By RAY KELLY
The ongoing 4K scan of tens of thousands of feet of nitrate negative shot by Orson Welles in Brazil, includes evidence of his little known visit to the town of Ouro Preto in March 1942.
Catherine Benamou, arguably the foremost expert on Welles’ aborted It’s All True project, told Wellesnet that 60,000 feet of negative has already been digitally scanned by Paramount Pictures, including the footage shot in Ouro Preto.
“Most recently, 8,000 feet from the Ouro Preto Easter festivities were scanned, portions of which will be used in a documentary, Orson Welles in the Land of Silence, by Laura Godoy and Marcella Jacques,” Benamou said.
Director Godoy has researched Welles’ seemingly forgotten visit to her hometown of Ouro Preto during Holy Week when the village dresses itself in flowers, cloth and processions of Biblical figures parade through the streets. It is widely known Welles filmed the Carnaval celebration in Rio de Janeiro and the story of impoverished fisherman in Fortaleza. Godoy and Jacques are partners at VENTURA, a film company based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
It was during the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles, at the urging of Nelson Rockefeller – an RKO Radio Pictures stockholder and the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the Roosevelt Government – took on a multipart documentary to bolster U.S. and South American relations. Welles’ colleague, Norman Foster, directed a segment, My Friend Bonito, in Mexico, and Welles went to Rio de Janeiro to film footage of the Carnaval, as well as a story about four fishermen, known as jangadeiros, who sailed a raft from the port of Fortaleza to Rio.
RKO shelved the project when it terminated Welles and Mercury Productions amid accusations of extravagance by Welles in Brazil and the recutting of Ambersons.
The It’s All True footage remained in the vault when RKO was acquired by Desilu Productions in 1957. A decade later, the footage came under the control of Paramount Pictures when the studio acquired Desilu. At the urging of Fred Chandler, then director of technical services at Paramount, the negative was donated to the American Film Institute in the 1980s. The AFI arranged for the footage to be stored at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Some of the footage was scanned and used in the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. Benamou. a professor of Film andMedia Studies at the University of California in Irvine, was the associate producer and senior researcher It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. She is also the author of It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey.
The UCLA archive houses 75,145 feet of footage from My Friend Bonito, 32,200 feet of Carnaval, and 28,000 feet of Jangadeiros (Four Men on a Raft).
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