Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in a scene from The Other Side of the Wind. (Netflix)
(Editor’s note: Alberto Anile, author of Orson Welles in Italy, shared his views of The Other Side of the Wind after attending a preview screening at the 75th annual Venice Film Festival.)
By ALBERTO ANILE
The very first public screening of The Other Side of the Wind, reserved for critics and journalists, took place at 7.30pm on August 30th. Long lines, and many probably remained excluded, for the most important event of the 75th Venice Film Festival. The place: the Sala Perla, a historic movie hall inside the Palazzo del Casinò, although not the most comfortable.
Finally, over forty years after the end of filming, here’s the movie. The purpose of the producers, and of the client (Netflix), was obviously to present the film not in a philological way, something still to be investigated, an object trouvé just refurbished, but to rebuild an opera that did not existed yet, working it to create a new movie, a new show to make even the public unaware of the forty-year production vicissitudes of the film; in short, a new product to sell.
There was a huge risk that the Wellesian scholars would split, among those who would have preferred the philological way, the “object trouvé”, a strictly rigorous approach, and some others who would have liked to leave behind every possible autopsy just to watch a brand new Orson Welles movie, and enjoy the show.
Personally, after the first vision of the film, I don’t think that these two possibilities are irreconcilable, especially for the guarantee of the filmmakers, Frank Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich before anyone else. The first impression is that the work of fine-tuning was excellent and scrupulous. The many sequences already disclosed during the last 40 years have now bright colors, and black and white has all the nuances of the original negative. The comparison with what is reminiscent of the scenes already edited by Welles himself does not seem to show betrayals. Moreover, the original materials of the film still exist, have been digitally preserved from the threat of time and could widely offer the possibility to study the possible variants, the reason for certain choices, and the discards.
As pointed out by Joseph McBride, the most difficult problem to solve was how to manage the movie directed by Jake Hannaford, the film-inside-the-film sequences, and how to make them interact with the party sequences. Does Welles wanted them to be very long (as Kodar would have preferred) or just showed as brief snippets here and there? Furthermore, the beautiful results of some of them (like the just known love sequence inside the car) could have undermined the purpose of satirizing the Antonionesque way of filming. I don’t know how much of this footage is left in the cans, but it would appear that the first hypothesis was chosen, without however losing the references to a possible parody of the style, enigmatic and patinated (Zabriskie Point, let’s say), that annoyed Welles so much.
The “new” parts, the ones in which could be seen a clear intervention, are the very beginning and the very last shot. The movie ends with the light of the morning which causes the “red, Red Indian” figure to fade and vanish on the screen of the drive-in, in the film-in-film portion which has only been watched by its female performer (Oja Kodar): the special effect of fading image in the image, in its modern perfection, denounces its very recent realization.
The real change is in the beginning of the film, a short introduction with voice over that should have been said by Welles himself, an introduction that the director has never recorded. The brilliant idea was to entrust it, and slightly modify it, to Peter Bogadnovich as Brooks Otterlake, as if he had decided just a few months ago to take back all the material recorded on the evening of Hannaford’s 70th birthday, and to present it after a long time to the viewer.
What to complain about? The addition, by the musician Michel Legrand, of some tinkling with tubular bells on the magnificent scene of automotive sex between the Indian and the motorcyclist? The high noise of the shots in the scene in which Hannaford takes to shot the puppets of John Dale? They would be venial sins, and remain subjective impressions; more careful reflections and analysis will come, after further studies.
What matters is that, as expected, as hoped, The Other Side of the Wind is one of Welles’s major works. A reflection on cinema, and its comparison with life. A duel between “old” and “new” Hollywood. A movie on the elusive ghost of sex. And on old age (“the idea that Lear becomes old only when he has renounced power and control over things and people”, P. Bogdanovich).
A film where the fractioning of the montage (F for Fake from this point of view – and perhaps not only from this – is the work more similar to The Other Side) that arrives in some sequences to a vortex of pointillisme, deliberately tries to lose the concept of reality: is more true the real context, that of the final party of Hannaford, sewed by dozens of recording equipment and kaleidoscopized by a thousand angles of filming, or the fiction of the film in the film, which has an enigmatic content but is also more linear and, paradoxically, “comprehensible”?
At the end of this very first screening (I write while the gala premiere, the official one, is still in progress), the audience was fascinated and perplexed: few applause at the end, no defections during the screening, many reflections in mind immediately afterwards.
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