All's Well That Ends Welles: The Other Side of the Wind

This is the final installment of a 2021 bi-monthly series watching my remaining unseen films directed by Orson Welles. 

Well here we finally are, at the "end" of Orson Welles.

I might logically have watched The Other Side of the Wind back when it was released in 2018 -- shot decades earlier, of course, and only assembled into a modicum of a coherent narrative by dutiful Welles acolytes a couple years back. But the film presented me with a bit of a conundrum about whether to count it as a 2018 new release and rank it with the other movies I saw that year, given its composition of old materials, not to mention its status as a curiosity more than a real film. So I just decided not to see it at all.

The chance to finally catch up with it was one of the reasons I decided to do this series. If so, it's a bit of an anticlimax in that respect.

However, I did find stuff, or at least a vibe, to like in this movie, in spite of the fact that I almost never knew what was going on.

An aesthetic sensibility that definitely overtook Welles as he aged was this jittery, rapidly edited montage approach to storytelling, one in which the shots are noticeably shorter than the comfortable length viewers are accustomed to, and the logic of any particular sequence of shots is jumbled. Not only did the images have this feel, but so did the dialogue, leaving a person out to sea if he or she failed to keep up with its frenetic pacing.

I despised this approach in Mr. Arkadin, the worst film I saw for this series, but I thought it worked much better in F for Fake. It still had the same disorienting effect, but there I thought it was to a purpose, since the movie itself is a bit of a puzzle box. 

The Other Side of the Wind is this sensibility to the extreme, and it's somewhere in between the two films listed above in terms of its effectiveness. Here, though, the editing in particular is not of Welles' choosing, but rather, an interpretation of what he would have done with the hundred hours of footage he shot -- and a damn fine interpretation, enough that it becomes an impersonation, which is really what you're going for in this situation. The assemblers of The Other Side of the Wind were certainly familiar with Welles' body of work, that's for sure. 

Semantically, though, the approach left me with the least amount of bearings on the material. I don't know whether to blame the increasingly eccentric footage Welles' shot, or the incredibly faithful attempt to reproduce Welles' peculiar editing rhythms, but I couldn't really follow any of the conversations in this movie and what they all added up to. I was left appreciating it, to the extent that I did appreciate it, in individual moments, not as an overarching narrative.

And you know what? That was fine.

The effect created by The Other Side of the Wind is kind of like being a fly on the wall at a party where you don't know any of the people. The majority of this movie takes place at a party, so that makes a certain sense. The party is for the character played by John Huston, Jake Hannaford, a brilliant director who is as polarizing as he is brilliant. (It's fitting, I suppose, that Welles' final film was the closest the man ever came to a literal self-portrait -- and equally fitting that he could not finish it before he died.) The occasion for the party is Hannaford's birthday, and also the screening of his latest and most inscrutable film. It's also the last day of his life, as the film tells us early on (but never shows us, likely because they never filmed it).

Truly, given what we see of this movie, which is called The Other Side of the Wind, it's appropriate that the people talking about it seem like they're speaking a foreign language. They talk in rapid-fire shorthand that makes sense to each other but doesn't function very well as exposition. However, that approximates experiences people have in the real world, where they're in a situation that's over their head, and they have to glean from it what they can through a sort of flooding of words they can't completely make sense of. I'm sure this is what people feel like all the time when they are immersed in a culture where they don't speak the language. 

The film within the film is this weird arty mess that has tons of nudity and sexual content, and plenty of brooding from a James Dean-like star, John Dale, played by Bob Random. It also features plenty of skin from Welles' current partner and muse, Oja Kodar, who was used similarly in F for Fake. Here, though, her exposure is much more graphic than it was there, as we see her fully nude, and also in sex scenes with Random that are far hotter than I expected they'd be. I'm not sure if Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was on Welles' mind when he was making this, but there's something campy about it that recalls that. 

I didn't get this film within the film -- I don't think you're meant to -- and I didn't get most of the conversation surrounding it, which kept coming back to the star Dale's inability to finish the film. He's the mystery who fuels the whole film -- will he show up at Hannaford's party? what's he all about? -- and assumes a sort of mythic quality, as he is for the most part only seen in the footage of the incomplete film. There are a number of other familiar actors here, the most prominent in terms of screen time being the director Peter Bogdanovich. Most of the other characters are enablers and functionaries in the employ of Hannaford, and I had trouble distinguishing them from each other.

I didn't really care. There was something sort of intriguing about the experience of watching this that made me like it more than I probably had any reason to. There was also a comfort in realizing it was basically hopeless to glean anything definitive from it, so eventually I judged it merely in terms of its moment-to-moment sensory impact. 

Interestingly, though -- for all its meanderings and incomplete thoughts -- the final product is something that has a clear sense of a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't know if Welles shot enough material for all parts of the narrative, or whether existing material was reimagined for the role it could play in a plausible denouement for the film, but the last ten minutes or so were actually sort of the most profound for me. I guess that's the definition of ultimate success -- however marginal. 

Overall, though, I'm not sure if I would consider Welles' career a success. Watching his movies in 2021 has clearly demonstrated for me that I had already seen the best of Welles before this year. Really, though, he never did anything else that was even in the ballpark of Citizen Kane.

It was a very compelling sort of career, though, full of interesting failures. Welles was not the type of artist to just keep remaking the same movie, and though it was possible to isolate themes and recurring artistic choices, he had a sort of restlessness that was probably to the positive overall. It seems like a full half of the films he made had major financial difficulties, and they certainly forced a sort of innovation to his approach, an adjustment that probably made his films more memorable than if they had just been well-funded studio movies that felt prestigious. I can't say I went with him on all the thematic journeys and all the wild techniques he selected, but I'm glad he did those things. It was never boring, and that's not something that every filmmaker with a four-decade career could say.

