(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, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marco Vanelli, looks at religious themes in the film. Wellesnet would like to thank Mr. Vanelli for his generosity in allowing us in recent weeks to publish several English translations from this remarkable issue. )
God’s Magic Eye
By MARCO VANELLI
The wait was enormous and, at first sight, the disappointment was equally so.
Finally seeing The Other Side of the Wind I had the impression of something chaotic, inconclusive, smug, almost a self-parody, full of obvious and hidden references to other directors and to himself. The liberating desire was to be free to say: I don’t like it. Yes, the film in the film is beautiful, the colors, the naked Kodar, but all the self-referential blah blah blah at the party is unbearable. It is really hard to follow the dialogue, recognize the real or key characters, appreciate the different types of shots and montages, grasp the general structure and, at the same time, enjoy the film.
But this was upon first impact, mainly due to the great expectations and the eagerness to be able to say that I had seen a new film by Orson Welles. Then comes the critical work, the successive viewings, the reconstruction of the pieces in the narrative arc – because there is one – the positioning of the work as a whole in contemporary cinema and in the work of the master. Then, things take on another meaning, and one manages to admire the increase in skill, the effort to achieve an existential and professional balance, the attempt to renew oneself and at the same time criticize the obsession for false youthfulness. And to understand, for example, why the film is titled as it is.
There are two predominant themes in the film: sex and religion. As in any real artwork, they are destined to merge and become a single reflection, in this case an allegory of creativity.
The Other Side of the Wind tells us about the seventy-year-old director Jake Hannaford, equally beloved and hated living myth, and of his film still in process which is also called The Other Side of the Wind. Of the latter we see three segments that, although disconnected from each other, still form a large fragment that is consistent from a stylistic and thematic point of view. A woman, mysterious and lofty, almost always naked, crosses human environments variously engaged in sexual activities without getting involved, as well as traveling through almost abstract spaces, spreading the fascination of the eternal feminine around her. A young biker, vaguely androgynous, remains attracted to her and pursues her, performing a sort of seductive dance with his bike. But it is she who dictates the rules and the times and supports the erotic game by dominating him with a constant threat of castration. Until he disappears, naked, and she will be left alone in an increasingly rarefied environment to make a phallic symbol fall with cuts of a scissors.
The young man, in addition to disappearing in the film, seems to have disappeared from the film, that is from the set, and also from the entourage of Hannaford who had really counted on him. By the dialogue we learn that his name is John Dale, and that Jake Hannaford, on his yacht, had saved Dale while he was drowning — seemingly an attempted suicide. He had made a deckhand of him, a sailor, then an actor. Someone defines it an all-consuming relationship between master and slave. In fact, he is his personal creation, the last one. Before him there were other actors discovered from nothing and then abandoned: Frank Fryer, Randy Moore, David Leigh, Neil Trevor, Branch Sutter, Glen Garvey, Courtney Saxon, a certain Kingman… Homosexual allusions regarding Hannaford’s interests for his actors, who come and go, begin to spread among the guests at the party, and in particular for John Dale: the critic Juliette Riche is convinced of this, but the loyal Brooksie and producer Max David also entertain the possibility.
For Juliette Riche, Hannaford has always seduced the female companions of his actors, and this was a way to possess the actors themselves, symbolically. With John Dale it didn’t work because he didn’t have a partner. In response to these insinuations, Hannaford erupts and slaps her.
Brooksie tells some of the fierce cineastes who are filming the entire party that Hannaford shared a bungalow with Frank Fryer, the first protagonist of one of his films: “Jake and Frank, used to strip to the waist, every Saturday night, and they put their pay envelopes on the mantelpiece, and they’d fight each other for the pot.” A situation of exaggerated machismo, in Far West style, but at the time of the making of the film, this recounted scene could not have failed to evoke an archetypal scene in the (homo)sexual imaginary of Anglo-American culture: the Greco-Roman wrestling between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, naked and in front of a fireplace, in Women in Love (1969) by Ken Russell. By now the Hollywood Renaissance was beginning to risk themes and images that until then were unimaginable: Midnight Cowboy (1969) won the Oscar for best film (rated “X” by the Motion Picture Association of America); Antonioni had choreographed collective coitus in the desert sands of Zabriskie Point (1970); Carnal Knowledge (1971) addressed sexual neuroses without equivocation.
