By RAY KELLY
Orson Welles famously wrote, “A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
He would have certainly been impressed then by Mark Cousins’ penetrating and engaging new documentary, The Eyes of Orson Welles, which had its world premiere today at the Cannes Film Festival.
Cousins has broken new ground by linking the late filmmaker’s lifelong love of painting and sketching with his success as a visual artist of stage and screen.
For The Eyes of Orson Welles, Cousins had unprecedented access to a lifetime of private drawings and paintings. (Cousins’ primary sources are the University of Michigan Special Collections in Ann Arbor and a private archive held by Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice.)
However, Cousins is not interested in presenting a flashy slideshow of Wellesian artwork.
Like his 15-hour The Story of Film opus, The Eyes of Orson Welles is a globetrotting affair loaded with insight and punctuated with moments of wit. Quite simply, it is one of the best Welles documentaries released since his death in 1985.
Cousins visits Welles’ birthplace of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where his mother was a community activist; Grand Detour, Illinois, home to the hotel his father owned; The Art Institute of Chicago, where Welles briefly studied; Dublin, site of his professional stage debut; the New York theaters where he directed landmark productions; boyhood vacation ― later filming ― locales in Spain and Morocco; and finally Arizona, where Welles lived and worked in the early 1970s.
Remarkably, Cousins manages to cover a great deal of ground during 114 minutes: Welles’ technique as an artist; his role as a civil rights activist, including his hunt for the white police officer who blinded a black serviceman; and his cinematic fascination with kings and tyrants.
Cousins narrates this perceptive documentary as a letter to the long-deceased Welles. He catches him up on 21st century advances he might have relished, the election of the first African-American president of the United States, and “a guy who thinks he is Charles Foster Kane.”
“The world has become more Wellesian, Orson. The despots that you were fascinated by are gaining ground. Things seem exaggerated,” Cousins says. “But what is Wellesian? Who were you?”
Cousins sees Welles as a child of privilege, who was inspired by working class people he encountered during boyhood trips abroad.
“You painted hundreds of landscapes here ― but destroyed them,” Cousins says of a 16-year-old Welles’ painting tour of Ireland. “It was the people and faces you preferred.”
Of his childhood trips to Spain and Morocco, Cousins speculates about the impact of those visits to the non-Anglo world. “Catholics and Arabs were more expressive than Protestants, more visual… your life experience was broadening.”
When probing Welles’ stage and film work, Cousins delves deep with an appetite that will impress even the most voracious Welles fanatics.
Noteworthy is Cousins’ examination of the visual artistry of the 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar. He observes how a teenage Welles’ sketch of Marc Anthony’s speech foreshadowed the lighting used years later in the Mercury Theatre production. Later, Cousins treats viewers to a glimpse at previously unseen sketches of Welles never-realized 1950s film version of Caesar.
The Eyes of Orson Welles also offers moviegoers a chance to see Welles’ pre-production sketches for Macbeth, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and the unproduced Heart of Darkness. It wisely makes use of footage from the 1955 BBC television series Orson Welles’ Sketch Book.
Cousins hammers home that Welles’ approach to the canvas mirrors the same “visual thinking” that went into his movies. He illustrates his points with a generous sampling from the Welles’ oeuvre, including uncompleted projects like Don Quixote, It’s All True and Too Much Johnson.
Beatrice Welles, a consultant on the film, is on hand to explain the history behind some of the artwork. She reveals an intense, almost angry, abstract painting her father created after he was locked out of the editing of Touch of Evil.
The closest The Eyes of Orson Welles comes to a misstep is an eight-minute passage imagining Welles’ ghostly reply (voiced by Jack Klaff) to Cousins’ letter. Faux Welles, no matter how skillfully written and performed, cannot compete alongside the real thing.
Near the conclusion of The Eyes of Orson Welles, Cousins says this perusal of sketches and paintings has forced him to reexamine Welles’ life and work.
“F For Fake was a sketchbook on folded paper. Touch of Evil is a fresco. The Trial is like a linocut. Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai, Othello and Mr. Arkadin scratch at their characters like your quill and ink scratched in the TV sketches ― approximately, excitingly ― but in a way many found too sharp.”
TWO EXCERPTS FROM THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES
THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES CREDITS
Director, cinematographer, writer and narrator: Mark Cousins
Producers: Mary Bell and Adam Dawtrey
Executive producers: Mark Bell, Mark Thomas and Michael Moore
Consultant: Beatrice Welles
Editor: Timo Langer
Sound mix and design: Ali Murray
Composer: Matt Regan
Animation and visual effects: Danny Carr
Dialogue editor: Stephen V. Home
Voice-over recording: Iain McKinna, Offbeat
Location managers: Diego Almazan de Pablo (Spain/ Morocco), Vincent Longo (USA) and Sean Burke (Ireland)
Research: Vincent Longo and Glen Shepherd
Produced by: Bofa Productions, in association with the BBC and Filmstruck, with funding from the National Lottery via Creative Scotland
Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes
Distribution: London-based Dogwoof plans a summer 2018 release. The BBC has UK broadcast rights, while Turner Classic Movies and Filmstruck have television and SVOD rights for North America.
On the red carpet at #Cannes18, filmmaker @markcousinsfilm with partner Gill and producers Mary Bell and @AdamDawtrey of Bofa Productions, ahead of the World Premiere of The Eyes of Orson Welles at #CannesClassics tonight#CannesFilmFestivali Full story: https://t.co/UEhdlvjvo5 pic.twitter.com/dDxVGrn8FB
— Creative Scotland (@CreativeScots) May 9, 2018
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