Don Quijote

[Harvey Chartrand]

Well, Orson Welles was a fat genius. Stewart Granger called him a fat genius, so why can't I?
Here's a quote from Joss Ackland, the distinguished English character actor who played Falstaff in 1982. This material is taken from "Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture" by Michael A. Anderegg.

"Welles, in various ways, can be said to have influenced subsequent productions of the Falstaff plays. One rather unexpected influence was reported by Joss Ackland, who played Falstaff in 1982. Ackland claims not to have been inspired by Welles's performance as Falstaff, but by...

the real Orson Welles... As a man, Welles exploded brilliantly, and then didn't know where to go. Like Falstaff, I believe he could have achieved so much, but it was frittered away. He gives everyone a lot to laugh about, and he can laugh at it too. But inside he is crying. He can see the waste, because he is not a stupid man."

This doesn't sound like a man who lived his life exactly as he wanted to.

[Tony]

Good point Peter, and I have often argued that to know and understand and appreciate Welles's work one should NOT try to psychoanalyze him; however, I'm betting that part of why everyone here loves Welles is because he was so charismatic and....lovable.

[MartynH]

I am always skeptical of people/authors who try to psychoanalyze people that they don't know. I'll give you an example. When I was young I was fat and didn't achieve anything at sport. Later on I became a marathon runner and ran four ultras over a period of almost 20 years. It was only in later life that I became aware my motivation may have been this lost sporting period of my youth. I never stopped and was always driving myself on to the next race. Now, if I'm not sure how could a stranger pick the bones out this?

I now write books about rock bands and I keep it to the music and known facts, and don't ruminate if 'momma loved him or not'

[Glenn Anders]

You are right, MartynH, as is tony and keats, about psychoanalysis, but somewhere in the remarks resides a mixed message. It depends on the subject, and how far we are willing to take it or not take it.

Orson Welles, it seems to me, is a special case because of his extraordinary experiences in youth, both promising and crushing, how he dealt with them, and how they turn up in so much of his art. In another man, another artist, that cigar might be . . . well . . . just a cigar.

But when from his own lips, Welles confesses the irreparable loss of his mother, a feeling that he caused his father's death, his rescue by a father figure [or father figures], a rage at "betrayal" by one of his best friends, a notion until late in life no woman quite offered him completion, an obsession in old age with control of daughters [and sons?], then the choices he made in his work become hard to ignore.

I don't consider it "dollar book Freud," as he dismissed in another context, but just a reasonable conclusion drawn from human logic.

In CITIZEN KANE, we have abandonment by the mother (and in a sense unwitting betrayal of the father, not to mention "betrayal" [imagined] by a best friend); in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (loss of mother, irrelevance of father and grandfather, rejection and banishment of a maternal figure); in THE STRANGER (murder of the old friend, guilt, obsession, willingness to sacrifice a wife); in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (betrayal by the love object and best friend); in MACBETH (murder of the father figure and best friend); in OTHELLO (betrayal by "best friend," murder of innocent wife); in MR. ARKADIN (loss of daughter, surreptitious murders, murder of old friend, subterfuges to conceal real biography); in TOUCH OF EVIL (corrosive loss of first love, substitution for maternal figure, projection of guilt on others); in THE TRIAL (rejection by the World); in FALSTAFF (rejection of the old mentor); in THE IMMORTAL STORY (voyeurism); in DON QUIJOTE (rejection of the modern world, and an attempt to recover a paradise lost), etc.

Only with F FOR FAKE does Welles appear to come to terms with his losses, defeats, and compromises -- in his celebration of Art, his praise of Oja Kodar, and a tip of his hat to Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Howard Hughes, his models. He may have carried on this summing up, more darkly, in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

As some of us say, you do not have to buy all of that, or even most of it, to determine Orson Welles was "a special case."

Glenn

[Tony]

Psychology, as they say, is the 'false science': you can never really prove anything definitively; ipso facto, any book on Welles which claims to have insight into his inner psychology, an insight which allows us to understand motivation- I consider nothing but pure, unadulterated B.S.

