By MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR
“But this way ain’t out, mister! That way!” – Jakob Zouk
Orson Welles’ Mr Arkadin (1955) is an international narrative set mostly in Western Europe but also in Mexico City, Acapulco, and Tangiers. Many of the locations were convincingly faked. Welles shot most of Arkadin in Spain, on the French Riviera, and in and around Paris (including at Photosonar studios in Courbevoie).
Some of the film’s most impressive sequences were filmed on location in Munich, including the framing narrative of Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) seeking Jakob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff) at ‘Sebastianplatz 16’. There are also some exciting Munich street scenes as Van Stratten seeks a Christmas goose liver for Zouk while avoiding the murderous Gregory Arkadin (Welles).
For a long time the circumstances of the Arkadin project were obscure. A production chronology was only recently established by François Thomas – see the booklet included with the Criterion Collection’s Complete Mr Arkadin DVD set (2006) and also Thomas & Jean-Pierre Berthomé’s Orson Welles at Work (Phaidon, 2008). Here’s a surprise: the Munich Christmas scenes were actually filmed during April and May of 1954. Springtime! The snow-blanketed city is so convincing faked that few viewers seem to have ever realised those scenes were not really shot in December. But Welles hardly pursued the methods of the Italian Neorealists when shooting on location. He consistently embellished and transformed real urban places. And through montage actual locations became malleable cinematic space, which will be evident when we look at the ‘Sebastianplatz 16’ sequences of Arkadin. This approach served Welles’ dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes – although his removal from the Arkadin project in the editing room surely obscured his intentions. (A few years later Welles pursued the same techniques when he used the detritus of eddying garbage and frayed bill posters to transform Venice Beach into the fascistic border town Los Robles for Touch of Evil.)
Welles had caused an uproar within Germany in the early 1950s when he published newspaper articles accusing the country of lingering Nazism. That phenomenon is directly implied in Arkadin by the upside-down Hitler portrait somebody has hidden in Jakob Zouk’s garret. Welles’ Munich is a bleak and frigid rubblescape, the final refuge of the impoverished and dying ex-con. It is an imagined city richer than what might be captured through documentary realism, as it arose from the encounter of the actual material terrain with Welles’ understanding of postwar Germany. In other words, Welles’ mise-en-scène is consciously political.
The Filmmuseum München is the repository of many of Welles’ unfinished late film projects. Museum director Stefan Drössler edited a ‘comprehensive version’ of Mr Arkadin with Claude Bertemes of the Luxembourg Cinémathèque for the Criterion box set. During my research visit to the museum in the summer of 2013, Drössler kindly took me to the building used as Jakob Zouk’s residence, which is coincidently in the direct vicinity of the museum. Here’s a contemporary bird’s eye view with the key locations marked:
The Sebastianplatz sequences in Arkadin do not always conform to real world space. If you visit Sebastianplatz you will realise how freely, and sometimes clumsily, editor Renzo Lucidi constructed a cinematic space from the material Welles had shot on location. Although there is precedent in Welles’ work for such spatial discontinuities (see Othello, 1952), the extent of Welles’ involvement in the editing of the Munich sequences is unknown. It is difficult to attribute full authorship to Welles as he did not finish any version of Mr Arkadin. He was removed from the editing room by producer Louis Dolivet in January 1955.
The film stills are taken from the version of Mr Arkadin known as Confidential Report, as released by the Criterion Collection in their DVD box set.
Here is part of the Münchner Stadtmuseum viewed from Sebastianplatz. The Filmmuseum was founded as part of the Stadtmuseum in 1963, about nine years after the filming of Arkadin.
I did not find a site that corresponded to the following shot of Van Stratten walking through what purports to be Sebastianplatz. Hardly surprising, as the postwar rubble is long gone. It may not even be Sebastianplatz. Welles has expertly used fake snow to convince us of the wintry setting. The modernist housing structures in the background seems a little anomalous for Munich, which was mostly reconstructed along traditional lines after the war. The buildings would seem to belong more to a city like Berlin.
In Confidential Report Van Stratten’s narration tells of seeking Jakob Zouk, “a petty racketeer, a jailbird, and the last man alive besides me who knows the whole truth about Gregory Arkadin” in the attic of “Sebastianplatz 16.”
‘Sebastianplatz 16’ does not appear to be a real address. I could find no trace of it. The facade of Zouk’s apartment building is indeed on Sebastianplatz, although it is not number 16. Welles uses a low angle that makes the building appear much taller than it really is:
The building at the centre of Welles’ frame (haus-Seinseifer?) is Sebastianplatz 4, now a shop and gallery called Quilt et Textilkunst. The middle second floor window will later be explicitly identified as the apartment of a woman with a neck brace who provides refuge to Jakob Zouk.
As you can see, these facades have been refinished. The ledge has been removed from the second storey of no. 4. A window with a pointed roof has been added to no. 5 above a bar called Baricentro. For a video view of the square and inside Quilt et Textilkunst, see HERE (German).
