“I do try to keep the screen as
rich as possible, because I never forget that film itself is a dead thing, and,
for me at least, the illusion of life fades quickly when the texture is thin.” --Orson Welles
Appearing from heaven 77 years after the premiere
of Citizen Kane, The Other Side of the Wind definitively crowns the career of its
maker, a career that since the 1960s was almost always portrayed as a steady
descent from the pinnacle of artistic glory into a haze of ambiguity and
mediocrity. Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight had their devotees, but
not many of the director’s admirers or critics thought of late films like The Immortal Story and F for Fake as among his finest work,
only the latest in a series of experimental curiosities.
The ghost of Orson Welles – who in life heroically completed thirteen idiosyncratic features by force of will and with minimal respect from his industry – can finally rest in eternity. The painstaking restoration of his lost final film The Other Side of the Wind is a tribute to Welles that is more respectful, just and outstanding than I could have imagined possible.
Like something out of a time capsule, The Other Side of the Wind is a relic from another world, whose style is so completely foreign to the 2010s that it feels radically avant-garde instead of dated, wilder and more frenetic than anything by contemporary filmmakers. It achieves a simulation of Welles’ editing style that’s near perfect for my money and miraculously avoids the problems suffered by the 1992 restoration of Welles’ unfinished Don Quixote, which was fascinating visually but lacked the final element of magic that Welles himself would have given it in the editing room.
Containing little or no master coverage, the film is made up of an assortment of shots in varying film stocks and aspect ratios, in both color and black-and-white, from cameras in the hands of documentarians, reporters and amateurs taking home movies. For the restoration team, there must have been tremendous pressure and/or temptation to make the film look as normal as possible to make it palatable to modern audiences, so the fact that the producers managed to retain Welles’ spirit without being overly cautious or overly liberal is all the more incredible.
The film takes place in one evening at the birthday party of a cantankerous veteran movie director named Jake Hannaford (John Huston), who seems composited from a handful of tough-guy directors that Welles had known or knew of, like Nicholas Ray, Raoul Walsh and Huston himself. On the outs with the wiz-kids of the New Hollywood, Hannaford is in the middle of trying to finish his current project by soliciting backing from studio executives and other investors. Despite him being a Hollywood trouper, the style of his film, as well as his methods, are startlingly arty and improvisational. He is accused several times of feigning youthfulness, out of ego, and yet the excerpts we see reveal a bold visionary flair, and Hannaford himself never indicates that he is doing anything other than trying to make the best film he can. The worst of several setbacks has been the departure of his novice star John Dale (Bob Random), who recently walked off the set after being bullied and humiliated by Hannaford. Surrounded at his party by long-time colleagues, sycophants and cynical journalists, Hannaford bolsters his gruff façade with alcohol. The electricity goes in and out as the group tries to view a rough-cut of the film, and things deteriorate to the point where Hannaford takes to firing a shotgun at mannequins of Dale.
It might be a dubious distinction, but it appears that Welles may have invented the “found footage” movie with this film. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is generally acknowledged as the first film to affect being assembled from another crew’s lost or abandoned footage, and obviously Welles would have preceded that film by several years if he had been able to release his in the 70s. Mockumentaries existed prior to this – Peter Watkins’ films, Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run; perhaps only McBride’s film is comparable to Welles’ in terms of using the apparatuses and trappings of filmmaking to merge a study of the medium itself with an intensely personal, even confessional, examination of a character unable to separate his art from his emotional life. But Welles amplifies this exponentially by having the fictional Hannaford be documented by a myriad of camera operators, all with different equipment, and different motives; which creates a mosaic of the man superficially and yet proves unable to penetrate the craggy smokescreen and thereby leaves us, as at the end of Citizen Kane, with no less of an enigma on our hands than as at the beginning of the film.
The film-within-the-film, the film that Hannaford is making, also entitled The Other Side of the Wind, is a mind-racking conundrum. It was intended (by Welles) as something of a parody of trendy European art films of the 1960s, such as those of Bergman, Godard and especially Antonioni, and yet it is so obviously the work of Welles himself, who clearly enjoyed being able to show off his flair for composition and movement in a way that the rest of the film doesn’t permit. This fake, ponderous art film – viewed intermittently throughout the primary story – is portrayed as a somewhat pathetic attempt by an old man to tap into the youth market, but it’s impossible for us to be as dismissive of these scenes as the characters are. Welles particularly disliked the passive and interminable shots in Antonioni’s films, but even he couldn’t force himself to mock them in Hannaford’s film. The shots are more dynamic and the cutting more fragmented than anything in the work of Godard, Antonioni or pretty much anyone except possibly John Frankenheimer.