Who cares if Beethoven was a pervert who looked in girls windows? It has NOTHING to do with his art. He was a genius, and that's it.

We know next to nothing about Bach- would it help if we did?

We know little about Shakespeare's inner life- does it hinder us from understanding his genius in any way?

Did Glenn Gould have a mother complex- was he secretly gay? Who cares? It tells us nothing about his genius.

Psychoanalyzing an artist not only seems a worthless pursuit, but an insulting one: as if the reducing of an artist's work to say, a childhood trauma, could explain the inner meaning of their work.

How silly. How ridiculously absurd. A parlour game, at best.

But do carry on, Charles Higham, David Thomson, Glenn Anders, et. al.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: You appear to know things about Beethoven, and some of these others, if true, that many of us do not. It occasionally descends into a dark obsession with you, a sense of denial, a need to defend the unknowable, an insistence on bringing up hints of pathology, real or imaginary -- only to dismiss them as irrelevant.

The difference, as I have tried, however inadequately, to explain is that we do know a very, very great deal about Orson Welles. He insisted that we know his traumas, his losses, his struggle. We can see many of them reflected in his works, and often he goes out of his way to point them out to us.

That is not an irrelevant field for study, for understanding.

And to react so crashingly, Tony, to any analysis of the influence of Welles' life upon his work does reduce what we do here to the ultimate parlor game. Without an exploration of such insights -- casting aside those which prove incidental -- we are left with the showman, the magician, the raconteur, the bravura actor, the narrator, the manque director, the confidence man, the wine salesman . . . .

Orson Welles was all of these, but to ignore his human wellsprings is to reduce him to a smiling celebrity of the past, a comic book figure, the subject of a future video game, more in keeping with the coming age, which he would have loathed so profoundly. You really do reduce the work of Orson Welles to a pile of pages and memoirs, scraps of film, to write monographs about, provide exegeses for, technicalities to argue over.

Glenn

[MartynH]

In the UK we had a series of 'Carry On' films (Carry On Cowboy, Carry On Camping etc) and most of them were about 'nudge, nudge' and 'wink, wink'. Now these films came about because we British were so prudish we could not talk about sex openly. How is this related to Welles and other artists I hear you say? And I take the point that artists can give more than clues about why they did this and that. But for a lot of time it's guess work. As has been pointed out that is fun for some.

The Carry On films really ended in the late 70's but I have a new one in the pipeline - Carry On Speculating

[mido505]

Glenn:

It seems to me that Tony holds a genuinely fascinating, almost mystical and Platonic (Socratic?) view of genius that, while extremely uncommon in our rather dull materialistic age is nonetheless valid and informative. It is as if Tony sees genius as something separate from the man, something vast, strange, mysterious, perhaps foreign, perhaps...trapped, certainly something greater. Genius is a rare thing, rarer than talent; and as Tony has correctly pointed out on several occasions, while many of us have talent, few have genius. And genius is without question rarer than any of the myriad neuroses that our post Freudian age has posited as the source of its mighty flow. Genius finds its home in imperfect vessels, for its own unfathomable reasons, but to confuse the imperfect vessel as the source and reason for the genius is to commit a grave error. In fact, one of the lamentable results of this upside down view has been the celebration and cultivation of neurotic, sociopathic, and just plain aberrant and destructive behavior in the mistaken belief that genius will be the inevitable result.

Freud was possessed by genius, and that genius uncovered vast areas of self and culture that were previously hidden from view. But Freud's biological reductivism was a serious error that has led us down a dead end path. Plato said genius was akin to madness, not that madness was the source of genius or (sorry, R. D.) the same thing. The Enlightenment culture that Freud helped usher in is a friend to talent but an enemy to genius - perhaps that is why Welles hated it so instinctively. And while our scientific age was and is an absolutely necessary corrective to a previous world mired in mystical and ignorant twaddle, perhaps it is time to take the lessons learned and move on. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis (yes Glenn, I've read my Marx, and Hegel too). The great age of the Renaissance was ushered in by the rediscovery of Plato. Perhaps it is time to read the Dialogues again.

