By BRICE STRATFORD

For the Orson Welles centenary in 2015, the British Film Institute arranged a season of his work centred around their re-release of Touch of Evil (The Great Disruptor Season). As a part of this, on July 6th, season curator Geoff Andrew (Head of Film Programming at the BFI Southbank) gave a presentation on Welles’ work in film, and on July 7th I was lucky enough to talk with him about Welles, his influence, and the season as a whole. It’s a meandering, unfocused and reflective conversation, and (I think) all the better for it.

So – the Great Disruptor Season. Obviously it’s the centenary year, but what was the specific motivation behind the direction you’ve gone in with it?

Yes, the centenary, definitely… but does one really need an excuse to celebrate Orson Welles? In my opinion… there is no one greatest filmmaker ever, and there is no one greatest film ever… but if I was forced at gunpoint to give a name for the greatest filmmaker ever I would probably say Orson Welles, and then if I was forced to do the same with a film title I would probably say Citizen Kane. He was an extraordinary figure, who showed the world that films could be made in a different way. Why not celebrate somebody like that? I think it was about ten or twelve years since we’d done the last season. We certainly felt that the centenary was a good excuse to revisit. Of course, the fact that Too Much Johnson had been rediscovered in the meantime… we did want to show that. While we were planning the season there was also talk of The Other Side of the Wind being completed, and all that stuff… whether that will ever be the case, who knows… but it seemed a very good time to revisit.

The Other Side of  the Wind‘s crowdfunding effort failed to meet its target, of course.

Yes, somebody was saying. They got about four hundred thousand, or something?

Yes, out of a million. Originally two.

I mean… who knows what it would really be like. I’ve only seen little bits of it, but it’s very hard to tell from that whether something approaching a properly finished film (let alone a properly finished film as Welles would have completed it) could ever be made. I’m one of those people who thinks that those unfinished projects are fascinating… and do I want to ever see them finished? I don’t know. It’s not as if he’s here to finish them.

It’s a valid point. The very fact there is so much unfinished work, so many projects started that didn’t happen… that’s just as intrinsic a part of the Welles legacy as all the finished masterpieces are. What would you say you’re happiest with in this season, or most excited about?

Oh, it’s almost impossible to choose. It has been great, being able to play Too Much Johnson, because… finally seeing it… I mean, it’s obviously in a very fragmented, unedited state, but… the first time I watched Johnson it was on a laptop at home, and I was laughing out loud; it was often very funny, and he made it two years before going to Hollywood. He had such a great eye for pacing, a very distinctive sense of scale, of space. I think it comes over in all the films, from Kane through to Chimes at Midnight and The Trial, and you can see it in embryonic form in Too Much Johnson. That in itself is very exciting, and also to see… I mean, Joseph Cotten in particular is remarkably agile and brave, running around on the rooftops… he’s frequently as elegant as a Chaplin, you know. It’s quite remarkable to see him clowning around. It’s been a real revelation, I think, Too Much Johnson… without saying to people “it’s a finished film” and “its a masterpiece,” that’s not the case at all, but it’s something to be valued.

You mentioned The Other Side of the Wind. Was there anything you would have liked to have included in this season but couldn’t? In an ideal world.

Well, in an ideal world, I suppose we’d probably like that to have been ready. Or perhaps… I think there is a work print of The Deep which was played in Vienna or Munich, but… you know… they don’t let that out, as it’s the one copy. I must say, what little I’ve seen of The Deep, it’s probably not a major work… but it would of course be nice to have been able to have played that, or The Other Side of the Wind, had it been in a form that we could play…. but as it is in little fragments… we are screening a set of programmes being introduced by Stefan Drössler, of the Munich Film Museum, at the end of August, where we’re doing… they’re these six compilation packages of odds and sods, so there will be things for people to be surprised by, maybe excited by, in those packages… but for me, what could be more exciting than watching Citizen Kane again? I’ve seen it at least a dozen times and each time I watch it I find something new; it’s a film, like most of Welles’ work, that bears repeated viewings, and throws up new things to think about… what’s great about his films is that they retain their mysteries however many times you see them. I mean, Kane is a fascinating film; it’s structured around this newspapers’ quest for “what does Rosebud refer to?” Well, I don’t know any newspaper ever who would do such a thing! They’d be quite happy with the News on the March newsreel I’d have thought! Who actually heard him say Rosebud? He was in the bedroom alone! So this sort of makes you think “ah, maybe the whole film is taking place in Kane’s imagination,” in his own mind as he lies dying, and he’s thinking about “how are people going to remember me?”