As with all of Welles’ films, one of the pleasures of The Other Side of the Wind is seeing the roster of loyal and familiar faces who answered the director’s call and came to lend their support for meager fees. Veterans of the Mercury years like Edmund O’Brien and Mercedes McCambridge appear, along with Peter Bogdanavich as a successful younger director and Susan Strasberg as a querulous critic not unlike Pauline Kael, (who was famous at the time for preposterously claiming that Welles was a fraud who hadn’t had much to do with the making of Citizen Kane at all). Paul Stewart, Charles Foster Kane’s faithful but smarmy butler in Welles’ first film, plays a similar gatekeeper character to Jake Hannaford. In a cast highly populated with non-professionals, one of the most endearing performances is courtesy of Norman Foster, Welles’ longtime associate who directed the Mercury film Journey Into Fear (1943) and worked on yet another famous unfinished Welles film, It’s All True, (surviving parts of which were assembled into a documentary of the same name in 1993). But the film truly belongs to John Huston, in his only lead role in a movie. Playing a puckish but nightmarish version of himself, at times world-weary, broken and frightening, his work is every bit commensurate with, if not superior to, his most well-known role in Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).
The Other Side of the Wind is at once Welles’ darkest and his most autobiographical film, not because the character Jake Hannaford is an avatar for Welles, but for its depiction of an artist unappreciated in his time and doomed to die before completing one last powerful and beautiful work. In some ways, it may be for the best that Welles did not release it in the 70s, because the world almost certainly would have been uncomprehending and contemptuous, if it paid attention at all. Welles would have been accused of trying (and failing) to be cutting-edge, just as his protagonist Hannaford is. The film is also a meditation on the state of cinema as an art form, and as a business, in the early 70s; a time just after the studio system had collapsed and the most celebrated directors were all under 35. Welles himself had never enjoyed any real clout in Hollywood, but he was always interested in power, corruption and tyranny in general; in fact, this is what most of his films are about.
Welles, the bellowing, baritone-voiced, cigar-chomping, womanizing gourmand who loved bull-fights and who found acting work in the last 25 years of his life as more-or-less a caricature of himself, was never so self-critical than here in The Other Side of the Wind, a phenomenon possibly aided by the fact that – for the first time since 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons – he did not play a major character. In addition to jabbing at the overblown macho image that he certainly cultivated as much as he critiqued it in others, (embodied in the monstrous but charming Hannaford), there is a persistent theme concerning emasculation, fear of women, and latent homosexuality in both the film and in Hannaford’s film-within-the-film. There is also genuine and unabashed eroticism for the first time in any Welles film, courtesy of his star, co-writer and longtime mistress Oja Kodar, (with whom he lived part-time for many years despite being married to someone else).
Notwithstanding its unsettling tone and inferences, the film is also an elegy for the age of the maverick auteurs, who since the 70s became increasingly unwelcome in an increasingly safe world; especially in such a business run by accountants and advertisers. The final moments are sobering in their implications. Despite being treated to a new and inventive film by a legendary auteur at a drive-in theater, the guests all abandon the film, even as it’s playing, when they learn that Hannaford isn’t going to be able to finish it. Inaudible, the film keeps running in the empty drive-in lot, a freight train lumbering by just behind the movie screen; symbolizing the world of schedules and commerce that drown out art without ever noticing it.
Welles publicly discussed plans and ideas for this film throughout the 1960s. To befuddled and even derisive interviewers, Welles talked about developing “new filmmaking styles” and crafting a “new kind of film.” From anyone else – (including Welles if he had failed) – such words would be eye-roll-inducing and annoyingly pretentious. But that’s because of the world we live in; not the world Welles lived in. Even in his 50s at the time, and beset with all manner of frustrations and disrespect, he actually believed that the cinema was a living art that could still evolve. And then he set about proving it. Such drive should put to shame the pampered professional directors of the film business who merely aspire to be employed as managers of safe studio productions for the rest of their lives, possibly making millions but discovering nothing and inspiring no one.
If the return of David Lynch was the greatest film-related event of 2017, then the same honor for 2018 goes to The Other Side of the Wind. It is much more than an oddity or a footnote. It adds something significant to Welles’ filmography. It isn’t a grasp at former glory, but a step forward in narrative abstraction and cinematic theory, moving along the trajectory that also resulted in the equally frenzied essay-documentary F for Fake from the same period during which The Other Side of the Wind was being shot.
Welles never got an Oscar for directing, of course, but he did receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute in 1975. He used his acceptance speech to show a pair of edited clips from his film in progress and to humbly request assistance in completing it. Not a soul in the audience of stars and bigwigs lifted a finger to help him, (except for Bogdanovich, who was already part of the cast). This is also why the recovery and release of The Other Side of the Wind is so important; it is a kind of cosmic apology to Welles from a world that enjoyed him as a celebrity but was indifferent to him as an artist. I think that Welles would appreciate this more than any award the industry could give him.
