Book, exhibition, retro, documentary… Orson Welles from every angle
The American filmmaker of Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai is the movie star of the fall. Long live Orson Welles.
My Name is Orson Wellesis the title of the exhibition dedicated to the author of Citizen Kane at the Cinémathèque Française. A way to delve into a heroic and battered life which starts from the Hollywood hills and ends in dark and misty valleys. Orson Welles (1915 – 1985), radio man, actor, director and… magician. Especially a magician. He was keen on it, perhaps because this activity brought together all the others. Making cinema is perhaps nothing more than pulling rabbits out of a hat to surprise people.
In the documentary available free on Arte.tv, This is Orson Wellesby Clara and Julia Kuperberg, we hear filmmaker Henry Jaglom explain how he persuaded Welles to star in his short film, A Safe Place in 1971:
“I arrived at his hotel room. We sat down and he pretended not to listen while looking at the ceiling (…) I started to tell my story: ‘You will be a magician who makes a lot of things disappear in Central Park, but there is only one thing that resists him‘. Welles suddenly turned to me and asked, ‘What then?‘, ‘You will know if you act in my film!‘It was won!’
“The camera did not exist”
The exhibition of The French Cinemathequerather anecdotal, unfortunately fails to touch on this fanciful part. A part that is nevertheless essential to the understanding of a filmmaker who has the image of Falstaff of Shakespeare whom he played in one of his greatest films remained a man injured and humiliated by a king whom he believed to be loved for his extravagances. Welles, just as Don Quixote, will have fought the windmills of the dream industry.
He is the very prototype of the independent filmmaker in an industry then double-locked by the omnipotent policy of the studios. A first feature film sacrificed by the very people who produced it, Citizen Kane (1941), a second mutilated, The Splendor of the Ambersons (1942) and a nomadic life trying to make ends meet to make films that not many people wanted to see. It’s only before Citizen Kane“the camera did not exist” according to the brilliant expression of Martin Scorsese in the documentary already cited, “the filmmakers tried as much as possible not to show the seams of the staging. Suddenly Welles had the camera flying in the air!“And in the business of old, things weren’t stolen with impunity.
Why Citizen Kane is a classic among classics
Two trees hide the imposing Wellesian forest: his radio show where he made an America then traumatized by the Munich Accords (1936) believe that the Martians had landed on Earth and Citizen Kane (1941), his first feature film considered the greatest film of all time. Once past these two markers, it’s a feast where an entire world is permanently reconfigured: insane film noirs (The lady from Shanghai, The Thirst for Evil), megalomaniac and experimental delusions (Secret File, On the other side of the wind…), Shakespearean fevers (Othello, Macbeth, Falstaff…) without forgetting this fascinating object which is its adaptation of Trial by Kafka. All of this can be seen (re-)at the Cinémathèque until November 29 during an imposing retrospective.
Grandeur and decadence
In the interview with the Kuperberg sisters in the film, Welles, having come back from almost all the affronts, concludes that cinema is “2% creation and 98% prostitution“. But the best remark to understand the excess which inhabited Orson Welles, this professional of self-destruction, comes from his own daughter, Christopher. She explains that her father had fully “awareness of his greatness“. This is both an advantage and a curse. Who really was Welles? Only his own camera could see him. That was the message he sent from his first film: Citizen Kane the last minutes of which constitute the biggest twist in the history of cinema.