Thinking about his legacy. The great megalomaniacal egotist. Yes, of course that would be the last thing he was thinking of!

Yes, it’s almost like his life flashing before his eyes, in a way, but also searching for meaning in that life.

It also rather undermines the beautiful innocence of the (supposed) meaning of Rosebud; instead of Kane at the end of his life yearning for that lost childhood purity, he’s obsessed by being remembered. It’s all ego again.

Well, there’s all sorts of things in that movie. It’s why the film’s so great.

Of course.

I did a talk on Welles last night, and the clip that I chose from Kane was actually the one time we see his childhood properly, the scene in the cabin with the mother… basically selling him off to a banker. Obviously that’s a crucial scene. How would a boy feel about that? She might say “we’re doing it for your own good,” but he would presumably feel terribly betrayed, and that seems to stick with Kane throughout his life… as he remembers it, anyway. This is my attempt at an interpretation of the film. That’s the great thing about the film; there is no one definitive interpretation.

Just as there is no one definitive Kane. No one definitive Welles.

No, exactly.

I love that child-getting-sold-off. It’s so Wellesian. If you really think about it, that’s such a bizarre concept… it’s medieval, almost. It’s a lovely extravagance, and you don’t necessarily think of it as being so in the context of the film.

I think one does wonder how much Welles there is in Kane, and how much Welles there is in all of his personal films… you know, his own mother died when he was nine, and his father died when he was fifteen. Well… he had two fathers… rather like Kane. One of the great things about Welles, I think, is that he showed it was possible to make very accessible films which were also very, very personal. Very adult. He never made a film where he was talking down to the audience. There would be no place for him in today’s Hollywood… well, there wasn’t a place for him in Hollywood in 1941, it seems!

Now, this is pure speculation, of course, an indulgence… but if Welles was around today, what sort of work do you think he would be engaging in? With the resources and technology we have available, with film being what it is now, with Hollywood being what it is now.

It’s hard to say, isn’t it? I think, in a way, F for Fake provides a little bit of a clue, in that… I mean, he was sort of doing sampling before anybody had heard of it. He was actually making, more or less, an entire film out of other people’s stuff, and dealing with all sorts of themes… many of which he’d dealt with many times before… but also the whole question of art and authorship which, of course, was a riposte (in many ways) to this Raising Kane article by Pauline Kael. To work so many different things into this one single film, and to do it with such wit! I mean, it’s a very profound film, but it’s also very funny, and entertaining, and pacey. Maybe he’d have been making essay films, who knows? The thing about Welles is that he worked extremely well in theatre, in radio, and even in television. Had he been allowed to make more television work… already, he was doing things that other people weren’t doing.

I’m very much looking forward to Ben Walter’s talk (on Welles work in television).

Yes, that (I’m sure) will be very good. He’s got some great ideas, and that’s one reason… we were going to do the season anyway, but then Ben came along and (I know Ben because he used to work with me at Time Out some years back) and said “oh, why don’t you do Welles?” Well, we were doing it, and then I got him to write the notes (partly because I did it last time we did the Welles season), but also because he’s actually gone into the television side of Welles’ work much more deeply than anybody I know, and I think he had some really interesting takes on Welles; that he kept moving from medium to medium and each time he tried to do something new, and in fact effectively did do something new… it’s just people know less about his television work.

Yes, it’s very true – his innovations stretch far beyond film, though that’s what he’s mainly remembered for. The work he was doing on stage was unprecedented, the Shakespearean work was incredible. He did far more than he could ever be rightly celebrated for; he defies definition, simple explanation.

It’s sad, of course, because we don’t have much of the stage stuff left. I mean, there’s a little bit of the Voodoo Macbeth, I believe, but just what appears in that documentary. Of course, unless you were there…

Well, that’s theatre, really. That’s the nature of it. We’ve got as much as there can be: the costume designs, the set designs, the script…

Yes, but it would have just been great to be there.