Spanning Citizen Kane to The Other Side of the Wind, the career of Orson Welles now ends where it began, in complete triumph.
The ghost of Orson Welles – who in life heroically completed thirteen idiosyncratic features by force of will and with minimal respect from his industry – can finally rest in eternity. The painstaking restoration of his lost final film The Other Side of the Wind is a tribute to Welles that is more respectful, just and outstanding than I could have imagined possible.
Like something out of a time capsule, The Other Side of the Wind is a relic from another world, whose style is so completely foreign to the 2010s that it feels radically avant-garde instead of dated, wilder and more frenetic than anything by contemporary filmmakers. It achieves a simulation of Welles’ editing style that’s near perfect for my money and miraculously avoids the problems suffered by the 1992 restoration of Welles’ unfinished Don Quixote, which was fascinating visually but lacked the final element of magic that Welles himself would have given it in the editing room.
Containing little or no master coverage, the film is made up of an assortment of shots in varying film stocks and aspect ratios, in both color and black-and-white, from cameras in the hands of documentarians, reporters and amateurs taking home movies. For the restoration team, there must have been tremendous pressure and/or temptation to make the film look as normal as possible to make it palatable to modern audiences, so the fact that the producers managed to retain Welles’ spirit without being overly cautious or overly liberal is all the more incredible.
The film takes place in one evening at the birthday party of a cantankerous veteran movie director named Jake Hannaford (John Huston), who seems composited from a handful of tough-guy directors that Welles had known or knew of, like Nicholas Ray, Raoul Walsh and Huston himself. On the outs with the wiz-kids of the New Hollywood, Hannaford is in the middle of trying to finish his current project by soliciting backing from studio executives and other investors. Despite him being a Hollywood trouper, the style of his film, as well as his methods, are startlingly arty and improvisational. He is accused several times of feigning youthfulness, out of ego, and yet the excerpts we see reveal a bold visionary flair, and Hannaford himself never indicates that he is doing anything other than trying to make the best film he can. The worst of several setbacks has been the departure of his novice star John Dale (Bob Random), who recently walked off the set after being bullied and humiliated by Hannaford. Surrounded at his party by long-time colleagues, sycophants and cynical journalists, Hannaford bolsters his gruff façade with alcohol. The electricity goes in and out as the group tries to view a rough-cut of the film, and things deteriorate to the point where Hannaford takes to firing a shotgun at mannequins of Dale.
It might be a dubious distinction, but it appears that Welles may have invented the “found footage” movie with this film. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is generally acknowledged as the first film to affect being assembled from another crew’s lost or abandoned footage, and obviously Welles would have preceded that film by several years if he had been able to release his in the 70s. Mockumentaries existed prior to this – Peter Watkins’ films, Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run; perhaps only McBride’s film is comparable to Welles’ in terms of using the apparatuses and trappings of filmmaking to merge a study of the medium itself with an intensely personal, even confessional, examination of a character unable to separate his art from his emotional life. But Welles amplifies this exponentially by having the fictional Hannaford be documented by a myriad of camera operators, all with different equipment, and different motives; which creates a mosaic of the man superficially and yet proves unable to penetrate the craggy smokescreen and thereby leaves us, as at the end of Citizen Kane, with no less of an enigma on our hands than as at the beginning of the film.
The film-within-the-film, the film that Hannaford is making, also entitled The Other Side of the Wind, is a mind-racking conundrum. It was intended (by Welles) as something of a parody of trendy European art films of the 1960s, such as those of Bergman, Godard and especially Antonioni, and yet it is so obviously the work of Welles himself, who clearly enjoyed being able to show off his flair for composition and movement in a way that the rest of the film doesn’t permit. This fake, ponderous art film – viewed intermittently throughout the primary story – is portrayed as a somewhat pathetic attempt by an old man to tap into the youth market, but it’s impossible for us to be as dismissive of these scenes as the characters are. Welles particularly disliked the passive and interminable shots in Antonioni’s films, but even he couldn’t force himself to mock them in Hannaford’s film. The shots are more dynamic and the cutting more fragmented than anything in the work of Godard, Antonioni or pretty much anyone except possibly John Frankenheimer.
