(Editor’s note: The Italian film magazine Cabiria has pulled together reflections from Orson Welles scholars across the globe to mark the one-year anniversary of The Other of the Wind. In this translation permitted by Cabiria, Italian film scholar Alberto Anile offers his views on the merits and compromises of the finished film.)
Merits and compromises of a reconstruction
By ALBERTO ANILE
Making movies means making compromises, even for the “authors”, even for the Author par excellence. Moreover, the entire career of Orson Welles is continuous negotiation. For Citizen Kane he had to share the script (and then an Oscar) with Herman J. Mankiewicz; what he did later was cut, manipulated, reassembled by others, or simply influenced by lack of money.
The story of The Other Side of the Wind has already been described with exciting completeness by Josh Karp in his Orson Welles’s Last Movie, and with autobiographical passion in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? by Joseph McBride, who was involved from the beginning in a small role of actor. The battle to complete the film continued beyond the publication of the two volumes and was finally won by Welles’ old collaborators. Not from his partner Oja Kodar, accused by some of having often been another obstacle to the closing of the negotiations; nor from the devoted operator Gary Graver, who has not had time to see the edited movie. Who can claim the credit on it is Peter Bogdanovich, to whom Welles in a famous anecdote would have entrusted the task of finishing the film, and Frank Marshall, willing and always smiling production manager, along with Filip Jan Rymsza and his Royal Road Entertainment. And they won the battle inevitably making use of compromises, even more necessary given the director’s departure, but at least freed from the economic problem. Therefore, with all the suspicion that it is permissible to express against a digital giant who’s changing the entire film industry, Netflix also has to be thanked, for having put on the plate the money needed to close a very complicated operation with little commercial appeal.
That said, we still need to try to understand which compromises have become necessary, and whether the result is to be considered a true film by Orson Welles. Because if the original editing left by the director amounted to 40 minutes, and the finished film is 120, this means that at least two thirds, although based on screenplays and notes by the author, were edited in his absence.
What is (or should be) The Other Side of the Wind talking about? First of cinema, and therefore of the relationship between life and art, and therefore of the relationship between true and false (F for Fake, conceived and realized in the midst of Wind’s filming, can be considered a spin-off, more coherent and graceful). After that, it talks about dialectics between old and young, disciples and masters, “sacred monsters” and rampant talents, taking up a theme already touched on Chimes at Midnight, with the bonus of a never so abundant series of autobiographical allusions. And finally it talks about the ghosts of sex, the ambiguities and the orientations that influence behavior or that have themselves been produced by ancient and unquenchable traumas.
Among these three themes (cinema, old age, sex) the third one is the most striking and surprising, due to the erotic suggestions of the movie inside the movie and the inclinations of Hannaford, the director at the center of the plot. The influence of Oja Kodar, credited as co-screenwriter, is evident. On the other hand it’s with the arrival of the beautiful and intelligent Croatian that Welles’s movies acquire passionate ignitions that were previously unknown or dormant and, at the same time, the chromatic joyfulness of a cinema so far proudly in black and white: with Oja Kodar, Welles begins to deal with sex and also to use color, in The Immortal Story, F for Fake and in the unfinished The Merchant of Venice, The Deep and The Dreamers. From this point of view the chromatic differences between the two constitutive elements of The Other Side of the Wind, the “documentary” on Hannaford’s last birthday, mostly in black and white, and the movie within the movie, entirely in color, mimic a possible partition. But the influence of Kodar goes beyond the excitement of color, it goes as far as the conception of some situations. Even refusing to take literally what she always claimed (very briefly: that the film is the result of the union of one of her subjects entitled The Other Side of the Wind together with what initially Welles called Sacred Beasts) certain analogies with her first film as a director, photographed and co-produced by Gary Graver (and realized – so the author said – just to finance the completion of The Other Side of the Wind) seem quite evident: presented in Venice in 1989, Jaded is a botched portrait of drifters, with violence, sex, fistfights, sodomizations, gays and transvestites; given the tare to the exploitation taste, Jaded shares with Wind a definite interest in the deeper and more dangerous ambiguities of the sexual sphere.