You are correct to point out, Glenn, that Welles "insisted that we know his traumas, his losses, his struggle. We can see many of them reflected in his works, and often he goes out of his way to point them out to us." But that stuff is just the raw material upon which Welles' genius worked. It was the clay, not the wellspring.

Tony, I promised you a while back that I would address this topic. Did I do O.K.?

[Tony]

I'm proud of you mido: you got it exactly, and expressed it better than I ever could. Stavinsky said "I am the vessel through which 'Le Sacre' passed", meaning he was God's vessel, and that his own personal character had nothing to do with his genius. Years ago I read a quote the author of which I unfortunately cannot remember; however, it went like this: the farther an artist's personality is from the work, the better the work. If an artist pollutes the work with their own personality, the work will obviously suffer. Schoenberg felt exactly the same way. I beleieve it is the loss of belief in God that has brought this crisis in art about, because artists now believe it is THEY that are creating the work, while up until the 60s it was God that was creating the work. Interestingly, postmodernism has also attacked the artist as originator, working from the position that it is society that creates the work, and the artist is only the vessel.

Either way, I think psychoanalyzing the artist's life is a dead-end road, and will tell us precisely nothing about, say, Orson Welles.

This does NOT mean we can't analyze, think about, ponder, the work: but it does mean that the speculations on the artist's (finally) unknowable innner life, even if we could know it, will lead us nowhere.

I do disagree on one point, Mido: for the genius artist, at their best, their personal life isn't even the wellspring; if the art is pure, the artist gets out of the way. Perhaps the genius is the one who most successfully and completely gets out of the way, such as Mozart taking his dictation.

[Tony]

I would disagree with you on both counts, Mr. K: Leaming is totally irresponsible and unreliable: she has no aguments, only the quotes of a man who seems to have no conscience about lying or exaggerating; her book has been roundly criticized on this very point since it's release: she's basically a shill for Welles's fantasies and revisions. As for Thomson, he believes that whatever theory he concocts, it must be true, again with no argument or evidence offerred. These people are not serious writers- they are hacks.

For serious writing on Welles you go to people like Bazin, Rosenbaum, Anderegg, Naremore and Benamou, writers who think deeply about the work. As Welles said in the Chartes section of Fake, who built Chartes is not important. And we may never know who the real Shakespeare was- a noblman, a woman, Will himself? And of course, what does it matter?

It's the work that counts, only the work. Wellesnet has become increasingly diseased with "Biographitus", defined as "the tendency to only look at the author as hero, and to totally ignore the work."

As Welles said, an artist thinking about their posterity is a low pursuit.

[RayKelly]

Leaming is totally irresponsible and unreliable: she has no aguments, only the quotes of a man who sems to have no conscience about lying or exaggerating; her book has been roundly critisized on this very point since it's release:

Actually, Leaming's book was well-received at the time of its publication in 1989, though a few did question Welles as the sole source of the incest claim. Here is a sample of the reviews:

"Ms. Leaming, the author of a fine biography of Orson Welles, has created a convincing historical portrait of Rita Hayworth's world. The meticulous research makes the painful story of Hayworth's personal problems vivid, which may diminish some envy of her public successes." — The New York Times

"Hayworth's life was indeed a terrible mess. Leaming's insightful, carefully researched account of it makes riveting, if depressing, reading. ... "If This Was Happiness" is a sympathetic account of Hayworth's life and a compelling case history of the long-term effects of incest." — Boston Globe

"The (incest) evidence here is spotty, based solely on Welles' word that Hayworth once admitted as much to him. But as a working hypothesis, the trauma of incest may explain a lifetime of otherwise inexplicable, self-destructive blunders. ... Leaming's prose can gush ("the incomparable Hermes Pan," "the fabulous Eartha Kitt") and regularly descends to write-by-the-numbers cliche. But the material is poignant, another reminder of the chasm that can exist between public images and private pain." — Time