Even Max David does not seem scandalized by the images of the nude figures in Hannaford’s film. Rather, he cares if the woman has a bomb in her bag, if we know when the man bought her a doll, if the public will understand the plot. Something similar must have happened, years before, at rko, during the screening of the rushes of Citizen Kane, when some executives might have wondered: but who is this Rosebud? when does she appear? will the public understand the plot? However, the ceremonious assistant Billy Boyle, compulsively munching sweets to replace booze, tries to exalt the photogenic qualities of John Dale: according to Jake, the camera, “the old magic box,” likes him. Max fears that the actor left the set due to Jake’s advances: “And if the actor doesn’t like “the old magic director”?” And, referring to the screen actress, he asks what “the old magic box” thinks about her. Then referring again to John he says that he looks like a girl. “It’s “the” scene,” Billy justifies. “And you old guys are trying to get with it… Is that what this movie is about?” Billy is upset, fears for the film, but evidently the confidence in Jake’s manhood is also uncertain. However, Max closes the question: “Tell Jake he wasted my time.”
In the Babel of dialogue, questions, quotations, spit-out sentences that punctuate the entire film by the guests at the party, there is someone who asks: “Is the camera merely a phallus?”
The climate of change underway in American puritanical society is also evident in two apparently random passages. While the minibus brings some guests to the villa, we see from a window that a double feature is playing at a drive-in—I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin—horror-exploitation films the second of which was among the first to get an “X” rating in 1964. Combined as a double feature in 1971 by Jerry Gross, I Drink Your Blood (David E. Durston, 1970) was named first Phobia and then Hydro-Phobia; I Eat Your Skin (Del Tenney, 1964) was originally called Zombies (later Zombie Bloodbath and also Voodoo Blood Bath). The combination of the new titles has a vaguely Eucharistic appeal that can be linked to the religious theme of Welles’ film.
When the bus stops for a moment, we see the signs of a store that sells “Adult Books,” “Nudist Magazines” and above all “8mm Art Films.” The nudie movies to be seen at home, camouflaged in Swedish or European (perhaps) artistry, were the domestic counterpart to the progressive sexual liberalization that Hollywood was experiencing in that period. Shortly thereafter there would have been the “official sanctioning” of pornography with Deep Throat (1972), projected in mainstream circuits and become a radical chic trend at the time.
The other major topic around which the continuous chatter revolves is religion, or rather, the figure of God. A commentator, speaking of Hannaford’s dreams, says: “Man, they’re real. He made them real. He gave them existence. He molded them out of clay – while another interjects: “Or cut them out with a pair of scissors” – He conceived them. Like a god. A terrible and jealous god. That’s what he’s been with this new boy of his. John Dale is Hannaford’s personal creation.” We immediately begin to outline the equivalence Author = Creator, but also director = voyeur, with his magic box that instead of giving life takes it away from the unfortunate young men he captures.
The idea of Hannaford as God is also addressed in the interview that someone (Welles’ voice) conducts with Zarah Valeska, the organizer of the party and – as we will see – Hannaford’s female counterpart: “It’s been reported that you call him “G.F.” sometimes. Jokingly, of course. Is that right? G.F. meaning “God the Father.” Later, in the conversation she and Hannaford will have, he will call her “Mother.” But during the party begins a discussion that moves from theology to the origins of Christianity and then always returns to Hannaford.
Someone asks him: “God isn’t dead.” Reflection of your attitude. Right, Mr. Hannaford?” To which the director replies: “Well, kid. He’s certainly Jewish.” And Brooksie, giving a kind of blessing, says: “Thus spaketh Jake”; then he adds that he still knows many things about Jake and religion, evidently gathered in the tapes of his conversations with Hannaford that were to have been used to write a book about him. Brooksie: “Here it is, The Gospel According to Jake. God the Father is an old Jew, invented by a lot of other old Jews in the hopeless attempt to put down the Jewish Mother.” A clash begins between a masculine, paternal principle and a feminine, maternal principle, namely Jake versus Zarah. The true primordial divinity would be a woman, as we shall see. And he adds that this is at the center of everything, “even his movie,” offering us a key to the reading.
Juliette Rich, perpetually hunting for clues, lapsus, involuntary revelations, enters the discussion asking if this God is also a member of the Hannaford clan. He replies, sarcastic as usual, that it is a “She”: “We’re all ruled by the wind, aren’t we, lady? So, if the Lord is a lady, and God’s will is her will, than we can all relax and stop expecting the universe to be logical.” Here comes the Wind of the title, a wind that drives everyone and that, evangelically, “bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3,8). The other side of the wind, that is of the Spirit, is therefore woman, echoing a dictum of Mao Zedong: “Women hold up half the sky.” And, in fact, later Hannaford calls the silent actress of his film “the other half of The Other Side of the Wind. The better half.”