Regarding the “cinematic” theme, the film is only on the surface a rather realistic, somewhat parodic portrait of the “New Hollywood”, because both the documentary filming of Hannaford’s party and the movie within the movie actually insists on the sub-theme of the vision, whose importance is underlined by Hannaford’s words that can be heard during the final apparition of John Dale: (Remember those Berbers up in the Atlas? They wouldn’t let us point a camera at them. They’re certain that it dries up something. The old eye, you know, behind the magic box… Could be it’s an evil eye, at that. Medusa’s). The importance of the “vision” returns along the whole work, from the siege of filmmakers to the continuous semiotic winks that dot the movie within the movie (the very first voyeuristic sequence in the Turkish bath, the ring with a fake eye in the public bathroom, the doll’s eyes turned into earrings, the laconic driver who witnesses the embrace in the car, the hypothetical old man who should spy on the scissor scene, etc.). Even if we have some anti-Antonioni persiflage, or the mockery of certain critical fumisteries (Is the camera eye a reflection of reality, or is reality a reflection of the camera eye? Or is the camera merely a phallus?), the discourse tends to become more and more serious, and the semiotic suggestions about filming and watching meet more substantial questions such as life and death. The fate of the great Hannaford, who fears to kill his characters when he films them, is to disappear himself by crashing into his car, precisely because of his film and his ghosts; and when he’s died, even his work dissolves on the screen, in front of an empty audience. The last word of the movie is Hannaford’s «cut!», which is both an act of creation and the invitation by the most cruel of the Fates. They seems metaphors, perhaps more suggestive than philosophical, of the impossibility of forcing life into the frame of a cinema screen, and the hazard of attempting it anyway.
The elderly/younger theme is represented first of all by the relationship between Hannaford and Brooks Otterlake, an “apostle” who seems the favorite John and instead turned out to be Judas; it should be the central theme of the film, at least at the plot level, and instead remains somewhat unspoken. This is where the film records the two most interesting changes compared to the original project. The introduction, which should have been recorded by Welles as the omniscient Narrator, became with great intuition a preface by Otterlake, just slightly up-to-date (the reference to the fact that the events took place long before cell phone cameras and computerized images). The coincidence that Bogdanovich collaborated on the assembly of The Other Side of the Wind, like Otterlake with materials related to the Hannaford party, contributes to sinking into the abyss a film also based on the Chinese boxes of vision, and on the illusory mirrors of fiction in which reality is reflected.
The other “change” concerns an ending that would instead require some explanation by the filmmakers. In the one and only published version of the script (The Other Side of the Wind, Cahiers du Cinema / Festival International du film de Locarno, 2005) it’s not John Dale who refuses a car ride from Hannaford; it’s Otterlake, who deceived the director wearing the wig of one of the puppets and imitating the voice of the ephebic actor. When Hannaford scrambles away in the car, Otterlake would take off his wig, murmuring, I’m better than I think… and much less funny. The real Dale would have arrived later, too late, as silent as he is in the edited film, but in following scene.
It would therefore have been not Dale’s refusal but Otterlake’s atrocious joke to originate Hannaford’s incident (… if it was an accident). Although it is a script expedient, with the risk of appearing more like a writing hub than a natural evolution of the story, the twist of the last imitation would have better distributed the responsibilities of the protagonists, clarifying the balance of faults and reactions, and lighting a new candle on the altar of the false truth. The edited film, instead, removed the disguised Otterlake and unified the two planned scenes, giving to real Dale the reverse shots of Hannaford in the car: a perhaps more elegant solution, but also a more anodyne one.
It is possible that this solution has been suggested to the filmmakers by some screenplays or memos from Welles himself, but this seems unlikely. One of the most obvious characteristics of Otterlake character is his ability in imitations; this explains why the director wanted a famous imitator like Rich Little for this role, and also, when he was forced to replace him, the reason why he choose Bogdanovich, who was really good at impressions: for what purpose did he draw Otterlake character like this, and then would take away his most decisive demonstration?
