Italian public television’s RAI 3 will pay tribute to Orson Welles in the days leading up to the 75th annual Venice Film Festival and world premiere of his recently completed movie The Other Side of the Wind.
The broadcast programming, except a showing of The Magnificent Ambersons, focuses chiefly on Welles’ connection to Italy and his many admirers in that country. Welles’ wife of 30 years, Mr. Arkadin actress Paola Mori, was an Italian countess.
The films, shown on August 26 and 31, include a special nod to the late Ciro Giorgini, one of Italy’s leading Welles scholars. (Giorgini passed away in April 2015.)
Here is the RAI 3 lineup:
Sunday, August 26
ROSABELLA. THE ITALIAN HISTORY OF ORSON WELLES FILM
(Italy, 1993, col.b / n, 56 ‘)
Directed by : Gianfranco Giagni, Ciro Giorgini, with Maia Borelli
Screenplay : Ciro Giorgini
Production : Maia Borelli for Tape Connection
Interviews with Mauro Bonanni, Suzanne Cloutier , Armoldo Foà, Gary Graver, Francesco Lavagnino, Maurizio Lucidi, Roberto Perpignani, Alessandro Tasca di Cutò, Giorgio Tonti
Rosabella is a journey in the footsteps of Welles in Italy, a country where the director lived for a long time and felt very close to him. After the first in Venice in 1993 and the presentation in Locarno in the Welles retrospective of 2005, the film made by Ciro Giorgini and Gianfranco Giagni returns to Fuori Orario, an extraordinary exploration of twenty years of the life and work of Orson Welles, which touches both the private aspects (the relationship with Lea Padovani, the marriage with Paola Mori, the friendship with the Sicilian prince Alessandro Tasca di Cutò) and his work as a filmmaker, from the many unfinished projects. The life of Welles in Italy has left many memories in those who knew him closely. Our search for direct testimonies has turned into a pleasant journey through the years he spent in the Peninsula.
IN THE LAND OF DON CHISCIOTTE
(2005 edition edited and commissioned by Enrico Ghezzi and Ciro Giorgini)
(Italy, 1961, b / w, 9 episodes for a total of 227’44 “)
Director : Orson Welles
Written and directed by : Orson Welles in 1962
Machine operator : José Manuel De La Chica
Assistants of Orson Welles for editing : Mariano Faggiani and Roberto Perpignani
Collaboration for editing : Carla Tonini
Musical arias : J. Serrano (2005 edition)
Negative work : Gina Giovannetti
Postproduction : Francesco Sarrocco
Realization : Enrico Ghezzi and Ciro Giorgini
Con: Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Beatrice Welles
- Andalusian itinerary, dur., 27 ‘
- Spain santa, dur., 22′
- The feria of San Firmin, dur., 26’08 “
- L’encierro di Pamplona, dur., 25’43 “
- The cellars of Jerez, dur., 24’14”
- Sevilla, dur., 25’12 “
- Feria de abril in Seville, dur ., 24’34 “
- Flamenco time, dur., 25’51”
- Roma and Oriente in Spain, dur., 25’43 “
In view of the film he was planning to make on Don Quixote, Welles made a long trip to Spain with his wife Paola Mori and daughter Beatrice. A sort of nine-part diary was shot for the RAI. Not having recorded any comment, he delivered to the RAI only the negatives, accompanied by a soundtrack made of music and noises. RAI aired the nine episodes adding a comment off the field. This version was rediscovered by Marco Melani and Enrico Ghezzi and aired at Fuori Orario. In 2005 Ciro Giorgini and Enrico Ghezzi restored the original material, reprinting the film from negative and eliminating the commentary added in 1962. This new edition aired on Fuori Orario was presented in international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in the retrospective dedicated to Orson Welles .
