James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles.
By MIKE TEAL
In the centenary year of Orson Welles’s birth, James Naremore has published a revised third edition of The Magic World of Orson Welles, his incomparable 1978 study of the late filmmaker’s career.
Naremore is Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. He provided commentary tracks for the Criterion Collection release of Mr. Arkadin and Universal’s 50th anniversary DVD of Touch of Evil. Recently, he was a featured guest at centennial events at Indiana University and Woodstock, Illinois.
He graciously fielded questions about The Magic World of Orson Welles.
The Magic World of Orson Welles is one of the cornerstones of literature regarding Orson Welles. I’ve had your 1989 revised version in my library for many years and still use it frequently as a resource. What do you feel are the most important changes since then regarding Welles that prompted you to do a third edition this year?
I’m honored to be interviewed by Wellesnet and thank you very much for your kind words about my book. To be honest, I decided to do a third edition because I got word that SMU Press, publishers of the second edition, would soon be closing down. I wanted to keep the book in print, so I approached University of Illinois Press, with whom I had worked before. They immediately saw that the coming centennial would bring attention to the book and thought it would be good to add some new material that would help sales. Illinois has done a wonderful job of design; this volume looks much better than the two previous editions, in part because of the size of the illustrations.
No doubt if I were writing Magic World entirely anew, it would be a good deal longer (when I originally wrote it, I had no access to the Mercury archive now at the Lilly Library). It would probably also have a different title and somewhat less dollar-book Freud. But I still basically agree with what it says and I didn’t want to make radical changes. I added an introductory chapter titled “Orson Welles at 100,” which surveys recent research, adds some retrospective ideas, and stresses Welles’s interest in a wide range of media. If I’d had another year I might have added a bit more, given that we know so much today about the original Ambersons and Welles’s incomplete films. Apart from the opening chapter, I contented myself with correcting errors and adding new paragraphs here and there. I was frustrated by the fact that The Other Side of the Wind hadn’t yet appeared, but at least I was able to add new information about it from the Bogdanovich collection at the Lilly Library.
The Magic World of Orson Welles has always been highly lauded through the years not only for your analysis of the films, but also for your astute and insightful exploration of Welles’s political beliefs and career. This has always seemed a neglected area. For example, most of the Orson Welles commentary broadcasts for Lear radio are missing; a huge chunk of Welles’s political thought gone. How big a loss is this, and do you think there is more light to be shed on Welles’s politics?
Orson Welles offered political radio commentaries in the 1940s.
Aside from its close stylistic and thematic analysis of the films, the thing that most pleases me about my book is its emphasis on Welles’s politics, about which relatively little had been written. When I originally wrote the book, I didn’t know about the FBI files on Welles. In 1991 I obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act (today you can get a bound copy on Amazon) and published an article about them in Film Comment. At one point I thought about doing a new edition of the book that would include the Film Comment essay plus another essay I wrote about Welles and acting. But I managed to use most of that material in a book of essays I recently did for the University of California (An Invention without a Future). I suppose there’s more to be said about politics, but I’m not sure how much. You’re certainly right about the Lear broadcasts, and perhaps other material has been lost. I imagine a good small book could be written about the full history and complexity of Welles’s politics. His activism seems to dissipate after the 1950s, perhaps because he was spending so much time in Europe (having gone there in part to escape the political atmosphere in the US), or because he wasn’t attracted to the youthful radicalism of the 1960s and 70s. He nevertheless remained a liberal in most ways and was interested in the state of society. His version of The Trial seems to me as much Orwell as Kafka; and although the postmodernists love F for Fake because of the way it plays with truth and lies, to me it has a more important political point to make about the commodification of art under late capitalism. The Other Side of the Wind is also political in various ways, especially in its satire of Hollywood and media celebrity.
When your last edition came out in 1989, there were still relatively few books on the subject of Welles. Since then there has been what seems a massive amount of literature on him published. Two questions: How do you account for this increase of interest in Welles on the part of writers? Which, in your opinion, are the best of these books that you’ve read, as well as the worst?
Yes indeed, in the past few decades Welles has been the subject of a great many books. When I wrote about him there was only one truly fine book: Joseph McBride’s Orson Welles, which has since been expanded and remains for me both a model and an inspiration. I suspect the proliferation of books on Welles has many causes. After his death a great deal of archival material became available, and of course he’s a natural subject for biographers. Then, too, the literature on film in general has grown exponentially. Among the several biographies, I admire Simon Callow’s (now projected to be four volumes), although Simon and I disagree about Citizen Kane, especially in regard to the writing of the screenplay. Other important books on Welles in English, in no special order, are Joseph McBride’s Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Discovering Orson Welles, the Bogdanovich interviews in This is Orson Welles (with the indispensable appendix by Jonathan Rosenbaum), Michael Andregg’s Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, Catherine Benamou’s massive study of It’s All True, Jean-Pierre Berthome and Francois Thomas’s Orson Welles at Work, Alberto Anile’s Orson Welles in Italy, Marguerite H. Rippy’s Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects, and Stephan Drossler’s The Unknown Orson Welles (the last is an edited collection of writings and illustrations related to holdings of Welles material in the Munich Film Museum). I’m probably forgetting something, but these are essential readings for anyone with a serious interest in Welles. I would also strongly emphasize that Patrick McGilligan’s forthcoming Young Orson, which I read in manuscript, is an exceptionally important biographical work, hands down the best thing anyone has done on Welles’s life and career leading up to Citizen Kane.
