Don Quixote/Other side of the Wind: Essays?

tony · Post by **tony** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 2:25 pm

In "The Unseen OW", while talking about The 'Fountain of Youth', Bill Krohn mentions that it reminds him of some of the very early television, and asks if Welles was consciously going back to that style ('illustrated radio') in the FOY, to which Welles responds:

"No, I thought and still do think, that I was way ahead of everybody and having nothing at all to do with television."

Here are some more interesting quotes of Welles's from the interview by Bill Krohn (c. 1979) which appears in "The Unknown OW"; the quotes have to do with the essay form as fashioned by Welles:

Bill Krohn is persistent in asking about Welles's essay form, (as evidenced in 'The Fountain of Youth' and 'F For Fake'), and Welles reveals that his plans at that time were to finish both 'Don Quixote' and 'The Other Side of the Wind' as essay style films, with him being in them as he was in 'Fountain' but not as much:

Re:'TOSOTW': "If I ever get it again, I'm going to do it as an entirely different film. I'm going to stand outside of it and talk about it as myself, you know...less as a narrator, more as myself...a movie within a movie within a movie...not so much the making of it, the unmaking of it..."

And re: 'DQ': "By that time [the shooting of DQ, mainly between 57 and 59] I hadn't developed the system that I developed for 'Fountain of Youth'.[Welles in this same interview calls 'Fountain of Youth' the "grandfather" of 'F For Fake.'] ...and now, when I do 'Don Quixote', which I'm supposed to do sometime in the next couple of years...I have to go to Spain...

Krohn: "The film will now be a meditation..."
Welles: "Meditation is a beautiful word for it, yes."
Krohn: "An essay. And will you appear?"
Welles: "Yes, I'll have to. There's no way out of that. But not persistently as in 'The Fountain of Youth'...I don't know really. I have to go to Spain to shoot it to find out."

What is interesting in these quotes is that Welles seems to have given up on both films as traditional narrative films, and feels the only way to salvage them is to turn them into essay style pieces. I don't think this necessarily means that DQ and TOSOTW shouldn't be reconstructed, or constructed, as narrative films today, but that the argument that they shouldn't be is here in Welles's words, and it seems possible that Beatrice's legal battle against the Showtime production of TOSOTW was perhaps based on her hearing her father say that he was going to refashion both Wind and Quixote as essay-style films. Of course, since he's not here to do that, the opposite argument could be made that the only routes left are either editing them as narrative structures as he originally intended, or, as Beatrice has recently argued, turning them into documentaries about their productions.

Terry · Post by **Terry** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 8:24 pm

Yeah, she's all about protecting Daddy's work and has no other ambition, does she?

Maybe the essay thing was just a phase. Welles didn't seem to be intending an essay format for The Dreamers. Had he access to Kane, would he have redone that as an essay as well? I think his original intention of doing DQ and TOSOTW as narrative films is at least as valid as his later notion of redoing them as essays, when he seems to have been second guessing himself. Essay films might have been cheaper to complete, as Welles could shoot the required footage in his living room and not even need to lease a drive-in movie theater. Nobody could ever reconstruct a Welles essay film (though The Dominici Affair is pretty good,) but one can cobble together a narrative film, which to me is more interesting than someone else carving up the footage for a documentary. Even Peter Bogdanovich's cut of One Man Band is less satisfying than seeing the excerpted footage at full length was. I'd rather see the Graver/Kodar/Bogdanovich narrative assembly of Other Wind than anybody's documentary.

Glenn Anders · Post by **Glenn Anders** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 9:39 pm

I agree, Hadji, but you might want to look at my to reply to Tony's post on THE HOAX thread before he flew it over here.

Glenn

tony · Post by **tony** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 12:25 am

Sorry about that, Glenn: when I 'flew it over' nobody had posted, yet as soon as I had done it, I noticed you had just posted, must have been as I was doing it.