Friday, August 31
TOO MUCH JOHNSON
(USA 1938, b / w, dur., 68 ‘, mute)
Directed by : Orson Welles
Starring: Joseph Cotten
The first silent film, directed by Welles in 1938. Shot for the Mercury Theater by 23-year-old Welles, this film was considered lost until the clamorous discovery of five years ago in a film fund of Cinema Zero in Pordenone. The positive nitrate was recognized as the Welles film with the collaboration of Ciro Giorgini and later restored by George Eastman House and presented in world premiere at the 2013 Silent Film Days. At the time when it was filmed, Welles was mainly dedicated to the theater , having already represented a modern reinterpretation of Macbeth. The film, which refers explicitly to the burlesque, was designed to accompany the staging of the homonymous pièce by William Gillette scheduled at the Mercury Theater in New York for the direction of the same Welles.
It is likely that the only future worth talking about is being posthumous. If nothing else because in some cases – like the Orson Welles case – being admitted without more doubts the essentiality of not being. Essential to be able to always be too many and too much to themselves, to know how to indefinitely re-launch and relaunch. The fact is that Too Much Johnson does not even consider the possibility of being unfinished, not even as a cubist substitute for a theatrical fifth. Beyond the plot or the more or less open endings, the internal plot is very complete, absolute even in the single repetitions of clapperboard, also concluded as a dream of future unlimited versions. It is the Arkadin Method: “There is always a better way”. The closed form is denied, a fulminating tour of palm trees is much better opposing speed combinations that collide or move away in the same frame. At the center are the two lovers who approach or move away from the situation of the kiss, and around the circular image, palms that turn. So in addition to the speed of the movements there is also that produced by the expansion of the scene. Then this pantomime, which sucks and regurges Keystone, which is better than René Clair’s intermezzo, which anticipates Antonioni’s architectural sounding, is a space that stretches like a fault ready to the earthquake, so outdated, to discard the need for propaganda of the his time (1938), the prerogative of an astrality that is instead of frightful political accuracy (even the ‘red’ John Berry assistant director), a volcanic vocation to peace, while the whole world is preparing for war. More than the missing link in a filmography, Too Much Johnson is an unknown pen, the unexpected and unpredictable trait, what since a twenty-three-year-old boy knew about editing, two close images are not their sum, but a third image. Up there on the roofs there are staggered heights, a skyscraper placed next to a prehensile terrace, gives rise to a void that is a sky, where if someone passes by quickly, speed is amplified, like the roar of a star.
CIRO GIORGINI: THE MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION – TOO MUCH JOHNSON AND THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES
(Italy 2014, col., Dur., 36’07 “)
Directors: Massimiliano Studer and Filippo Biagianti
Unique and precious testimony made in February 2014. In the interview Ciro Giorgini tells his relationship with Welles, started in 1977 thanks to a review organized at the Obraz Cinestudio in Milan by Paolo Mereghetti. He tells the story of his documentary, Rosabella: the Italian story of Orson Welles, of his obsession with Mr. Arkadin – with his versions and rediscovered cuts – of his fundamental contribution to the identification of the new Too Much Johnson and of the relationships between Orson Welles and Sergej M. Ejzenstejn. And again the two “cursed” and unfinished films, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind, of which Venice presents this year the world premiere of the completed film.
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
(USA, 1942, b / w, dur., 83’54 “)
Directed by : Orson Welles
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehood, Ray Collins
The disintegration of a rich Southern family unable to adapt to the new world of industrialization between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In its own way, yet another unfinished and “lost” film by Welles, since the final edition of the film commissioned by RKO was remounted and reduced by forty minutes and changed its final, while the twenty-six Welles was in Brazil for a another legendary film, never finished, It’s All True. Welles discovers The Magnificent Amberson in the only surviving version, but the film based on the eponymous novel by Booth Tarkington and played by his friend Joseph Cotten, remains a masterpiece and a classic of the style of the first Welles in the use of the sequence plan, the wide angle and the depth of field (the director of photography is Stanley Cortez).
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