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.
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