally unconvincing. We have no sense that the daughter has
anything invested in the image of her father as a respectable man, no
sense that she (or anybody else) sees him as a respectable man, and we're offered no psychological insight into why his daughter's good opinion of him matters to Arkadin.
But Welles never had much interest in psychology -- anymore than
Shakespeare did. For a great dramatist, psychology is always a
reductive science. Why does Hamlet pretend to be mad? To
make himself seem less threatening to Claudius? To amuse himself
with play acting? Os is it because he is mad, and knows he's mad,
and enjoys the black irony of pretending to be what he actually is?
There are no answers to these questions. People have been
psychoanalyzing Hamlet for 400 years precisely because Shakespeare
didn't.
There's no point in psychoanalyzing Arkadin, either -- he is a perfect
blank at the center of Welles's film. But, by a wonderful mystery hidden in the storyteller's art, we learn all we need to
know about him at the fringes of the film -- including his terrible
"secret", which, like the character of Arkadin himself, is not at all what it seems to be.
The clue to everything lies back in Warsaw, before 1927 -- the year in which
Arkadin claims he was afflicted with amnesia. We eventually learn that the
"amnesia" was self-induced. But what was he trying to forget?
The petty crook Arkadin hires to investigate his supposedly lost past
talks to people who knew Arkadin or his associates in
Warsaw. Although they are recalling a criminal underworld, they
all speak of Warsaw as though it was, in fact, a lost paradise -- now
(in 1955) locked behind the Iron Curtain, a place they can never revisit.
Finally, what "Warsaw" really means is revealed by Arkadin's old lover
there, now a faded beauty who speaks of him and of their time together as worth the
betrayal that ended it all. "Warsaw" is simply youth -- it's the
loss of this that Arkadin cannot abide. It's what has engendered
his vaguely incestuous obsession with his daughter, it's what leads
him to kill off all his old associates from Poland. Not to hide his
crimes but to wipe away the evidence of passing time, of the lost
paradise -- the evidence that he was a
lover once, that he had comrades-in-arms . . . a connection to other human beings.
Welles's performance as Arkadin offers us only one moment when real
emotion seems to grip the character. It's the moment when he
looks into the decayed face of his last surviving friend
from Warsaw -- and laughs, with an imperfectly disguised fury that is
genuinely chilling. When asked what it is he finds so funny,
Arkadin replies, "Old age."
The story of Mr. Arkadin had its origins in a script Welles wrote for an English radio series he starred in, The Lives of Harry Lime.
There the name of the man of mystery is Mr. Arkadian, with its clear
reference to Arcadia, the mythological paradise which is also used as a
synonym for death, as in the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego . . . "even
now I am in death."
In the film, Arkadin recounts a dream he has of walking through a
cemetery whose tombstones all record very brief lifespans. He
learns that they in fact record the spans of friendships -- these being
the true measures of a life. This is the graveyard Arkadin now
inhabits -- literally killing off his old friends is just his expression of
rage that they are dead to him already, and thus that he is dead.
The Latin phrase quoted above found its way into the Anglican Book Of Common Prayer,
in the burial service -- "In the midst of life we are in death."
That might serve as Arkadin's motto -- one he cannot accept.
In the end, scared of losing his last friend, his daughter, he kills
himself. Because of the oblique way Welles has chosen to tell his
tale, we feel no great emotion at this. But our minds keep
drifting back to the monologue about the old days delivered by
Arkadin's aging lover from Warsaw -- one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history. This is the narrow aperture
though which we get a glimpse of the real Mr. Arkadin, fleeting,
devastating, heartbreaking. Like Kane, he is, very simply, a lost
soul, bewildered and ultimately destroyed by his aloneness.
To have told us this in so many words would have been to trivialize the
insight. By making us tease it out for ourselves, feel it as a
haunting melancholy at the edge of consciousness, Welles takes us
inside Arkadin in a way Dr. Freud could never have managed.
Thursday, April 17
ORSON WELLES ON POPULAR ART
by
Lloydville
on Thu 17 Apr 2008 12:12 AM PDT
Nothing has ever been too good for the public.
Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.
Amen.
Sunday, April 13
CITIZEN KANE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 13 Apr 2008 08:44 AM PDT
Citizen Kane
is a hard film to "see". It's so alive with invention, so dense
with magical images (and camera tricks) that it's difficult to process
them in detail. The film also has a relentless narrative drive,
aided by visual, musical and other sound transitions of exceptional
virtuosity which keep one in a perpetual state of anticipation.
The rap on the film has always been that all this razzle-dazzle
distracts one from the fact that Kane is hollow at its center -- an
exercise in sensation rather than substance. This is a complaint
that was often made about Welles' stage productions -- that they were
thrilling while you were watching them but evaporated instantly from
the mind afterward. Pauline Kael saw Kane
as a magic show -- and a magic show is another kind of theatrical
experience that lives only in the moment, that has no artistic echo.
I myself disagree with this view of Kane.
There is a hollowness at the center of the film but it's the hollowness
of Kane himself, of the character -- not the actor who plays him or the
film's director (who of course are one and the same man.) The
sharp dialogue and knowing wit of the film, the insistent technical
bravura of the filmmaking, tend to disguise the fact that Kane is a grandly sentimental work, a work of great compassion and feeling.
I have no doubt that this sentiment and compassion came from Welles
himself, though he may have been steered into it sidewise by his
screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who put a lot of Welles into Kane under
the cover of the roman à clef
element that related the character to William Randolph Hearst.
Welles always said that the Rosebud theme was all Mankiewicz's doing,
and that he wasn't terribly fond of it himself. I would argue
that the Rosebud theme, far from being the artificial MacGuffin it's
often dismissed as, even by Welles, is in fact exactly what it seems to
be -- the key
to Charles Foster Kane and to the film. This may have been
something Welles could not admit because it struck such a deep nerve in
him.
Welles is often treated as a uniquely mysterious character, a mass of
irreconcilable contradictions, but I think this is no more true of
Welles than it is of Kane. Everything about Welles makes perfect
sense if you remember that he lost his mother, an adoring but demanding
woman, to jaundice when he was 9, and that he lost his father, by a
longer process, to alcoholism, which finally killed him when Welles was
15.
Welles cut himself off from his father six months before his death, in
an effort to get him to face his drinking problem, and never forgave
himself for the betrayal, for allowing his father to die alone and
estranged from him -- something he could never make up for. It's
not dime-store psychology to see these traumas as the forces which
fueled and warped the unfolding of Welles' genius -- they are primal
emotional events. And so with Kane's abandonment by his mother
and father.
The nostalgia for Rosebud, for what it represents, does sum up Kane's
life, and it's not a simplistic analysis. The loss of a parent in
childhood is a wound that never heals -- it can be endured but never
overcome. A child always sees the loss of a parent as a rejection
-- in the case of Kane, his mother's decision to send him away was on one level a literal rejection, however well-motivated.
Simon Callow, Welles's most astute biographer, is dismissive of Welles's performance in Kane,
feeling that it never achieves depth, and he feels this way about most
of the performances in the film -- with the notable exception of that
by Agnes Morehead as Kane's mother. We don't see her for long but
we sense worlds of grief in her as she sends her son out to the wider
world, where she hopes he'll have a better life.
It is a singular performance in
the film, but I think its singularity makes perfect sense. Kane
has a hole in his heart which robs him of personal substance, makes him
a perpetual performer incapable of real intimacy with anyone. And the
significant others in his life are content to be his audience --
thrilled or appalled by his "act", excited and inspired, but with no more real
commitment to him than a theater audience has for the lead actor in a
play after the curtain comes down, or after his celebrity fades.
We share their guilt in this, of course -- we the audience are also
thrilled and appalled by Kane's act, excited and inspired, amused by his rise and morbidly delighted by
his fall. But Welles won't let it go at that.