"The title of the book comes from Orson Welles, who said of his ex-wife, "If this was happiness, imagine what the rest of her life had been" is apt. The terror of Hayworth's horrendous childhood, carefully recreated by the author's research, is overwhelming." — Chicago Tribune

[Harvey Chartrand]

None of this has anything to do with the shredded & unfinished Don Quixote or the blurry Don Quijote de Orson Welles. Let's get back on topic, please. The divine Rita Hayworth's troubles should be the subject of another thread. We were discussing Welles' determination to make Don Quixote while misplacing the priceless footage, leaving it in hotel rooms when he had to sneak out cuz he couldn't pay the bill, refusing to finish the picture when Francisco Reiguera told him he was dying so better wrap soon. Reiguera dropped the bod in 1969 and Welles professed to still want to finish DQ! And then Akim Tamiroff (Sancho Panza) died in 1972. That didn't seem to deter Welles either. It's great to have such determination, but in his late fifties, was Welles really up to reshooting the entire DQ epic with new and younger actors (like Peter Brocco and Larry D. Mann, for example)?
Whatever happened to Mischa Auer as Don Quixote? Was he only used in test shots or did he play the Man of La Mancha in a few scenes?
Do I hear the sound of DQ reels disintegrating?

[RayKelly]

Do I hear the sound of DQ reels disintegrating?

I was scrolling back through the thread, which, by the way, frequently goes OT <g>
A year ago, Harvey posted something that still holds true today (to quote the great wine salesman)

It appears that rescuing and assembling the dusky fragments of Orson Welles' DON QUIXOTE is as futile a venture as trying to save a damsel in distress on a movie screen with a broken lance. DON QUIXOTE's a goner... No Criterion treatment for this one. All that decades-long effort for nothing! Other than a few brilliant gleaming shards, we'll never get to see the “greatest home movie ever made.”

Considering how tough it is to get OSOTW completed, I doubt we will ever see more than the Franco assembly of Don Quixote. Sadly, those reels are disintegrating and I fear that the McCormack footage will be lost.

[Tony]

A: It was Welles who said: "Don't you love digressions?"

B: I'd like to see your badge, Officer Chartrand.

[mido505]

Keats,

Tony has posted, I believe somewhere back on this thread, an excellent summary of Welles lost and found. I have authored, also on this thread, a pretty thorough history and accounting of the DQ footage. Welles' editor Mauro Bonnani has the negative in storage in Italy. Mauro also had a fairly complete work print that was picked up by Beatrice and brought back to Welles in the U.S. There is evidence for this work print's existence up until the early eighties; I give the references. That work print has not turned up since Welles' death, so it's current whereabouts is the central mystery of the DQ story. A significant amount of footage was also given by Welles to actress and friend Suzanne Cloutier for safekeeping. Welles had contacted Cloutier and Bonnani shortly before his death about restarting work on DQ. Cloutier has stated that her footage was on a ship sailing the Atlantic when she learned of Welles' demise.

I am sorry to say that Harvey, so often correct, is simply wrong here. Orson was not "criminally careless with the Don Quixote footage (no sooner shot than lost)". During Welles' lifetime, the footage was never lost, although it was endangered when Welles fell behind on payments to the Rome film lab where it was stored. It is Welles' heir, Oja Kodar, who has been so criminally careless with the DQ footage, handing over crappy dupes to the completely innappropriate Jess Franco and getting into a pointless pissing match with Bonnani. If the fabled work print can be found, and Bonnani's negatives do not deteriorate, and these petty little egotists can act like adults and cooperate, we can at least have an approximation of Welles' DQ, or at least how he conceived it at a particular moment in time.

Of course, these are big "if's". To be fair to Harvey, I am pretty sure that he is right on the money with this quotation: "Abandon all hope...all those among ye who ever expect to see footage from any of the unfinished films of Orson Welles. You will never have the pleasure of screening the Criterion Don Quixote or The Other Side of the Wind in any form, whether fully assembled in umpteen different director's cuts, or incorporated in a contextual documentary."