You also ask which books I like least: They’re David Thomson’s Rosebud (regrettably, because he has nice things to say about me) and Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of his Life. Both books are erudite and engagingly written, but they’re inadequately researched and exasperatingly opinionated about Welles’s character and personality.
Loretta Young in a scene from The Stranger.
I saw your lecture on The Stranger at Woodstock, and it was fascinating. That was also the first time I had ever seen the film on the big screen and I was impressed by it’s ability to grip an audience. I noticed that you gave special emphasis to Welles’s use of the death-camp footage. How do you see that film’s place in the Wellesian oeuvre, since many Welles scholars seem to dismiss it? Do you think Welles could have and should have made more films like that, even though he had to compromise more with the producer?
I’m very pleased that you liked my talk on The Stranger. My chief regret about the new edition of my book is that I didn’t say more about that film, especially about the death-camp footage. When Michael Dawson asked me to speak about The Stranger at Woodstock (in part because the film has an obvious connection to the Todd School), I had already completed work on the new edition of my book. When I looked back at the film before going to Woodstock, I realized what should have been obvious to me from the start: as far as I know, The Stranger was the first and maybe the only time in the aftermath of World War II that audiences were shown documentary evidence of the Holocaust in the context of a commercial entertainment. This was a daring and important act, completely in line with Welles’s antifascist politics. The scene in which Edward G. Robinson shows the footage to Loretta Young is extremely powerful and transcends its fictional context; but the film as a whole is also far better than most critics (including me) have recognized. Of course, like all of Welles’s Hollywood work after Kane, The Stranger wasn’t exactly what he wanted. But it holds up remarkably well and is less conventional than it might seem. Should Welles have done more things like it? Maybe, or maybe not. The chief thing to remember is that he wasn’t given a chance.
How are you enjoying the Welles centennial this year? I saw you also at Bloomington, where you did a very fine job moderating the symposiums, a few of which I watched on the computer with the live streaming feature. They would make a great book. Have you had a chance to attend any other events? What have been some of the highlights this year for you?
James Naremore speaking at Indiana University.
I’m afraid I haven’t attended as many events as I would have liked during the centennial, but I suspect it would be hard to beat the Bloomington celebration, which was very classily organized by Jon Vickers, who is the peerless Director of IU Cinema, and Craig Simpson, who curated the Welles exhibit at the Lilly Library. The university did everything in style and the reaction of people who attended (representing at least six different countries) was quite positive. The academic presentations I saw were generally quite good, and the university cinema is a great place to see the films. There’s a plan to publish a book that will contain many of the conference papers, but I’m not editing it and don’t know quite how far the idea has progressed.
I was also at Woodstock for a couple of days, and the high point for me during my visit was Jonathan Rosenbaum’s interview of Oja Kodar, who was very charming and impressive. I was supposed to give a talk at the University of Michigan celebration, but much to my regret I had to cancel at the last minute. (My wife, who had been doing research in Portugal, had an accident while there and injured her knee. I needed to get her to a doctor in Bloomington and stay with her until she was feeling better. I’m pleased to report she’s recovered and doing fine.)
I have no doubt the Michigan events were outstanding. Their library materials on Welles are now the most extensive anywhere.
Glad your wife is better. What is your reaction to the recent developments regarding the Too Much Johnson rediscovery and the campaign to complete The Other Side of the Wind? Are you optimistic about Wind and that more obscure and/or incomplete Welles stuff will see the light of day soon?
The discovery of the Too Much Johnson footage is something of a miracle. As you surely know, it’s an extremely charming and sophisticated piece of moviemaking that proves Welles was no amateur when he went to Hollywood. I’ve written a short appreciation of it in the new edition of my book. I hesitate to predict anything about The Other Side of the Wind because I have no inside track to news about the work being done or about the legal/financial issues. Like everyone, I’m excited by the prospect and hope it will soon appear.
You and Jonathan Rosenbaum together have done two of the best DVD commentaries that I’ve ever heard, for Criterion’s Complete Mr. Arkadin and the three-disc Touch of Evil set. How do you look back on those sessions, and do you have any plans to do any more? Which Welles films do you think are in most need of a good commentary?
I hugely enjoyed working with Jonathan, who invited me to join him on the two DVD commentaries about Welles. In fact, I’ve enjoyed all my experiences as a commentator (I also did one on Sweet Smell of Success, which, like everything issued by Criterion, was expertly produced.) I don’t get invited that often, probably because most of the year I’m not near a big city — I’ve had to turn down a couple of opportunities for that reason, but I’d love to do more. If there’s ever a good DVD of Falstaff in the US, I’d be eager to comment for it. We need a good one on Ambersons (Robert Carringer did a useful commentary on the old Criterion laser disk of the film), and also on The Lady From Shanghai. There are excellent extras with subtitles on the French DVD edition of Macbeth, but both that film and Othello deserve to have good US DVDs with commentaries.
Anything else you would like to add regarding the new book, or any Welles-related subject? Any other future projects we should be on the lookout for?
My chief problem during the past year has been that all the attention brought to Welles (which of course I was happy about) made me put a temporary stop to a book I’ve been writing about Charles Burnett. I’m almost a year behind schedule and eager to get back to it. I hope to finish by early 2016.
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