Although I didn't love any of the Welles films I saw this year -- which included The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, in addition to those I've already mentioned -- the ultimate success of this series is that I'm primed to follow a similar format again next year. I've got another director picked out whose career I can finish in six films, as well as a cheeky name for the series, and it may be that this will be a recurring project for me. I'll fill you in on all the details in a few weeks.

Whether anyone can surprise and confound and prod and tickle me as much as Orson Welles, though, remains to be seen. 

Avoiding the Orson Welles problem

Pretty much every year, a movie gets released that’s been sitting on the shelf for a long time. The ones that were shot and maybe debuted at film festivals in, say, 2015, then tried to find a distributor for a couple years, are not so difficult to subsume into the field of 2018 releases, in terms of ranking them on year-end lists.

The ones that stretch that timeline out to closer to a decade? You really have to agonize over them. I didn’t like including All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a 2006 film that only finally got a U.S. release seven years later, in my 2013 year-end rankings. But I did it.

When The Other Side of the Wind debuted on Netflix a couple months ago, 48 years after Orson Welles began shooting it, I had to draw the line.

The fact that there was a whole separate documentary about the making of it, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, which is properly a 2018 release, made it easier to just slough off the whole thing to 2019.

I love Orson Welles, and in December alone saw another movie he directed (Othello) as well as revisited one he appeared in (The Muppet Movie). But I did not see the one he directed for six years on and off in the 1970s and left incomplete at his death in 1985. I didn’t want to include it with my 2018 movies but also didn’t want to not include it. Easiest solution to that is just not to see it. Not yet, anyway.

This is occurring to me today not only because I’m in the final stages of preparing my own year-end rankings (just 11 more days now), but also because I’m reviewing a list of critics top ten lists on Metacritic, partly out of general interest and partly to make sure I see as much as I can before I finish mine. Of 318 lists Metacritic examined, Wind came in 28^th on their scoring system, which awards three points for a first-place ranking, two for a second place, one point for anywhere between 3^rd and 10^th and then a half point for any appearance on an additional 11 through 20 offered by the critic. This ties it with Minding the Gap and First Man to round out the top 30, and it’s one of only five films on the list I haven’t seen, two of which I will not be able to see before my rankings close.

So I’ve actually got quite good coverage of critically acclaimed 2018 films, which is part of the reason I’m not feeling the same mad rush to squeeze in viewings before January 22^nd, and am making some time in my schedule for rewatches. But of those three in the top 30 that I can still see if I choose, The Other Side of the Wind is the only one I will intentionally decline to view.

On the one hand I think my reasoning is sound. This is a movie that was made in the 1970s. It may not have been edited until 2018, and I think there’s some new voiceover if I remember correctly (though I’ve tried not to read too much about it). But it just doesn’t feel like it should go shoulder to shoulder with movies like Eighth Grade and Love, Simon, the stars of whom were not even born when Welles shot his last Wind footage. In fact, the star of Eighth Grade would not be born for another 27 years.

On the other hand, the movie could not have been ranked in any other year. No one saw it until 2018. Even with All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, it might have been possible for me to rank it in 2006 if I’d gone to the right festivals or lived in the right countries. Not the case with The Other Side of the Wind.

And my general overriding principle is that every movie deserves at least one year in which it has the opportunity to be ranked. Some get two possible years, such as Paddington 2, which came out in Australia at the end of 2017 but didn’t take the cinematic world by storm until its 2018 U.S. release. I didn’t see it in the theater so I’m choosing to rank it with 2018. But no movie should have no years, which is what gives me such headaches about Wind.  

What year the footage was shot in is rendered less of an important factor when you consider documentaries containing archival footage. One interesting 2018 example of that is They Shall Not Grow Old, the film consisting entirely of World War I footage painstakingly colorized by a team led by Peter Jackson. Sounds really great and I wish I’d taken the opportunity to see it. (Technically I still have that opportunity, as it’s still playing at a theater near me, but it’s gone well past the two-week period I could see it with my critics card, and I guess my desire doesn’t rise to the level of paying $20 for it.) There’s no doubt this is a 2018 film and I would have ranked it with this year’s films if I’d seen it.

Yet the case of The Other Side of the Wind feels different. It feels more like a corpse shocked back into twitchy life by some really powerful electrical currents. It feels like something that was never meant to exist, but did because some good people saw the chance to bring us an artist’s vision, and some not-as-good people saw a chance to make money on it. But many of those who have seen it – those not ranking it in their top ten, anyway – have described it as a weird kind of incomplete experiment, less a film than a collection of disjointed thoughts. Which is to be expected.

I have no doubt that if The Other Side of the Wind had been completed by Welles, it would look significantly different than what we’ve gotten. Since he obviously had a fraught relationship with what he’d shot, there was a good chance he would have thrown out some or even most of it. I appreciate that I will get to see what he shot when I do watch it, but I can’t agree with the argument that this is Welles’ film as he intended it to be seen – if anyone’s making that argument. It’s more akin to an old silent film uncovered in a basement than an actual new release and meaningful part of the 2018 film landscape.

So I might watch The Other Side of the Wind as soon as next month. I kind of can’t wait, actually. But by waiting, then I won’t have to torture myself with whether I made the right decision to rank it or not rank it. It’ll just join the ever-increasing body of Films That Did Not Come Out This Year, and I will appreciate its merits or lack thereof in that context.