As with all of Welles’ films, one of the pleasures of The Other Side of the Wind is seeing the roster of loyal and familiar faces who answered the director’s call and came to lend their support for meager fees. Veterans of the Mercury years like Edmund O’Brien and Mercedes McCambridge appear, along with Peter Bogdanavich as a successful younger director and Susan Strasberg as a querulous critic not unlike Pauline Kael, (who was famous at the time for preposterously claiming that Welles was a fraud who hadn’t had much to do with the making of Citizen Kane at all). Paul Stewart, Charles Foster Kane’s faithful but smarmy butler in Welles’ first film, plays a similar gatekeeper character to Jake Hannaford. In a cast highly populated with non-professionals, one of the most endearing performances is courtesy of Norman Foster, Welles’ longtime associate who directed the Mercury film Journey Into Fear (1943) and worked on yet another famous unfinished Welles film, It’s All True, (surviving parts of which were assembled into a documentary of the same name in 1993). But the film truly belongs to John Huston, in his only lead role in a movie. Playing a puckish but nightmarish version of himself, at times world-weary, broken and frightening, his work is every bit commensurate with, if not superior to, his most well-known role in Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).
The Other Side of the Wind is at once Welles’ darkest and his most autobiographical film, not because the character Jake Hannaford is an avatar for Welles, but for its depiction of an artist unappreciated in his time and doomed to die before completing one last powerful and beautiful work. In some ways, it may be for the best that Welles did not release it in the 70s, because the world almost certainly would have been uncomprehending and contemptuous, if it paid attention at all. Welles would have been accused of trying (and failing) to be cutting-edge, just as his protagonist Hannaford is. The film is also a meditation on the state of cinema as an art form, and as a business, in the early 70s; a time just after the studio system had collapsed and the most celebrated directors were all under 35. Welles himself had never enjoyed any real clout in Hollywood, but he was always interested in power, corruption and tyranny in general; in fact, this is what most of his films are about.
Welles, the bellowing, baritone-voiced, cigar-chomping, womanizing gourmand who loved bull-fights and who found acting work in the last 25 years of his life as more-or-less a caricature of himself, was never so self-critical than here in The Other Side of the Wind, a phenomenon possibly aided by the fact that – for the first time since 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons – he did not play a major character. In addition to jabbing at the overblown macho image that he certainly cultivated as much as he critiqued it in others, (embodied in the monstrous but charming Hannaford), there is a persistent theme concerning emasculation, fear of women, and latent homosexuality in both the film and in Hannaford’s film-within-the-film. There is also genuine and unabashed eroticism for the first time in any Welles film, courtesy of his star, co-writer and longtime mistress Oja Kodar, (with whom he lived part-time for many years despite being married to someone else).
Notwithstanding its unsettling tone and inferences, the film is also an elegy for the age of the maverick auteurs, who since the 70s became increasingly unwelcome in an increasingly safe world; especially in such a business run by accountants and advertisers. The final moments are sobering in their implications. Despite being treated to a new and inventive film by a legendary auteur at a drive-in theater, the guests all abandon the film, even as it’s playing, when they learn that Hannaford isn’t going to be able to finish it. Inaudible, the film keeps running in the empty drive-in lot, a freight train lumbering by just behind the movie screen; symbolizing the world of schedules and commerce that drown out art without ever noticing it.
Welles publicly discussed plans and ideas for this film throughout the 1960s. To befuddled and even derisive interviewers, Welles talked about developing “new filmmaking styles” and crafting a “new kind of film.” From anyone else – (including Welles if he had failed) – such words would be eye-roll-inducing and annoyingly pretentious. But that’s because of the world we live in; not the world Welles lived in. Even in his 50s at the time, and beset with all manner of frustrations and disrespect, he actually believed that the cinema was a living art that could still evolve. And then he set about proving it. Such drive should put to shame the pampered professional directors of the film business who merely aspire to be employed as managers of safe studio productions for the rest of their lives, possibly making millions but discovering nothing and inspiring no one.
If the return of David Lynch was the greatest film-related event of 2017, then the same honor for 2018 goes to The Other Side of the Wind. It is much more than an oddity or a footnote. It adds something significant to Welles’ filmography. It isn’t a grasp at former glory, but a step forward in narrative abstraction and cinematic theory, moving along the trajectory that also resulted in the equally frenzied essay-documentary F for Fake from the same period during which The Other Side of the Wind was being shot.
Welles never got an Oscar for directing, of course, but he did receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute in 1975. He used his acceptance speech to show a pair of edited clips from his film in progress and to humbly request assistance in completing it. Not a soul in the audience of stars and bigwigs lifted a finger to help him, (except for Bogdanovich, who was already part of the cast). This is also why the recovery and release of The Other Side of the Wind is so important; it is a kind of cosmic apology to Welles from a world that enjoyed him as a celebrity but was indifferent to him as an artist. I think that Welles would appreciate this more than any award the industry could give him.
Spanning Citizen Kane to The Other Side of the Wind, the career of Orson Welles now ends where it began, in complete triumph.
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