By RAY KELLY
From the industrialization of an Indiana town in The Magnificent Ambersons to the bleak postwar landscapes of The Trial, cities have played a considerable, and perhaps overlooked, role in the films of Orson Welles.
In January 2016, Columbia University’s Wallflower Press rectifies that with the publication of At the End of the Street in the Shadow – Orson Welles and the City by Matthew Asprey Gear
Gear, an Australian media studies academic and co-editor of Contrappasso magazine, is no stranger to Welles’ work.
He recently penned the insightful Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan for Bright Lights Film Journal. In addition, Gear has written two pieces for Wellesnet – Mr. Arkadin’ – A look at the film locations and Too Much Johnson: Interview with Scott Simmon.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow – Orson Welles and the City is the culmination of years of travel and research.
“I’ve been working on the book for the last three years. It’s taken me around the world: to the Welles archives at the Munich Film Museum, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and the University of Michigan,” Gear said. “I’ve been able to study many of Welles’ unfinished and unreleased films as well as his unrealized treatments and screenplays. Of course this book is built on the foundation of a tremendous body of existing scholarly work, as well.”
Gear calls the late filmmaker a “poet and critic of the city.”
“It’s difficult to think of a more cosmopolitan American filmmaker. The more I study his movies, the more I’ve come to appreciate Orson Welles as a poet and critic of the city. He had a deeply personal vision of urban society – in the contemporary world and throughout history – as well as serious political ideas about the way power operated in urban space,” Gear said. “I think this informed the innovative ways he created cities on screen. I hope this different angle provides a fresh assessment of a radically independent filmmaker.”
In its synopsis of the upcoming book, Wallflower Press states:
The films of Orson Welles inhabit the spaces of cities – from America’s industrializing midlandto its noirish borderlands, from Europe’s medieval fortresses to its Kafkaesque labyrinths and postwar rubblescapes. His movies take us through dark streets to confront nightmarish struggles for power, the carnivalesque and bizarre, and the shadows and light of human character.
This ambitious new study explores Welles’s vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban transformation, race relations and fascism, the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism, and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture. It focuses on the personal and political foundation of Welles’s cinematic cities–the way he invents urban spaces on film to serve his dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes.
The book’s critical scope draws on extensive research in international archives and builds on the work of previous scholars. Viewing Welles as a radical filmmaker whose innovative methods were only occasionally compatible with the commercial film industry, this volume examines the filmmaker’s original vision for butchered films, such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), and considers many projects the filmmaker never completed – an immense “shadow oeuvre” ranging from unfinished and unreleased films to unrealized treatments and screenplays
At the End of the Street in the Shadow – Orson Welles and the City is available for pre-order through amazon.com and amazon.co.uk
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