Wouldn’t it? The Macbeth and the Caesar especially, my God! His Faustus… even the disastrous Five Kings… it would have been amazing to see the scope of it.

I mean, yes! Of course, it turned out as Chimes at Midnight, eventually.

Eventually, yes, and that’s another fascinating thing – the relationship between the Shakespeare films and the Shakespeare plays. Obviously there was the WPA Macbeth, but he also did a very brief stage production of his film Macbeth, a very brief one, and his Chimes at Midnight obviously had… I think, three different incarnations on stage before finally turning into a film. He returned Faustus repeatedly, and Shylock, Lear… everything always touched everything else. As you said earlier, he repeated himself so often and so wonderfully… explored the same themes in different ways throughout his career, he revisited and, as you say, remixed the same projects, the same films, the same stories, time and time again.

Absolutely. The most obvious incident of that is Citizen Kane and Mr Arkadin, but it’s amazing how many of the films deal with betrayal and guilt, and its quite often particularly the uneasy relationship between two men; how far can one trust? I think, again, that’s probably something that… from what we know of his life (you know, his relationships with people like Houseman) he would have felt betrayed very often, but also probably did a lot to make other people feel betrayed… not least, possibly, his families.

Of course, when it comes to male relationships, there’s the strange, untold story of his brother…

Indeed!

It’s bizarre how little there is on that. The alcoholic, rejected brother in the mental asylum.

Well, everybody has their secrets. They always have their secrets in the films, don’t they?

Yes. Everyone has their secrets. What for you is Welles’ legacy? If you could sum it up purely for yourself, from an entirely personal standpoint. What is Welles’ legacy, for you?

I suppose it’s a legacy that hasn’t, sadly, been taken up as widely (particularly in the American film industry) as would have been nice… but that idea that cinema has enormous potential as an art form; that it isn’t just about escapist entertainment. That you can entertain people while dealing with extremely serious social, political, ethical, philosophical questions… that’s something that he… I mean, he loved Shakespeare, and in a way he was doing the same sort of thing; he wanted to tell great, strong stories like Shakespeare, which were still about something, rather than just being mindless entertainment. He loved entertaining people, obviously, with his magic act and so on… but you know, you can tell the films where he felt he was putting the most in. They try to deal with very serious questions, on all sorts of levels, while still entertaining people. He never spoke down to his audience. He always trusted his audience to be able to follow him, even with quite difficult narratives. I mean, how many of them start off with people dying? Even Othello starts off with Othello dead, and using quite strange flashback structures… F for Fake, which is an amazingly odd structure… but he trusted spectators, his audience, to go along with it; get something out of it. I really wish more filmmakers had followed his example. Quite a lot of people did, I think. He set new standards, and there were people who came along in the post war years (particularly in Europe) who were really pushing forward with film, whether it was Bergman or Antonioni, trying to push the boundaries forward and to stretch the audience while still making films which were absolutely about communication. I think, in a way, he’s the best example of that. I mean, I’m not going to knock earlier filmmakers (I love Jean Vigo or Jean Renoir), but Kane is a remarkable film… I think it’s probably the first film where you get to the end and are suddenly, as the film is closing, given something which makes you feel… “oh, I’m going to have to watch this film again if I’m going to understand it.” I don’t think anybody had done that before. It certainly is a film which, you know… you haven’t got it. You’re going to have to watch it again and try and fathom things out, watch very closely. It took me years to realise that the snow globe… that we see it when he goes into Susan Alexander’s lodgings. It’s there, on her dressing table. That’s where that comes from. The camera never makes anything of it, it’s just there in a medium shot, and there are lots and lots of very, very telling and, I’m sure, deliberate details in that film which you might only pick up on after several viewings, and even then you have to think, well “what does that mean?” It’s a film which demands to be interpreted, rather than just experienced.

Yes, there’s so much. So dense.

Yes. I mean, the same goes for virtually all of them. I still don’t understand the plot for The Lady from Shanghai! How would one? Even when he tells you what’s happened… it’ll drive you stir crazy, thinking about it. He wants to entertain you and make you think, and wants you to engage very actively in films. it’s sort of like a dialogue, really.

