Rosenbaum's "Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut"

[The Night Man]

Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses the elusive nature of "director's cuts" in an article published today at his site http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com. Not surprisingly, Welles' work is mentioned several times, including this interesting reference:

According to [Harvey] Weinstein... the “true” director’s cut of [The Double Life of] Véronique would be the U.S. version [recut by Weinstein], precisely because he knew or understood Kieślowski’s intentions better than the filmmaker did himself. (This is the same argument that was recently made to me by Michael Dawson–an American film technician who has already revised the soundtrack of Welles’s Othello and plans to revise the soundtrack of Chimes at Midnight in the near future by adding the sound of neighing horses to one shot “because if Orson were alive today, I’m sure he would have done it himself.”)

The article is adapted from a lecture given by Rosenbaum in early 2007, so it's not exactly current, but could this quote presage a possible re-release of "Chimes"? And if so, will its soundtrack have been rejiggered as in the unfortunate "restorations" of "Othello" and "Vertigo"?

[Roger Ryan]

Talk of adding the sound effect of the horse's neigh to one shot in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was briefly discussed back in December, 2006 at the New Haven Welles Symposium. I imagine it must have been Rosenbaum (present during the discussion) who provided the info to symposium organizer Dudley Andrews who mentioned it to me (Andrews was keen on getting Welles fans opinions of Mr. Dawson's audio restoration efforts). As I understand it, the majority of the restoration work done on CHIMES had been completed nearly ten years ago, but the on-going legal problems have prevented its completion and release. The initial plan was to show the nearly-complete restoration at the symposium, but for some reason only the last reel of Dawson's work arrived. An excellent quality print of Welles' original was screened for the majority of the film with the switchover to Dawson's "restored" print for the last 15 minutes...

...I couldn't really tell much of a difference! My personal opinion was that the "restored" sound appeared to have a little more warmth to it and a better spatial sense (lines spoken further from the camera sounded like they were further away, etc.). For those 15 minutes anyway, Dawson's reworkings appeared a lot less obtrusive than what he did to the OTHELLO soundtrack. Only a totally incongruous heavy bass frequency during the end credit music annoyed me.

We didn't get to see the Dawson's "improved" horse scene. But if you're already doing a sound restoration, I really don't have that much of a problem with dropping in one foley effect if the lack of it is distracting to the "reality" of the moment (although I'm not quite sure where this horse scene even is in the film). A lot of this comes down to personal taste, I guess. I, at first, believed the hype that the 1992 OTHELLO soundtrack had been a vast improvement on what had come before until I heard Welles' original 1952 soundtrack which turned out to be far richer and with better synch than the restoration.

[ToddBaesen]

Roger:

I totally agree with you about OTHELLO. I had much the same reaction to the restored version. Originally I thought, "Why is Jonathan Rosenbaum making such a fuss over re-syncing the soundtrack up correctly, or complaining about recording the waves on one of the great lakes instead of the Mediterranean sea?" Of course, at that point, I assumed the restorers actually knew what they were doing, and it was also nearly impossible to compare the "restored" OTHELLO with any of Welles original versions of the movie before the Criterion laserdisc was released.

It was only much later, after a close A and B comparison between the two versions that I noticed how badly Dawson and the team of restorers had screwed up on OTHELLO. How else can you explain mistakes like lines being present in the original, that are suddenly missing in the restored version!

It's like Welles says in F FOR FAKE... we take it for granted that people who are labeled as experts know what they are doing. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to Welles own work, many of these so called "experts" are making big mistakes. So based on Dawson's track record, which is not exactly good, I can't imagine his version of FALSTAFF being any kind of improvement over Welles own approved soundtrack. Dawson's statement about "improving" FALSTAFF - "if Orson were alive today, I’m sure he would have done it himself” - provides the answer to why his work on OTHELLO was such a botch. Dawson thinks he knows what Orson Welles would have done!

[Tony]

I'm surprised, Roger, that you would have no problem with the "dropping in of one foley effect". On what grounds would you accept this? Perhaps we could also drop in a single breath, or a grunt, or a step too?

Perhaps we could drop in a single foley in the Kane death scene- just a single step of the nurse that should be there?

Seriously, I see no reason why Dawson or anybody should be allowed to add anything to a film. They should limit themselves strictly to restorative work, and even that should be very limited (look what happened to the Kane screening room scene). And Dawson has a terrible track record!
His comment reveals his philosophy:

"because if Orson were alive today, I’m sure he would have done it himself.”

Maybe not, Mr. Dawson- but we'll never know.

[Roger Ryan]

I probably should not have used the term "restoration" in my earlier post for this is not technically what Mr. Dawson is doing to the CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT soundtrack. What he is doing is revamping the audio in an attempt to improve it.

Now the question is: "Does the soundtrack need to be improved?"

This is where personal preference comes in. We know from interviews that Welles was not happy with the sound to CHIMES, at least in the release prints. He complained that the synch was off in one or two reels and he was discouraged that things like the generator motor could be heard during Margaret Rutherford's big soliloquy. In fact, it goes without saying that Welles was not completely happy with the technical resources he had while working in Europe. So, a film like CHIMES differs from something like KANE where we know that Welles had all the resources he needed to meticulously record and balance the audio; the CHIMES soundtrack was compromised by a low budget and technical issues. Therefore, it is not completely unreasonable to assume that if Welles had today's technology and the money to use it, he might want to try and improve the soundtrack.

Personally, I think the original CHIMES soundtrack is pretty good (better than Welles' other European productions), but knowing that Welles thought it was flawed, wouldn't it be acceptable to try and improve it? Yes? Okay, well then how far? The Dawson approach is to resynch the problem dialogue, apply noise reduction and attempt to create a more realistic spatial range for the film's dialogue and sound effects (we know that Welles was a stickler for a proper spatial range, or would deliberately mess with the spatial range for effect, so this last item is not completely uncalled for). My opinion is that if this work is done, and an eventual re-release clearly labels the soundtrack as having been revamped, I don't think it's such a big deal to also include what could be a missing foley effect to a soundtrack that Welles himself called flawed.

Now, I've gone a long way defending Mr. Dawson's opinion, so let me add a few thoughts to provide some balance. Claiming to know what Welles wanted without documentation is absurd. The choice to include an extra foley effect would be Dawson's alone because he felt the lack of the effect hurt the impact of the scene (again, I don't remember the scene in question, so I have no idea whether I would agree with this). While the 15 minutes of Mr. Dawson's work on CHIMES that I saw and heard did not alarm me, I did find the booming low frequency of the end credit music to be unacceptable. This could very well be part of Dawson's plan to remix the music score into stereo which I AM NOT IN AGREEMENT WITH. Given how poorly the OTHELLO job was done, I would say that I await a revamped CHIMES with trepidation.

[Tony]

Roger: I recall that Rosenbaum advised Dawson to redo the monks' chanting at the beginning of Othello in Latin, whereas Dawson had done it in English. Much to Rosenbaum's relief, at the last minute Dawson made the change. I understand your reasoning, but I still disagree with any change past strict restorative. For example, if Dawson could remove the generator sound behind Rutherford, I think this would be acceptable as Welles explicitly complained about it. But when Dawson starts saying things like "I know this is what Orson would have wanted", the red flag goes up for me.

In addition, I heard a few years ago that Dawson was working on "synching up" the dialogue in Chimes with the actor's mouths, and you know what that means.