(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 critic Alessandro Aniballi looks at the film and Welles’ treatment of death.)
D for Death
By ALESSANDRO ANIBALLI
The Other Side of the Wind translates the death of the author into images.
More than in his other movies — in any case: differently — Welles stages his own death, acting that through the body of the protagonist, John Huston. The American director plays the seventy-year-old director Jake Hannaford, who commits an alleged suicide during the night of his birthday, exactly while the images of his upcoming movie are running; a movie that will become, of course, not completed.
So, the uncompleted. More than putting the sign “THE END” in the credits, the matter is the end of the author who, for one reason or another, has not succeed to finish his movie. Being unable to complete a project, the author suffers the unexpected interruption of both his aspiration and his desire for perfection, living a small death that — like every death — makes him imperfect, forever.
Considering that, Welles has died many times, dying with his numerous unfinished works, from Don Quixote to The Deep, right up to The Other Side of the Wind, irregularly classified by the American critics as his last movie. Rather than that, The Other Side of the Wind is his last movie made in Hollywood, and at the same time his most viscerally anti-Hollywood work, shamelessly far from any concept of harmonic classicism, and alien to the idea of a centered style.
When we say that Welles in The Other Side of the Wind stages his own death, we must remember that he has always refused any autobiographical reference in his work. And we should also consider that Welles has often staged the death of the character that he was playing, from Citizen Kane to Othello, and Mr. Arkadin , Touch of Evil, and again, Campanadas a Medianoche and Une histoire immortelle. In these cases, of course, it has been always the staged death of an actor, not the loss of the author.
Beyond the fatal coincidences (like Hannaford, Welles died when he was 70) in The Other Side of the Wind dies the author as a creator, as the filmaker bigger than life; he is replaced by the cinephile author / degenerate cine-son, meaning the parasite director, acted in the movie by Peter Bogdanovich, friend of Welles and maximum example of neo-Hollywood mannerism.Welles stages the death of the Father, replaced by dwarfs living on the shoulders of the giants: the directors of the “New Hollywood” later will refuse to give a financial contribute to complete The Other Side of the Wind, even though they have had the chance. Maybe because this project appeared to them too cruel and metalinguistic, like an autodafé that ridiculed those who worshiped Welles – scared by him, at the same time – much more than the old moguls of the Majors, who considered him eccentric and, therefore, harmless.As always, there is a Shakespearean filigree in Welles’ work. Hannaford / Huston is a Falstaff who used the Cinema to have fun and to live well, as a pioneer, both fighting with his actors and having sex with his stars, men or women; Otterlake / Bogdanovich is, instead, an asexual prince Harry who is using the cinema to get rich and take Power (in fact, the New Hollywood ended up occupying the board of command of the Factory of Dreams; and the whole saga of Star Wars could be read like a tutorial about how to seize Power, overthrowing the Empire). As we said, every uncompleted is a death. And every time someone tries to complete the not finished, he tries to act a resurrection, a galvanization. Netflix has done this, investing money to complete the editing of The Other Side of the Wind. To reach the cut that now we can see, they have edit what they had available — we are talking about almost a hundred of hours of footage —, but also they have redoubled some missing parts (for example, Danny Huston has imitated the voice of his father, John, “redoing” it), inserting music (Michel Legrand, who had already worked with Welles for F for Fake, has composed the soundtrack from scratch), even shooting some missing frames, such as the counter-shots of the dummies shot by Hannaford / Huston.Overall, it was a process of emulation, “as if” Welles was still on board, taking as a model the sequences he had – perhaps – left behind as completed. It has been an arbitrary move, that in our opinion has taken the project to a successful end, paradoxically.Beyond this judgment, what is more important is that, with it, the Wellesian bet (and prophecy) about the end of the cinematographic authorship has been accomplished, to its extreme consequences. The Other Side of the Wind has become an infinite spiral of mirrors, the most radical and extreme of the labyrinths without escape of Wellesian art, because it has been closed in the absence of its author, and we have been permanently entangled in its already dead spider-web , as if he had always known about it.