I think it’s Michael Anderegg who talks a lot about Welles’ work as accessing high culture through low culture; the highbrow through the low.

Absolutely, yes. I mean, there are people working in the world today, like Abbas Kiarostami or Michael Haneke, and they’re people who are doing such similar things, who are telling stories which are very easy to follow, in many ways very simple stories… even Kane is a simple story – it’s a man’s life… but they are saying “you must watch closely, listen closely, because that way you’re going to understand something.” You have to engage with it, as an active spectator. You have to put in your imagination, and your memory and thought processes. They’re not spoon-feeding you a movie, and I think Welles is the first really great example of somebody who says “you’re going to have to work at this. It’s going to be fun, but you’re not just going to take it in. You’re not just going to consume it.”

He forced audiences to be active, not passive.

Yes! And even filmmakers as great as Von Stroheim, or Keaton, or Renoir (to some extent)… I mean, they’re wonderful filmmakers, and in other respects perhaps there’s the sign of Welles… but I think they weren’t making or insisting that the viewer engage actively. Not in the way that Welles was. That’s where Kane is revolutionary. He made a film where, as soon as it came to end, you really would have to realise that one viewing wasn’t enough. Now, some people watching it might not like that, wouldn’t go back to it, but I think quite a lot of people… if they’re really curious about how film works then they would want to revisit it.

Was Kane your introduction to Welles?

No. No, no. I think the first thing… I mean, I’m now sixty… I think my first, maybe… I probably heard The Third Man on radio [The Lives of Harry Lime radio series], maybe seen The Third Man (although in those days old films didn’t get shown on television quite so much. Mainly what we used to have to watch were Western series), but I certainly remember as a schoolboy in Northampton being taken to a screening, on Thursday afternoon in the local cinema, of Macbeth, because it was a set book [on the school syllabus], and so it was a way of having an education. I suppose that was my introduction to Welles, as far as I can remember… but I didn’t become a film buff until I went to university, and I remember seeing The Lady from Shanghai in my first year as a student, so that may have been… I also saw F for Fake when it came out, when I first came to London. By then I’d seen Citizen Kane. When I first came to London I worked at a cinema, and the first thing I did as one of the programmers was… I made sure we had an Orson Welles season, so that I could watch as many as possible. We even did Filming Othello. So, it was mainly my early twenties, but Macbeth is the first one I remember seeing as a schoolboy… then probably Lady from Shanghai as a student. You know, it was something where I was dragged along as a schoolboy, and probably sat there bored out of my skull… but certainly when I started seeing these movies as a student, and then in my early twenties, it was a revelation. One thing that comes across in the first place is just how much pleasure, how much joy he took in making films. They’re not like… they feel different to other people’s films. In my talk I kept having to say, after the clips… I mean I scripted my talks, but watching the clips again for the umpteenth time… I just felt nobody else would have filmed them that way. I mean, the ending of Shanghai, in the mirror house, it’s not only bold and imaginative, but nobody else would have done it.

Yes. Not just the ending, but the entire funfair sequence, the aquarium… extraordinary. Who could conceive of that? I mean, nobody else did…

No, I mean… cinema; clearly he just loved it.

What was, for you, (I think I probably know the answer to this) the most significant of Welles’ work? On an entirely personal level.

Well, it’s Kane. It’s funny, when I first saw Kane… I guess I did want to see it again, but I didn’t get it, and in a way… I think that one needs to get a bit older to really appreciate Kane. Partly because that’s what it’s about, it’s about looking back on your life, and I think it’s extraordinary that a man as young as Welles could have made a film like that (and, indeed, wanted to make a film like that) and carried on doing so in his own completely uncentred way; obsessed with mortality, looking back on lives, trying to find out what they meant.

He once said that “Death is our only dirty word.” Even his one record was about age.

Oh, I didn’t know about that?

Yes, he released a single in the 80’s. I Know what it is to be Young.

No, I had no idea!

You can find it on Youtube. It’s a little hokey, perhaps, but haunting and fun and effective. It’s a spoken word thing, with music in the background and backing singers.

