Has anyone actually seen 'filming the trial'?

[tim1]

I've been searching for this title for ages now and no-one seems to have it or even seen it, i've seen 'filming Othello' and was a bit disappointed in it, so would you say this was better?

[colwood]

Filming the Trial is in the possession of the Munich Filmmuseum. It has played the recent OW festivals in NY and LA, and probably played similar OW festivals in Europe this year and last year.

As it was never finished before Welles' death, it consists of an 80 minute Q & A Welles did at USC following a screening of the film in '81. The MF has combined it with the film's trailer for their restoration. A few snippets of this doc can be seen in the One Man Band.

I can't personally compare it to FO as I was unable to see it when it played NY recently. But I'm sure others could. MF director Stefan Drossler commented that he didn't believe Welles would have released it as it stands now. He probably would have intercut it like he did with Filming Othello. Others have said that the footage does not delve as deeply into Kafka as FO did into shakespeare. Of course, this is all subjective.

Parts of the film are excerpted in the book, the Unknown Orson Welles published by the MF. Among the interesting notes,

- Welles couldn't understand how the film got good notices but Anthony Perkins didn't. Welles said that Perkins played K as Welles wanted him to, as very active not passive. And that the bad press on Perkins was entirely Welles' fault.

- Casting today, Welles would have used Pacino, "but then I'd think of Pacino for most anything I can think of."

- On the Parable of the law (the prologue): "Because the life of this man is contained within a lie.... "He was born into it and conceived in the womb of horror...[the fable is a lie] an attempt to destroy him."

-On the changed ending, "because the book was written before the Holocaust." "I'm not Jewish but we're all Jewish since the Holocaust." On the explosion he says that any big explosion ends up in a mushroom and that they repeatedly tried to rig it so there wouldn't be a mushroom, sybolism. Eventually, he gave in when they couldn't get rid of the mushroom. But he left him defiant till the end throwing the grenade back and not getting his throat slit like a pig.

- On the theme of evil, he said that he doesn't believe in evil, "evil is force so great it is beyond me to decide whether it's generated entirely within man or whether it is a contagion." "The power of it is so great it humbles me."

- Welles considers himself a "profound pessimist."

- On cinematography, he lights a set before putting the actors on it and when it looks right, he puts the actors where he thinks they belong.

- Long takes are dependent on two things " a very good technical crew and very good actors." Then it can be an "enormous help to a cast, if they are good enough to play the rhythm of an entire sequence."

- "You can never get the same depth of field in color as you do in black and white."

- "The actor has too much power." "In film studies, the actor is very underrated." "Any good director is constantly astonished by something that his cast is giving him."

[The Night Man]

Hello all. New member here.

I'm a longstanding Welles admirer (I still have my program from the original release of F FOR FAKE), live in Los Angeles and attended every one of the Welles retrospective programs here except for THE BIG BRASS RING. (I made notes at several of the programs intending to post the information in this forum, but haven't had time to do so yet.)

I can tell you that FILMING THE TRIAL as it stands doesn't have a patch on FILMING OTHELLO. The 80 minute q&a that FILMING THE TRIAL essentially consists of is very discursive, and marred by a number of lame-brained queries from an audience with no shortage of self-enchanted cinephiles. On a purely visual level, the single-camera setup is a disaster (lots of panning from Welles to the audience, and then searching the audience for the questioner).

As a document it's fascinating. But Welles doesn't seem to be quite on top of his game in this appearance (I've seen him much sharper in other situations). Perhaps he found too many of the questions uninteresting and/or obvious, but his answers are sometimes cursory, sometimes glib. And sometimes they're just contradictory - Welles at one point does pronounce himself a profound pessimist, but before the session is over he's also proclaiming his great optimism! And nobody calls him on this contradiction.

Welles of course always has something interesting to say (see the quotes in colwood's post above), but the q&a format with its general lack of follow-up means that nothing is dealt with in detail. And the reverential crowd never presses him very hard on anything. In my opinion he would have done better to have sat down with a single intelligent and hard-nosed interviewer (someone conversant with Kafka as well as cinema) who could have forced him to dig deeper into specific aspects of this particular film. But then maybe this was just a rehearsal of sorts, a way for him to start thinking about how to approach an ultimate FILMING THE TRIAL. We'll never know.

My memory is kind of fuzzy now, but I seem to recall Stefan Droesler saying that more of this q&a exists on film but the sound element is missing. (I may be wrong about this.)

-Steve-

[mteal]

Night Man,
I agree with you that Welles does seem a bit out of it during the Trial Q&A. I was especially struck by the part where he lets the nerdy guy answer his own question about corporations, as if Welles was too tired or too uninterested to answer it himself.

Now that the LA and NY Welles fests are history I find myself wondering how they did overrall, attendance-wise, since I suppose that might determine whether the films shown make it to other cities. I thought I saw that the THE THIRD MAN got held over for a second week in New York, but I didn't see any mention of any other films getting held over.

[The Night Man]

mteal, I hate to have to report that the Los Angeles programs were not particularly well-attended. Most of the shows were not even half full. The two programs that attracted the largest crowds were the ones featuring material from THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

[tim1]

So am i right in thinking that there's no bootleg copies floating about out there?

[Jeff Wilson]

Unlikely to be any bootlegs, as I don't think it's been on TV in Europe, which is where many of the bootlegs of the unreleased material have come from.

[blunted by community]

hello all. new member here:
it's a shame that filming the trial was done as a question and answer thing. as we all know, welles got bored pretty easy. i can't imagine anything more boring than welles fielding questions from a bunch of students. seems like welles felt that same way. certainly in this type forum there would be no opportunity to do anything provocative, and intreresting like filming othello.

i would liked to have seen welles in a hotel room, drinking wine with some of the film's actors, talking about the fiming, intercut with scenes from the film, and with cut-out scenes. that certainly would have been worthy of such a fine film. when fielding questions from students you can only soar so far.