WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Ten films through October, November, December:
http://www.wellesnet.com/la-filmoteca-d ... on-welles/

‘Citizen Kane’ scripts fetch more than $102,000 at auction
http://www.wellesnet.com/citizen-kane-s ... t-auction/

Kelju Koo (From Facebook): "People are ready to spend such money on pieces of paper for sentimental or fetish reasons, but nothing on the Other Side of the Wind."

‘Welles 100: The Maverick’ at Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, a follow-up to the retrospective offered at the San Rafael, California, center in June. The emphasis is in Welles post 1940s output:
http://www.wellesnet.com/welles-100-the ... lm-center/

http://www.wellesnet.com/esteve-riambau ... on-welles/

THE OTHER SIDE OF ORSON WELLES
A PRESENTATION BY JOSEPH McBRIDE WITH ESTEVE RIAMBAU
THURSDAY, NOV. 19, 7 p.m., Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA
JOSEPH McBRIDE, film historian and Professor at San Francisco State University, has written three books on Orson Welles, the most recent being What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. He also worked with Welles, as an actor on his long-gestating, still-unfinished drama about the film industry, The Other Side of the Wind. McBride will share stories about that film and its difficult history. He will also screen several rare shorts and clips that represent the work by Welles of which most people are unaware.
Spanish film scholar and director of the FilmTeca de Catalunya in Barcelona, ESTEVE RIAMBAU is the author of three books on Welles: Orson Welles: The Show Without Limits (1985), Orson Welles: An Immortal Spain (1993) and The Things We Have Seen: Welles and Falstaff (2015). Riambau is co-screenwriter of the documentary Orson Welles in the Land of Don Quixote and adapter of the play Yours Truly, Orson Welles (2008).
Program approximately 2 hours.

For the 30th anniversary of Welles's death.
"Orson Welles, 30 Years On: A Ghostly YouTube Presence Enthralls a New Generation":

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... jycbe.html

This year also marks 30 years since Welles died and, paradoxically, during the past three decades it has become easier for us to know Welles than it was when he was alive.

This is because almost every film appearance Welles ever made, most of his interviews, his monologues, outtakes, and many of the documentaries he took part in from 1936 until 1985 have been posted on YouTube. It's the scattered detritus of a man's artistic and personal life collected in one convenient location. These hundreds of hours of miscellaneous footage tell us much more about Orson Welles' opinions and prodigious energies than any of the tendentious biographies. It's a repository in the clouds.

Stefan Drossler answers questions about the upcoming MOMA screenings:
http://www.wellesnet.com/stefan-droessl ... on-welles/

Rare Welles treasures keep coming from the Pordonone warehouse:
http://www.wellesnet.com/formacinema-to ... treasures/

During the month of November The Cary Theatre will be paying tribute to Orson Welles for his 100th birthday with the following:

November 5th: Touch of Evil Cinema Studies Screening. The Modern School of Film’s founder, Robert Milazzo, leads an in-depth, active deconstruction and group-discussion of Orson Welles’ masterpiece TOUCH OF EVIL (1958).

(http://thecarytheater.com/event/touch-o ... screening/)

Followed by showings of...

November 8th: The Magnificent Ambersons

November 15th: Citizen Kane

November 22nd: The Stranger

November 29th: F for Fake

The link for The Cary Theatre is: http://thecarytheater.com/

Thanks to Nick Iammatteo for the info.

Including F For Fake, introduced by Simon Callow on the 12th:
http://www.wellesnet.com/cork-film-fest ... s-tribute/

Including two programs of unfinished Welles material:
http://2015.tiff-jp.net/en/lineup/list. ... egory=m=14

Special guest Larry Jackson talks about his time with Welles in this radio excerpt:
http://wamc.org/post/larry-jackson-talk ... s#stream/0

As part of the Zagreb Film Festival. Courtesy of Daniel Rafaelic:

Tomorrow, November 16, we start with the restored, previously unseen two hour TV appearance of OW in cult TV Zagreb show 3, 2, 1... kreni! show. The show was filmed 30.4.1979. and aired as a two part New Year special the same year. However it was shortened and dubbed. Now, thanks to the editing efforts of Leon Rizmaul (together we made THE OTHER SIDE OF WELLES in 2005.), we managed to restore this unique Welles TV interview to its original length. Here's the trailer: https://vimeo.com/144043325 (it finally reveals the mystery of "Rosebud" ).

In the retrospective I've also included THE TRIAL (filmed in Zagreb), THE SECRET OF NICOLAS TESLA (Croatian films starring OW and Oja Kodar), Othello, The Stranger and Filming Othello.

