Film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum
Update: The Other Side of the Wind will be shown April 19 and 23.
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Jonathan Rosenbaum, noted film critic and consultant on the restored Touch of Evil and completed The Other Side of the Wind, will host a 14-week lecture series on the work of Orson Welles at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.
Orson Welles: The Other Side of the Argument will be offered from January 25 until May 7.
Presented in conjunction with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the weekly series will feature a Tuesday lecture by Rosenbaum accompanying a Welles-directed film. There will be additional weekend screenings of Welles films sans lectures.
“A polemical defense and celebration of Orson Welles’ fourteen features and a few of his shorter works, Orson Welles: The Other Side of the Argument will seek to counter some of the ideological and biographical biases that have viewed him as an out-of-control and unfulfilled artist,” Rosenbaum said in a statement on Siskel Film Center’s website. “Despite the very unruly and unorthodox aspects of Welles’ career, the richness of his artistry and the perpetual originality of his accomplishments have yielded challenges that this series will attempt to define, engage with, and honor.”
He added, “The order of the films to be discussed will be roughly chronological, although the existence of varying release dates and different versions of individual films makes a strict chronology impossible. Anomalies of this kind, frequently the results of Welles’ unconventional work methods, will be addressed and discussed in some detail, because they suggest that different tools and criteria are sometimes needed in order to understand the nature of Welles’ far from conventional aims and achievements.”
A 35mm print of Citizen Kane will open the series on Friday, January 25. Rosenbaum will speak about Welles’ Hollywood debut on Tuesday, January 29.
Other showings include: The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, Macbeth, Othello, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, F for Fake and Filming Othello. Other titles will apparently be added since two dates on the schedule have “to be announced” designations.
Tickets are $11 for evening screenings and $8 for matinees with a reduced fee of $5 for Siskel Film Center members.
Rosenbaum, retired film critic for The Chicago Reader, edited the essential Welles and Peter Bogdanovich book, This is Orson Welles. He is the author of more than a dozen books on cinema including Discovering Orson Welles and the recently published Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues.
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