But there is some trickery here, because the interior courtyard of the fictional ‘Sebastianplatz 16’ is really within the apartment building at Sebastianplatz 3, to the left of Quilt et Textilkunst and on the corner of Sebastianplatz and Nieserstrasse:
The ground floor of Sebastianplatz 3 is presently the Cameleon Brasserie, which has pleasant al fresco seating in Sebastianplatz:
Here is the open air courtyard of ‘Sebastianplatz 16’, located behind the brasserie’s kitchen:
Van Stratten (and later, Arkadin) would have accessed the foot of this stairway by walking down a long dark passage from Sebastianplatz through what is now the Cameleon.
If you watch this sequence carefully you’ll see that it makes no spatial sense, because in the next shot Van Stratten enters the courtyard from the doorway at right:
(I’ve taken my shot from a higher floor)
The spatial problem is that Van Stratten has jumped in position about three metres from the foot of the stairs to a passageway leading in from Nieserstrasse:
In other words, he has entered the courtyard twice from two separate passageways. Arkadin does exactly the same thing when he arrives.
Here is the entrance to the courtyard from Nieserstrasse (at no. 3):
The next shot returns to the earlier camera position. Van Stratten is once again at the foot of the stairs:
As Van Stratten runs up the stairs, the camera memorably tracks back through the passageway to create the illusion of an iris shot:
Unfortunately, when I visited the courtyard, the passageway was not open:
At this moment we do not see how Van Stratten accesses Zouk’s garret. The interior of the garret was probably a set, perhaps created at Bavaria Studios. Note the upside-down painting of Hitler. Welles later said to Peter Bogdanovich, “There’s been instant de-Nazification, so of course the attics all over Germany filled up with such sacred relics” (see This Is Orson Welles):
The conversation with Zouk provides the frame for a series of flashbacks. Later in the film, when Van Stratten looks out of Zouk’s window, his P.O.V. is south over Sebastianplatz. Arkadin’s car stops far to the left of the Salvation Army band, which makes no spatial sense as Arkadin then has to push through the band to get to haus-Seinseifer:
We next see Van Stratten and Zouk escaping from a doorway on the top floor, south side of the courtyard, establishing that Zouk’s garret (presumably accessed by an inner stairway) is therefore high above what is now the Cameleon Brasserie at Sebastianplatz 3:
Now Van Stratten drags Zouk down the stairs to try to hide him from Arkadin, who is on his way up. In reality it is inconceivable that Arkadin would not hear Zouk and Van Stratten’s comical argument. The editing and pacing makes the courtyard and stairway seem much larger; it also creates the illusion of more storeys than exist in reality – but not consistent with the exteriors, as we will see.
Van Stratten and Zouk try to enter apartments on two successive lower floors without success:
All of the apartments they attempt to enter are on the north side of the courtyard. This photograph was taken on the ground floor:
Finally, Van Stratten hides Zouk with the strange woman wearing a neck brace (played by Tamiroff’s wife Tamara Shayne). As the men have descended three flights of the stairway, this would position the woman’s apartment on the ground floor, north side of the courtyard – but not in the spatially crazy world of Arkadin! There’s some disjointed editing as Van Stratten and Zouk approach the woman’s door – perhaps to intentionally confuse any viewer who has still retained a sense of space. But more likely it’s just bad continuity.
Arkadin finds Zouk in the woman’s bed, supposedly does not recognise him, then promptly departs the way he came. As Arkadin marches to his car, the woman throws coins out of her window to the Salvation Army band on Sebastianplatz – which would not actually be possible, because her apartment is on the wrong side of the courtyard and her window would therefore be facing north, the opposite direction. We must accept more trickery: the woman’s window is shown to be a second floor apartment in Sebastianplatz 4 rather than 3. Magic.
By the way, the insert of the woman at the window is clearly a crude studio recreation, although the snow helps:
The woman’s P.O.V. shot of the musician bending over to collect the coins is exactly the same camera position used in the earlier shot from Zouk’s garret window, which should be at least four floors above her. Another problem: there just ain’t enough floors above her.
So that’s it for ‘Sebastianplatz 16’.
The Christmas setting is thematically important because it inspires Zouk’s nostalgic longing for a goose liver. Van Stratten grudgingly agrees to find Zouk’s Christmas dinner and is nearly run over by Arkadin’s car outside the famous Hofbräuhaus Beer Hall (Tony Castle photo):
It may be difficult to find a goose liver on Christmas Eve in Munich, but it’s very easy to find a glass of beer. Merry Christmas!
Thanks to Stefan Drössler for his hospitality at the Filmmuseum München.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR is a writer and lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Senses of Cinema. He is writing a scholarly book on Orson Welles. See www.matthewasprey.com
© 2013 Matthew Asprey Gear. All rights reserved.
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