A fourth theme could and should hold together the other three, and it is the useless attempt to establish the identity of a man. A typical Wellesian theme, on which Citizen Kane, The Immortal Story and Mr. Arkadin, among the others, are founded. “The real mystery,” wrote Welles about Hannaford “is perhaps not the nature of his death, but his nature of man, the definitive truth about him as an artist, as a mask maker. If he really said everything about himself in his art, is there anything it can really be said about the artist?” (It’s the ending of a short text about the structure of the movie, published in 1974 on Dirigido por..., and republished on a notable Italian volume, Il cinema secondo Orson Welles, edited three years later by Paolo Mereghetti).
While giving new revelations after each watching, the film does not seem to be able to hold together so much wealth and complexity of themes with the same homogeneous lucidity of other works by Welles. The problem of the reconstructed version of Wind seems to be the juxtaposition of at least two lines that compete with each other, the sexual ambiguity and the cinematographic theme, which battle each other from the two fronts of Hannaford’s life, the professional one (the elderly director in search of financing) and the personal one (the playboy who seduced the wives of his actors, the old lover who woos underage girls, the vicious man without money willing to give away expensive cars to actors he would like to take to bed), the old cineaste who is looking for returning in vogue, climbing on the shoulders of young disciples who betray him, and the sexual tortuosity of the He-man with homosexual latencies that seeks life and death together.
How much of all this is to be charged to Welles and how much to those who have completed the movie? In other words: which dose of loyalty can we attribute to the operation? A quick comparison with the published script highlights several divergences beyond Otterlake’s final imitation scene: the Mr. Burroughs episode would have had a funny conclusion when the elderly teacher, stripped to enter the pool, would find himself naked under the spiteful Hannaford rifles; the final quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest was preceded by a similar call; in general, the order of the various scenes is altered (indeed there would be other versions of the script with differently ordered scenes). In the edited film, the appearance of Rich Little has been preserved in a couple of shots, so that two Brooks Otterlake (his and Bogdanovich’s) come close to holding hands. The aforementioned «cut!» by Hannaford has been removed from the last scene (perhaps because this ending, who would sound evocative and original in 1976, has now been used so many times in movies about movies that became a cliché) and moved after the last of many final credits. A decidedly questionable decision was to shorten the embrace in the car, probably the most beautiful erotic sequence of all time.
Nevertheless these observations — which, without viewing all the footage and all the papers consulted by the filmmakers, can only be defined as doubts — must not overshadow the objective merits of a movie that continually challenges perception and intelligence of the viewer. This The Other Side of the Wind contains the unmistakable ability to capture, recombine and restore life, making it more spectacular and at the same time more complex, engaging the mind and the eye: the extraordinary density of the dialogues, with radio overlapping technique, the ability to make fluid sequences composed of shots collected over the course of several years between Los Angeles, Carefree, Madrid and Orvilliers, the astonishing compositional beauty of much of the movie within the movie, the quality of the performances of navigated professionals like Huston but also of non-actors like Bogdanovich, Welles’s lucid humor, which is never an end in itself or ever dryly cynical, and touching moments like the reference to Napoleon’s and Hannibal’s soldiers, anonymous “heroes” of all time (which recalls the eulogy in F for Fake to the unknown artists who made the beautiful Cathedral of Chartres)… We come out of the film in the mood as Marlene Dietrich said she felt at the end of a chat with Welles, “like a plant that’s been watered.”
Like the best works of Welles, The Other Side of the Wind gives the feeling of promising the solution to so many questions, of revealing the meaning of everything, and then with a stroke of magic it makes disappear the last certainties, leaving new stimulating questions.
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(Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic, historian and journalist. He is the author of several books, including Orson Welles in Italy. All rights reserved, 2019.)
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