Hannaford does not seem to be only a godfather, but also a messiah, with a lot of disciples to form a clan. What do they feel about the new film, asks Juliette Rich. Brooksie: “The man is infested with disciples. I’m the apostle, lady. Just like Saint Paul,” jokingly claiming a privileged role in Jake’s life, work and thought. Brooksie continues to claim he knows everything, even of St. Paul: “Yeah, the Apostle Paul packaged it. By now, Jesus was dead. […] And so the subject was in public domain and… […] So, when Paul dreamed up Christianity… he stuck the “anity” into Christ…” Taking advantage of Brooksie’s unintentional double sense, Jake replies with a macho joke: “As long as I’m still twitching, Brooksie, you won’t stick it into me,” immediately caught on the fly by Juliette Rich who says, provocatively, “Isn’t that just what he’s doing?”
Jake: “Movies and friendship… those are mysteries”; Brooksie: “A mystery may reveal. It never explains.” Right?” This exchange of words reminds us of the prologue of Mr. Arkadin, with the small apologue attributed to Plutarch: “A certain great and powerful king once asked a poet: “What can I give you of all that I have?” He wisely replied: “Anything, Sire… except your secret.” Around Hannaford hides the same mystery of many characters played by Welles, Mr. Arkadin in the lead: a mystery that may reveal, but never explains.
Just at that moment, Claude Chabrol comes up and asks: “Just like you, Mr. Hannaford?” To which Jack replies: “Just like me and God. If it weren’t for the difference in sex, how could you tell us apart?,” telling us again that God is a woman, but putting himself on the same level. The sudden entry of Chabrol reminds us that Welles had just acted for him in Ten Days’ Wonder (1971) as a patriarch with the emblematic name of Theo. And there are other references scattered here and there by Jack: “Always remember that your heart is God’s little garden,” said to Pister; the invitation made to prof. Burroghs to undress over there, “in the sight of God”; and above all “The truth shall set us free” (John 8,32), referring to the fact that, obeying the will of Zarah, all that evening must be filmed without fearing the inconvenient truths that will be documented.
So, Hannaford, as a director, is a demiurge, someone who invents characters, cuts out them, creates them from clay, gives them the face and body of young actors he then abandons. He is a divinity who can dispose of the lives of others, who takes pleasure in maneuvering them, making them become stories. And in Welles’s films there is always someone who feels the delirium of omnipotence in manipulating the stories of others (C.F. Kane, George Amberson, Elsa Bannister, Iago, Mr. Arkadin, Hank Quinlan, Hastler, Charles Clay), if not even to manipulate history itself (Charles Rankin, Macbeth).
Realizing that his last creature, John Dale, is actually a manipulator himself, as he faked suicide to be saved and become an actor, Jack can only declare himself defeated and disappear by killing himself, as his father, J. Jason Hannaford, did. His “old magic box” is revealed for what it is: a scrutinizing look that destroys the characters, the eye of an evil god who observes and judges. In one of the takes of his film we hear him off camera giving directions to John Dale: “Listen kid. Listen. Somebody’s watching you. You can you feel it. There’s somebody else out there. Up there in that window […] there’s somebody up there peeking down.” Meanwhile we see the new Adam and Eve in a post- apocalyptic Eden, where she knows what she has to do and does it, while he, John, does not stand up to the pressure and runs away. The masculine is destined to succumb, both in the Wind of Hannaford and in that of Welles (which obviously also includes the other). The female archetype triumphs, the other half of the wind, and the Mother Goddess, Zarah, is saved, she who does not fear the camera lenses and does not allow herself to be corrupted by cinephile chaos and gossip. Instead, the male archetype is destroyed, as is the myth of a God the Father with his magic eye.
The last words of the film are those of Jake Hannaford in an old tape heard by Pister — words that play lucidly as an admission of guilt: “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. Who knows, maybe you can stare too hard at something. Drain out the virtue, suck out the living juice. You shoot the great places and the pretty people. All those girls and those boys. Shoot them dead.”
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(Marco Vanelli was born in 1963 in Lucca, a small town in Tuscany where Giacomo Puccini was also born. He is the editor-in-chief of Cabiria. Studi di Cinema, published by Cinit-Cineforum Italiano, which is a magazine dedicated to deepening the forgotten pages of the cinema of the past. Vanelli teaches Italian Language and Literature in a secondary school, and Cinema and Theology at the University of Pisa. In his studies, he has dealt with Walt Disney and animation cinema, but above all with Italian Neorealism. He found and restored a lost short film by Mario Soldati, Chi è Dio? (Who is God?) written together with Cesare Zavattini and Diego Fabbri in 1945.)
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