The story of Kane is a shadowplay, with one real person at its center
-- Agnes Morehead's Mary Kane, who has unwittingly, in an act of misguided
sacrifice, turned her son into a shadow. There are many moments
in the film, especially as Kane ages and begins losing everything, when
Welles lets us (though not the other characters in the film) into his
psychic universe, a place of bewilderment and pain.
Welles is curiously least convincing when he plays Kane at
the age Welles actually was when he made the film -- he's like an older
man doing an unconvincing imitation of a younger one. It's as
though Welles doesn't know how to be young -- but that works for the
young Kane, a man born to power and wealth, who has to play at being a
regular lad. Yet Welles is utterly convincing as the older Kane
-- as though he knew in advance what it would be like to hold the world
in your hands and then see it slip from your grasp. Callow
suggests that the young Welles is preserved in Kane
like a fly in amber but the truth is far stranger -- the
older Welles is on display in that film, fully formed (and deformed) by
the vicissitudes of failure and disappointment.
This is uncanny, of course, and in retrospect disturbing -- but it
represents a brilliant imaginative leap for the young actor, one he summoned up from the core of his being, and it's very
moving. Welles asks us,
and allows us, to pity Kane, to forgive him -- and he gives us good and
sufficient reason to do both.
Rosebud.
The ambiguity, the unknowable quality of Charles Foster Kane is the real MacGuffin
of the film. Rosebud is its heart, hiding in plain sight in the
last scene just as the truth of Kane hides in plain sight throughout the
film.
[Thanks to six martinis and the seventh art for the screen grab of the sled in the snow.]
Monday, April 7
CHARLTON HESTON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 07 Apr 2008 07:06 AM PDT
Charlton Heston has died at the age of 84. In life he never got
the appreciation he deserved -- damned with faint praise as an actor of
limited range, damned in more direct terms for his right wing politics
and defense of gun rights. As an artist, however, he was a
genuine hero.
It was Heston who lobbied Universal to give Orson Welles the job as director of Touch Of Evil
(above), at a time when no one else in Hollywood would give Welles the
time of day, and he single-handedly kept Sam Peckinpah on Major Dundee by offering to kick back his own salary into the production.
In movies, presence is sometimes more important than range -- one might
argue that it's always more important than range -- and presence
requires more than mere personality. It requires its own kind of
craft and courage. There was no other actor of his generation who
could have held his own in El Cid, and his "presence" helped make that film a masterpiece. It also elevated The Planet Of the Apes from a B-picture to a pop classic.
I am personally grateful to him for Touch Of Evil
-- mangled as it was by the studio it's still one of the great American
films, and it wouldn't exist without the artistic heroism of Charlton
Heston.
And for those of you who can't get past his efforts on behalf of the NRA,
remember that he also stood with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March
On Washington -- one of the few Hollywood celebrities with the guts to
take a public stand like that in 1963.
Tuesday, April 1
THE OTHER SIDE OF KANE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 01 Apr 2008 01:04 AM PDT
Yesterday, Showtime screened a rough assembly of Orson Welles' legendary uncompleted film The Other Side Of the Wind,
which Peter Bogdanovich is restoring for the cable channel. The
select group of critics in attendance were stunned to find that the
film bore no relation whatsoever to the brief excerpts from the film or
to the script pages which have previously seen the light of day.
The film unveiled was in fact a shot-by-shot remake of Citizen Kane using sock-puppets in place of the original actors. Citizen Kane
is considered Welles' masterpiece, and many have pronounced it the
greatest movie ever made -- a stunning debut which Welles never managed
to live up to in the course of his subsequent career.
Bogdanovich explained the "very Wellesian" ruse involved -- "He shot
fake footage and wrote a bogus script to keep his real plans a
secret. 'Everybody wants another Kane,' he told me, 'so I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to shove it up their ass.'"
Bogdanovich believes that the sock-puppet Kane
will eventually be recognized as a greater work than the original --
"though it may take awhile. Orson was always years ahead of his
time."
Bogdanovich hopes that the restoration of the Kane
remake will be completed towards the end of this year and screened by
Showtime in 2009. It will appear under the name Welles chose for
it shortly before his death -- Kane You Believe It?
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