No! Well, you see? He seems fascinating. I mean, the whole point of Citizen Kane, in a way, is him thinking “what’s he going to be like when he gets old?” Imagining himself as an old man… most young people don’t do that, that’s quite fascinating. The first couple of times I saw it… I mean, I admired it enormously, but I found it quite cold. I always used to say I preferred either Touch of Evil, which obviously a lot of young people like because its… you know, lurid and everything… slightly scandalous I suppose… and the other one was Ambersons, which is of course a wonderfully warm film… but the more I’ve watched Kane the more I’ve come, not only to find more and more in it, but actually to realise that it’s a very moving film. I hate this idea that it was all downhill after Kane, it wasn’t, but it’s the one film until F for Fake where he really had freedom to do what he wants, and because he had freedom… it’s all, sort of, there in the film, and it’s a film of immense complexity and sophistication, and I’m fascinated by it. Partly because it’s about how… not only that we can’t know other people, but that we can’t know ourselves properly, and to me that seems philosophically profound and correct. I don’t understand myself, and if I try to look back at my life, try to impose some sort of meaning on it… well, I wouldn’t be able to, because our lives are made up of so many different fragments and contradictions; we sometimes do things without thinking, we sometimes do things we know we shouldn’t have done (like the scorpion)… and he did this with his first film, which is extraordinary! The other film is F for Fake, which I think is also damn near perfect.

Incredibly there’s nothing quite like it; certainly not before, and I don’t think since.

No, and when other people talk about essay films… much overused term anyway, people use it for any old documentary these days… but that really was an essay film. He showed people how it really should be done, and unfortunately nobody’s managed to match him yet. You know, time’s getting on! It’s about time somebody came up with something as good! But they’re not going to. I fear that nobody will ever come up with anything as good as Citizen Kane.

One final question then. Completely personally, not worrying about justifying at all beyond your own feeling or instinct, what does Welles mean to you? When someone says “Welles” – when you hear a snatch of the Third Man theme – when you see the silhouette of the cigar and the hat – what does that mean to you?

I love hearing his voice. He was such a wonderful storyteller, even if half the time he complicated himself with different versions (“who cares about the truth, print the legend “). He was such a wonderful storyteller, such a wonderful speaker… you know, when he’s considering the shark in F for Fake, one wants to have been in his company! I mean, sadly that wasn’t possible, but on screen he manages to create a real feeling of intimacy when he’s talking. I’m not talking about when he’s on a chat show, but you see it in some of the TV things he did; Around the World with Orson Welles and things, and you see it in F for Fake, and you sort of see it a little bit in the Arena documentary. So that’s… when I think of Orson Welles, that’s what I think of: of a wonderfully intelligent, charming, possibly deceitful Storyteller-Raconteur, who we can learn so much from because he knew so much. He wore his erudition very lightly. I don’t know, does that make sense?

Yes, as much as anything about Welles does.

When I think of Welles… there’s so much one can think about him. One can think of him smashing a room up in Kane, but equally I might think of the scene between Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead in the kitchen, when they’re doing the strawberry shortcake scene. Welles isn’t even in that, but he was the one filmmaker who realised that Agnes Moorehead could act everybody off the stage.

And doesn’t she just!

She does, and I don’t think there’s a finer performance in cinema, apart from maybe the brief cameo in Citizen Kane, and this is someone who loves Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Pitt and many, many great actresses, and Moorehead wasn’t really given much chance to do what they did, because not many people really understood how great she was.

That scene in Ambersons is magnificent.

A clip I showed in my talk last night was the one when he’s walking with his mother, trying to find out what Eugene’s going to do with the car, whether his dad’s going into business with Eugene, and as that conversation continues you get the row between Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead, where they start teasing each other and imitating each other, and… I mean, Tim Holt is great in it, far better than he ever was in anything else, but her acting in that scene is just… absolutely perfect.

It’s interesting. So many actors just couldn’t work with Welles, but the one’s that could… the ones that really understood his approach… he could get such performances from them.

Absolutely.

Well, I think that’s all we have time for. I’m happy to come to a close if you are?

 Yes! Hope I didn’t blather on too much?

Oh, not at all! Blather is very much what we’re looking for, far more insightful than well-considered responses. Thank you. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.

Thank you! I’ll see you there.

You will.

________

Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.

• RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE