OW Magazine articles of interest
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
OW Magazine articles of interest
I seem to remember there being a lengthy article in Vanity Fair early last year about Welles, Ambersons and Brazil; is my memory correct?
-
ChristopherBanks
- Member
- Posts: 83
- Joined: Thu May 31, 2001 5:50 pm
- Location: Auckland, New Zealand
- Contact:
Yes, in the January 2002 edition. Tom Cruise was on the cover, discussing another act of movie butchery, namely his remake "Vanilla Sky".
The article goes over the old Ambersons tragitale, but adds some disturbing new anecdotes (well, new to me anyway) about the Iscariot-esque activities of some of Welles' so called friends and business partners (memos from Brazil getting binned without being read, phones calls from Brazil deliberately left unanswered), and the tantalising possibility that somewhere in Brazil there just *may* be a work print of Welles' original version.
Well worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.
The article goes over the old Ambersons tragitale, but adds some disturbing new anecdotes (well, new to me anyway) about the Iscariot-esque activities of some of Welles' so called friends and business partners (memos from Brazil getting binned without being read, phones calls from Brazil deliberately left unanswered), and the tantalising possibility that somewhere in Brazil there just *may* be a work print of Welles' original version.
Well worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.
****Christopher Banks****
-
AndersE
- Member
- Posts: 21
- Joined: Tue Aug 05, 2003 5:37 am
Bright Lights Film Journal has two articles on Welles in their August issue..
One on Kane and one on F for Fake.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/index.html
Apologies if this has been mentioned before, I've been away...
Anders
One on Kane and one on F for Fake.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/index.html
Apologies if this has been mentioned before, I've been away...
Anders
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
Here's a nice article from The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann written in 1997; I found a print-out of it in my files today, and was surprised to find it still on the internet after all these years. I think it's a lovely piece, both evocative and intelligent.
Please see what you think:
ON FILMS: "WHEN IN THE CHRONICLE OF WASTED TIME"
by Stanley Kauffmann
The more we learn about Orson Welles, the sadder his story becomes. In 1994, Oja Kodar, the Croatian woman who was his close companion in his later years, opened a vault of long-stored Welles film footage in Los Angeles. Together with a Slovenian director, Vassili Silovic, and a German producer, Roland Zag, Kodar assembled a ninety-minute film from that footage. (The Film Forum in New York had the U.S. theatrical premiere.) This film is heartbreaking in its unfulfillments, irritating in its idlings, ghastly in its losses and laced throughout with magic, literal and beautifully figurative.
Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (Media Res Berlin) contains japeries, conjuring acts (Welles was famous for these), shards of abandoned projects, remnants of completed but lost ones. The materials are bound together with excerpts from a Welles appearance before American film students in 1981 after a showing of The Trial. With these students he plays his favorite late-life role: the thwarted genius full of wry rue.
The real rue is that he was a genius, beginning with his very presence. With the sole exception of John Barrymore, I know no American screen actor, not even Marlon Brando, who so immediately seizes an audience just by appearing-- before he begins to do whatever there is to perform. And Barrymore was not, as Welles was, a writer and a director. (A director? At his best, one of the best in world film history.) This new assemblage, like other posthumous Welles films and like some writings about him, calls both our culture and Welles himself to account. How could the theater and film worlds of America and Europe have been so wasteful of him? How, early in his career when he was showered with adulation, could he have done so much to discourage it? How could he so early have accepted the position of outcast? True, The One-Man Band shows more vividly than previous accounts how he attempted to work, how he fought against idleness. But it was a fitful fight. His slide into gross obesity was a patent surrender.
In this new compilation the reasons for making some of the bits are not given. One sketch shows Welles as the naive American client of two snooty London tailors. Another sketch is a mockery of an English stately home. Another shows him drooling outside a pastry-shop window in Vienna. (Demel's?) In another sketch he really does walk around in the get-up of a London one-man band, addressed by a bobby, a housewife and a flower vendor, all played by Welles. These snippets are fairly painful private jokes.
But there is more. Though there are no excerpts from the nearly completed Don Quixote, there are several from The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's last work, which, we're told, was virtually completed but is blocked by legal tangles. On the basis of these excerpts, it's possible to say only that they are quite unrelated to previous Welles styles. These glimpses are done with whirling cameras and stroboscopic cutting and with a sexual explicitness previously unseen in Welles. But nothing reliable can be inferred about the last film from these clips.
The pearl that makes this compilation invaluable is some footage that, I think, has been generally unknown. Around 1970 Welles prepared a forty-minute version of The Merchant of Venice for television. (Presumably just the Shylock scenes--something that had been done in American theater by Maurice Schwartz in the late 1920s.) We're told that after Welles had finished shooting and was about to start editing, the negatives vanished. Only a fragment remains, some of the scene in which Shylock leaves his house and bids his daughter to guard it. Welles, in full make-up and costume and with a touch of Jewish accent, plays broodingly, powerfully. Ten years or so later, for some reason, Welles filmed himself, without make-up, without accent, in a trenchcoat, doing Shylock's great speech ("Hath not a Jew eyes?"). Fragment though it is, it is more fully accomplished than all of his Othello and his Falstaff. It is a glorious moment.
In 1958, after the British premiere of Touch of Evil, Welles wrote a letter to the New Statesman about their review. This letter, not often acknowledged by biographers or critics, is a threnody on the conditions of filmmaking. First, he talks about the film artist's freedom. Responding to the charge that his picture is "a muddle," Welles says:
This is understandable in the light of the wholesale re-editing of the film by the executive producer, a process of re-hashing in which I was forbidden to participate. Confusion was further confounded by several added scenes which I did not write and was not invited to direct.
Rhapsodists about every frame of every Welles film don't often mention this interference. Then he addresses the reviewer's comments on his choice of subject. "I have to take whatever comes along from time to time, or accept the alternative, which is not working at all."
This new account provides a good measure of Welles's struggle to forge his own work, instead of waiting for "whatever comes along from time to time." Yet it also suggests that there was a streak in him, certified by biographers, of a longing for exiled superiority. The extraordinary artist relished, or came to relish, lolling in that easy chair before those students, basking in their adoration of a spirit too fine for this world.
Please see what you think:
ON FILMS: "WHEN IN THE CHRONICLE OF WASTED TIME"
by Stanley Kauffmann
The more we learn about Orson Welles, the sadder his story becomes. In 1994, Oja Kodar, the Croatian woman who was his close companion in his later years, opened a vault of long-stored Welles film footage in Los Angeles. Together with a Slovenian director, Vassili Silovic, and a German producer, Roland Zag, Kodar assembled a ninety-minute film from that footage. (The Film Forum in New York had the U.S. theatrical premiere.) This film is heartbreaking in its unfulfillments, irritating in its idlings, ghastly in its losses and laced throughout with magic, literal and beautifully figurative.
Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (Media Res Berlin) contains japeries, conjuring acts (Welles was famous for these), shards of abandoned projects, remnants of completed but lost ones. The materials are bound together with excerpts from a Welles appearance before American film students in 1981 after a showing of The Trial. With these students he plays his favorite late-life role: the thwarted genius full of wry rue.
The real rue is that he was a genius, beginning with his very presence. With the sole exception of John Barrymore, I know no American screen actor, not even Marlon Brando, who so immediately seizes an audience just by appearing-- before he begins to do whatever there is to perform. And Barrymore was not, as Welles was, a writer and a director. (A director? At his best, one of the best in world film history.) This new assemblage, like other posthumous Welles films and like some writings about him, calls both our culture and Welles himself to account. How could the theater and film worlds of America and Europe have been so wasteful of him? How, early in his career when he was showered with adulation, could he have done so much to discourage it? How could he so early have accepted the position of outcast? True, The One-Man Band shows more vividly than previous accounts how he attempted to work, how he fought against idleness. But it was a fitful fight. His slide into gross obesity was a patent surrender.
In this new compilation the reasons for making some of the bits are not given. One sketch shows Welles as the naive American client of two snooty London tailors. Another sketch is a mockery of an English stately home. Another shows him drooling outside a pastry-shop window in Vienna. (Demel's?) In another sketch he really does walk around in the get-up of a London one-man band, addressed by a bobby, a housewife and a flower vendor, all played by Welles. These snippets are fairly painful private jokes.
But there is more. Though there are no excerpts from the nearly completed Don Quixote, there are several from The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's last work, which, we're told, was virtually completed but is blocked by legal tangles. On the basis of these excerpts, it's possible to say only that they are quite unrelated to previous Welles styles. These glimpses are done with whirling cameras and stroboscopic cutting and with a sexual explicitness previously unseen in Welles. But nothing reliable can be inferred about the last film from these clips.
The pearl that makes this compilation invaluable is some footage that, I think, has been generally unknown. Around 1970 Welles prepared a forty-minute version of The Merchant of Venice for television. (Presumably just the Shylock scenes--something that had been done in American theater by Maurice Schwartz in the late 1920s.) We're told that after Welles had finished shooting and was about to start editing, the negatives vanished. Only a fragment remains, some of the scene in which Shylock leaves his house and bids his daughter to guard it. Welles, in full make-up and costume and with a touch of Jewish accent, plays broodingly, powerfully. Ten years or so later, for some reason, Welles filmed himself, without make-up, without accent, in a trenchcoat, doing Shylock's great speech ("Hath not a Jew eyes?"). Fragment though it is, it is more fully accomplished than all of his Othello and his Falstaff. It is a glorious moment.
In 1958, after the British premiere of Touch of Evil, Welles wrote a letter to the New Statesman about their review. This letter, not often acknowledged by biographers or critics, is a threnody on the conditions of filmmaking. First, he talks about the film artist's freedom. Responding to the charge that his picture is "a muddle," Welles says:
This is understandable in the light of the wholesale re-editing of the film by the executive producer, a process of re-hashing in which I was forbidden to participate. Confusion was further confounded by several added scenes which I did not write and was not invited to direct.
Rhapsodists about every frame of every Welles film don't often mention this interference. Then he addresses the reviewer's comments on his choice of subject. "I have to take whatever comes along from time to time, or accept the alternative, which is not working at all."
This new account provides a good measure of Welles's struggle to forge his own work, instead of waiting for "whatever comes along from time to time." Yet it also suggests that there was a streak in him, certified by biographers, of a longing for exiled superiority. The extraordinary artist relished, or came to relish, lolling in that easy chair before those students, basking in their adoration of a spirit too fine for this world.
-
Glenn Anders
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1842
- Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2003 12:50 pm
- Location: San Francisco
- Contact:
Tony: Stanley Kaufmann's review could not be more sympathetic, but it pins on Welles once more a recrimination that he did not manage to complete possibly half a dozen masterpieces, many of them puzzling snarls of film in ORSON WELLES: THE ONE MAN BAND. Latterly, here, we seem to have been adding to those recriminations or at least trying to explain their roots.
Let me try one more explanation:
Welles was a man who grew up, encouraged to please and excel for a series of older men and women: his mother, his father, Skipper Hill, Dadda Bernstein, Edwards and Macliamoor, John Houseman, Louis Dolivet, etc. Praise and accomplishment became his life blood, but somewhere deep in his being, the human core of his Art really, was a desire to have that "normal" childhood he never had. How often he must have wanted just to be with friends or just have a good time or enjoy his family (which in the case of his role as pater familias in Paola Mori Welles' household, we know little about). But everywhere, there were the people who expected him to be a genius, a reconteur, a magician, a superman.
A man of lesser talents might have been known as "Charles Foster Kane."
And he had been reared to deliver, even when he didn't feel like it, which is the definition of a professional. The reason for many of his vices and his so-called sloth, it seems to me, can be found in the above conundrum.
In other words: How to be a genius while achieving a private life, and recreating a childhood that you never had.
Welles would have called this interpretation "dollar book psychology," but as he admitted himself, there was a good deal of dollar book psychology in his work, and in his life.
What a spendid assessment the distinguished Kaufmann gives Welles:
"The real rue is that he was a genius, beginning with his very presence. With the sole exception of John Barrymore, I know no American screen actor, not even Marlon Brando, who so immediately seizes an audience just by appearing-- before he begins to do whatever there is to perform. And Barrymore was not, as Welles was, a writer and a director. (A director? At his best, one of the best in world film history.)"
Perhaps it is enough.
Glenn
Glenn
Let me try one more explanation:
Welles was a man who grew up, encouraged to please and excel for a series of older men and women: his mother, his father, Skipper Hill, Dadda Bernstein, Edwards and Macliamoor, John Houseman, Louis Dolivet, etc. Praise and accomplishment became his life blood, but somewhere deep in his being, the human core of his Art really, was a desire to have that "normal" childhood he never had. How often he must have wanted just to be with friends or just have a good time or enjoy his family (which in the case of his role as pater familias in Paola Mori Welles' household, we know little about). But everywhere, there were the people who expected him to be a genius, a reconteur, a magician, a superman.
A man of lesser talents might have been known as "Charles Foster Kane."
And he had been reared to deliver, even when he didn't feel like it, which is the definition of a professional. The reason for many of his vices and his so-called sloth, it seems to me, can be found in the above conundrum.
In other words: How to be a genius while achieving a private life, and recreating a childhood that you never had.
Welles would have called this interpretation "dollar book psychology," but as he admitted himself, there was a good deal of dollar book psychology in his work, and in his life.
What a spendid assessment the distinguished Kaufmann gives Welles:
"The real rue is that he was a genius, beginning with his very presence. With the sole exception of John Barrymore, I know no American screen actor, not even Marlon Brando, who so immediately seizes an audience just by appearing-- before he begins to do whatever there is to perform. And Barrymore was not, as Welles was, a writer and a director. (A director? At his best, one of the best in world film history.)"
Perhaps it is enough.
Glenn
Glenn
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
"Shakespeare Bulletin" on Othello and Chimes
I've just received in the mail a copy of the latest "Shakespeare Bulletin", which is a "Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship". This volume is dedicated to some articles on Welles' Othello and Chimes. It's apparently the first time this journal has dedicated an issue to the discussion of Shakepeare on film, so it's quite an honour for Welles. The Welles articles (and a bibliography of articles on Welles' Macbeth, Othello, Chimes, Filming Othello and Merchant of Venice) run for 136 pages, so it's like a slim volume on these two films, although there are other articles on current theatre presentations of Shakespeare. I can't understand why Macbeth isn't discussed, and I should write and ask why!
The articles are:
"A Bogus Hero: Welles's Othello and the Construction of Race"
"Touch of Shakespeare: Welles Unmoors Othello" (with stills from Othello and Touch of Evil)
"Bypaths and Indirect Crooked Ways: Mise-En-Scene in Orson Welles's Chimes At Midnight"
If you're interested, here's the info:
Shakesperae Bulletin
Volume 23
Number 1
Spring 2005
Available from:
Shakespeare Bulletin
Department of English
University of West Georgia
1600 Maple Street
Carollton, GA
30118-2200
U.S.A.
$9.00 U.S. money order
The articles are:
"A Bogus Hero: Welles's Othello and the Construction of Race"
"Touch of Shakespeare: Welles Unmoors Othello" (with stills from Othello and Touch of Evil)
"Bypaths and Indirect Crooked Ways: Mise-En-Scene in Orson Welles's Chimes At Midnight"
If you're interested, here's the info:
Shakesperae Bulletin
Volume 23
Number 1
Spring 2005
Available from:
Shakespeare Bulletin
Department of English
University of West Georgia
1600 Maple Street
Carollton, GA
30118-2200
U.S.A.
$9.00 U.S. money order
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
"Shakespeare Bulletin" on Othello and Chimes
Here's a link with a photo of the cover with an Adobe file of the contents:
http://www.shakespeare-bulletin.org/
http://www.shakespeare-bulletin.org/
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
Here's an interesting little article I accidentally came upon about Welles,("They're not 'Goya-like'! Each one is an exact reproduction of a Goya etching."), Goya, and Chinchon, Spain, where he filmed "The Immortal Story" and parts of "Falstaff", "F For Fake" and "Mr. Arkadin". and where he requested that his ashes be scattered.
http://www.spainview.com/peterstone3.html
http://www.spainview.com/peterstone3.html
-
filmyfan
- New Member
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2008 12:06 pm
Vanity Fair-Article-Jan 2002-Ambersons
Hi Welles fans,
Does anyone have access to the article from Vanity Fair about the Ambersons ?
Scans would be fine if anyone has it to email ?
Many Thanks indeed.
Does anyone have access to the article from Vanity Fair about the Ambersons ?
Scans would be fine if anyone has it to email ?
Many Thanks indeed.
-
tony
- Wellesnet Legend
- Posts: 1046
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:44 pm
photocopies would be no good- you have to have the original article- it's a thing of beauty (I mean the photos). That issue has Tom Cruise on the cover.
get it now for $3.99:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vanity-Fair-Tom-Cru ... otohosting
get it now for $3.99:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vanity-Fair-Tom-Cru ... otohosting
-
smartone
- Member
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Mon Mar 01, 2004 8:36 am
Great article on Welles
On Gizmodo - a tech blog -- about Welles and his brief love affair with Betamax technology
http://gizmodo.com/5429390/orson-welles ... e=true&s=x
http://gizmodo.com/5429390/orson-welles ... e=true&s=x
-
Alan Brody
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 308
- Joined: Fri Sep 07, 2007 11:14 am
Re: Great article on Welles
That is a great article, and sad too. Had he lived, Welles could have cleaned up with video technology.
As an iMac owner, I also find myself wondering what he would have thought of iMovie, or even Pinnacle or any of the other video software packages. Would he have sworn off film altogether?Whenever I see a tiny new camcorder introduced, or see Apple upgrade a revolutionary application like iMovie, I think of Orson. Oh, how excited he'd be. The pure magic of it all! If he were alive today, he'd be making his movies without regard to raising huge amounts of money. That, for both Orson and his audience, would be an achievement that we'll never be able to enjoy.
-
jaba4017
- New Member
- Posts: 5
- Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2008 7:41 am
Any info on "Quixote and the Movie Theater"?
I was searching amazon.com for used books when I came across "Quixote and the Movie Theater" by Ferran Herranz - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/843762 ... 37&seller= - The cover features an image of Don Quixote sitting in the movie theater(the very scene from Welles' project). It appears to be in Spanish. Does anybody know what this book is about and if there is an English translation?