And who could carry out this operation if not Netflix, which is enacting the end of Cinema as we have known it? An entertainment giant who performs the most cinephile operations, like this one in the memory of Welles, or like The Irishman, Scorsese’s movie with De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci (with some traditional producers which had pulled back from it, incredibly); and at the same time a giant that, like a glittery Trojan horse, allows the watching of his branded stuff only through its platform, which is way more important than the single movie or the Cinema itself.
What The Other Side of the Wind tells us through the death of the director, if not the end of a certain Cinema? A kind of Cinema in which the “old magic box”, meaning the camera, has no more a magnetic and mystical power; all that is lost in the media overexposure made by thousands of small and agile recording machines, used by various cameramen during the birthday party of Hannaford / Huston, which are able to film only in a “dirty”, impromptu, shapeless way. A kind of Cinema in which the main object of the shooting is an old fashioned director whose eclipse happens, in some kind of Nick’s Movie ante-litteram, because of his insistence on being on stage, instead of behind the camera.
How we cannot think, in this sense, also about the dictatorship of the extras in nowadays Cinema? We are surrounded by a pandemonium of meta-texts to give us a comment about the main text itself, in the end burying him it in a shapeless audiovisual treacle. This is the destiny, of course, also of this reconstruction of The Other Side of the Wind, accompanied by two documentaries: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making, even if the real meta-text (or uber-text) that we would like to have is the one hundred hours of footage. F for Fake: we are still there, even more now that Netflix has come, expanding and complicating the make-up layer.
Synchronicity can help us for once, because in the early seventies Welles worked both on F for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind; more, they has been financed both by the Franco-Iranians producers of Les films de l´Astrophore, and they are edited both as a puzzle of visual and sound fragments. But in F for Fake, Welles himself was on stage to guarantee the appropriation of the author, while in The Other Side of the Wind this hold does not exist, since only his voice is revealed in a brief moment, during a fake interview.
The uncontrolled fragmentation of the movie flourishes here, bringing to the ultimate level that process of crumbling of the image, and growing of the amount of work (and time on the set), that Welles had begun to experience, despite of himself, in the years of Othello, replying it with theoretical awareness in the proliferation of the spaces in Mr. Arkadin. In The Other Side of the Wind the set is just one — Hannaford’s villa — but the points of view are multiple: there is no longer a single “eye of the author”, but a thousand of decentralized eyes; they are no longer omniscient, but visually impaired, and the more they look — recording it — the less they see.
In a movie that, moreover, has predicted in its diegetic fiction to be doubly not directed by Welles there is a total dispossession of the role of the author: in fact, Hannaford / Huston has the role of the director, but the anonymous cameramen record on the set fragments of documentation have no director. It is a concept reiterated, in some kind of epiphany, by Netflix.The author vanishes, losing control of himself while he loses the Cinema. What could remain is just the cathedral of Chartres, or rather its idea: maybe the greatest masterpiece of western art has no signature, because it has been made by one hundred thousand men. That temple embodies “man” in its essence, as Welles says in F for Fake: the nameless craftsman. And today we have built (and we are building) a new dis-humanized temple with images that are mostly anonymous, recorded almost involuntarily, automatically. The Other Side of the Wind is a study about the triumph of the hetero-direct images made by the last man on Earth. He could be only a director, which is shot until his body has collapsed into an image, a film, a fake.
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(Graduated with a thesis about Orson Welles, Alessandro Aniballi is a journalist, screenwriter and film critic. He co-directed three edition of the DAMS Film festival, a University Film Festival and wrote for many websites before founding, in 2014, with three other colleagues, Quinlan.it, a film review website. From January 2019, he’s among the curators of “Ritorno in Pellicola” (Back on film), a film exhibition dedicated to Italian film classics to be screened in 35mm. All rights reserved, 2019.)
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