Parallel to this, Croatian national TV is showing MR. AKRADIN and THE OTHER SIDE OF WELLES, and documentary cinema DokuKino showed F for Fake.

Also, together with Fedja Gavrilovic, I'm the author of an exhibition 100 GODINA WELLESA/100 years of Welles, that focuses on Orson's relationship with the city of Zagreb and Croatia itself and includes the works of Croatian contemporary artists inspired by Welles' legacy. The exhibition is accompanied by the bilingual (English-croatian) book, that whose title page is in the attachment. The book also includes the interviews that Welles gave to (then) Yugoslav newspapers. The exhibition opening is Wednesday, November 18,in Zagreb's Glyptothek.

From Wellesnet Facebook:

Oja Kodar will not be attending the Museum of Modern Art screening of footage from "The Other Side of the Wind" and "The Dreamers" on November 20 in NYC. According to a MoMA spokeswoman, "Ms. Kodar had originally been confirmed to co-present this program, but unfortunately she is unable to make the trip to New York and will not be present to introduce the Welles program on the 20th, so Stefan Dröessler will do the intro solo."

Went to all 4 nights. I posted thoughts about The Merchant of Venice, The Dreamers, and The Deep in their respective threads, leaving me with one movie about which I haven't talked:

Journey into Fear was a wonderful watch on the big screen. When I watched it in the past, I never really registered the humor nor the sheer joy of having the major Mercury Players on screen at their prime. As labeled, it is the last Mercury Film Production, after Kane and Ambersons.

Additionally, after viewing the reconstructed version, I had an added appreciation for the craft. The long tracking shot of Howard and Josette is pretty amazing, especially considering it is not whole in either popular version! The aural foreshadowing of Benat is another nice touch. The movie is truly as Wellesian as people have commented through the decades.

The deleted scenes were interesting, though I daresay nothing particularly vital is cut. The omitted dialogue is more political and philosophical in nature. It makes the movie more complete so to speak, but it ultimately doesn't change it that much. Most lamentable is the loss of an explicit relationship between Howard and the Dolores Del Rio's character; I don't know how they planned to get this past the censors. That said, the movie, as-is, does pretty clearly imply to such a relationship fairly strongly, and, moreover, in deleting certain scenes, it becomes more vague what exactly transpired between the two...

What bothered me on previous viewings is the seemingly utter passivity of Howard, Joseph Cotten's character. It only registered to me now to read it, like I read The Third Man, which is to say the passiveness is utterly intentional-- the meaning. Looking at it in the context of Howard representing America, his line about how he struck back at Benat because the latter "made him mad" is interesting. Never thought a B-thriller could have political implications! But, of course, that's classic Welles for you.

It's a shame this has been mistreated on home video. I don't see the situation getting better to be honest. Mr. Drossler's reconstruction seemed to be formed of SD elements and as admitted was merely shown off of a non-HD video master. How amazing would it be to have a bonafide 4K restoration of Journey into Fear, reconstructed with all the footage from the two versions! Until then, the existing French and Spanish DVD will have to do, which, as I'm sure could be married to make a reconstruction (as I think others on this board have done?), not dissimilar in technical quality and academic merit to Mr. Drossler's version.

A Sled in Flames wrote: ...The deleted scenes were interesting, though I daresay nothing particularly vital is cut...

When Welles was able to convince RKO to pull the film from release and allow him to rework it, I suspect he was only able to use the footage contained in the version already mutilated by the studio (as opposed to having access to the preview cut or other deleted material). His choice to frame the story as a lengthy flash-back told from the perspective of Graham required dropping any scene where Graham was not present to witness the action. I believe this is also the reason the single-take scene of Benat preparing to leave the hotel room became a pre-credit scene - Welles needed to separate it from the rest of the narrative since Graham could not logically include the action in his recounting of the tale.

A Sled in Flames wrote:...Most lamentable is the loss of an explicit relationship between Howard and the Dolores Del Rio's character; I don't know how they planned to get this past the censors...

Welles' original intentions were to push the "sex farce" aspect of the story as far as he could. Not only were Graham and Josette supposed to be having an affair, but Graham's wife was doing the same with Col. Haki! Welles wrote a concluding scene in which Graham learns of his wife's infidelity just as the hotel elevator door closes on the couple to give the film a Preston Sturges-style comic ending. The Hayes office was censoring this material at the scripting stage so very little of the sex farce material was actually shot. The suggestive scene between Mrs. Graham and Haki (which Welles cut since it could not logically be part of Howard's first person account) is a remnant of the comic sexual element that Welles had hoped to weave through the entire film.