Orson Welles and the City by Matthew Asprey Gear
By RAY KELLY
At the End of the Street in the Shadow – Orson Welles and the City, now available from Columbia University’s Wallflower Press, looks at the filmmaker’s work with an eye focused on his depiction of cities.
Author Matthew Asprey Gear, an Australian media studies academic and one of the founding editors of Contrappasso magazine, sees Welles as a poet and critic of the city with a deeply personal vision of urban society. He examines his completed work and unfinished projects in the new 300-page tome.
Gear is no stranger to Welles aficionados. His writings on Welles have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Wellesnet.
He was gracious enough to field some questions about At the End of the Street in the Shadow and share his impressions of Welles’ work.
So much has written about Welles’ cinematic work, but At the End of the Street in the Shadow is the first book to exhaustively look at locations and the role they played in his films. What set you down this road?
I’m fascinated by cities in movies and Orson Welles was a hugely innovative urban filmmaker with a staggeringly global sweep. The book was a great opportunity to immerse myself in his completed films as well as the enormous body of unfinished work lurking in the shadows.
But the book isn’t just about the urban locations used in Welles’s films. After all, many of his cities were created in studios, too, and Welles had very little interest in documenting reality as he found it. Sometimes he filmed in real locations, sometimes on studio sets, but through art direction, camera tricks, special effects, editing, through the patchwork of shots made in different locations (sometimes on different continents) and through the construction of his soundtracks, Welles invented distinctly cinematic spaces that don’t represent any real place.
There have been wonderful critical studies of Welles’s work in cinema, including James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles. My book is also a full-length critical study, but I come at Welles’s work from a different angle, by examining how he constructed cities on celluloid. This isn’t as esoteric as it might seem, because I believe his cinematic cities were a profound expression of both his aesthetic vision and his politics.
You noted that his first two films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, are different in narrative style and theme, but both identify and romanticize pastoral locations outside urban centers in their stories. How much of this is due to Welles’ own upbringing in Woodstock, Illinois?
I would say that the town of Harper, Connecticut, in The Stranger more directly evokes Woodstock than anything in Kane or Ambersons. Harper makes several clear allusions to the Todd School for Boys, where Welles seems to have been very happy and found a lifelong friend in the headmaster Roger ‘Skipper’ Hill. But Ambersons is clear evidence of Welles’s nostalgia for the semi-rural Midwest as it existed before his birth, that half-century between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the First World War. Late in life he spoke fondly of the lingering late nineteenth century mode of life preserved in the small town of Grand Detour, Illinois, where his father ran the Sheffield Hotel in the 1920s.
Welles was an adherent of city culture, which he equated “by definition” with civilization. Nevertheless, he frequently created appealing pastoral images to contrast with his urban settings. His urbanized characters feel nostalgia for these pastoral locations, and that provides a kind of emotional logic. On his deathbed Charles Foster Kane remembers his snowy Colorado frontier childhood of 1871, and Ambersons very tenderly depicts the last sleigh ride on the outskirts of Indianapolis before the automobile transforms the midland town into a suburbanized modern city.
But really I think Welles’s pastoral gestures were much more than simple nostalgia for his own Midwestern upbringing. They tie in with his key theme, the loss of something valuably human in the mad scramble for progress. Ambersons is the greatest American exploration of the theme, but it proved very adaptable to other times and other societies. Booth Tarkington, author of The Magnificent Ambersons, was basically a conservative and racist crank, myopically bemoaning the growth of his provincial little town and the coming of immigrants. By contrast Welles possessed a larger and profoundly romantic vision of loss, which was internationalist and inclusive rather than rooted in resentment about some specific historical transformation.
Pastoral images turn up elsewhere in very different contexts but they are often virtually interchangeable. In 1942 in Fortaleza, Brazil, Welles filmed the traditional rituals of the jangadeiro fishing community (the unedited footage, which Welles never saw even as rushes, was posthumously assembled as the coda to the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on a Film by Orson Welles). As Bill Krohn and Jonathan Rosenbaum have pointed out, Welles seems to have kept any hint of Fortaleza’s modernity out of frame. Years later Welles was in the Basque country making the TV series Around the World with Orson Welles (1955), and glowingly depicted Basque culture through similar images of the pastoral. A Basque procession in the Pyrenees is startlingly similar in its framing to shots of the jangadeiro funeral procession: the silhouettes of crosses held aloft, the trail of people through the hills.
This facet of Welles has been criticised as misrepresentative of traditional cultures, in essence more an expression of his romantic worldview than about the culture he purported to represent. And that’s fair enough. But on the other hand Welles knew exactly what he was doing. He re-invented the world as he discovered it, funnelled his experiences through his personal vision. He was an artist. He identified with Shakespeare’s idealism, his capacity to “to adore the impossible.”
In a conversation earlier this year, you referred to Welles as both a poet and critic of the city. What did you mean by that?
I think Welles followed somewhat contradictory impulses when he created cities on film. First there is the Welles who said, “A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” His cinematic cities are poetic, expressionist creations. He created the Tex-Mex border town of Los Robles in Touch of Evil by transforming locations in Venice Beach, California. Welles insisted at the time “there was no attempt to proximate reality, the film’s entire ‘world’ being the director’s invention.”
(Nevertheless, I was recently fooled into believing I was on the set of Touch of Evil one night in the streets of Mérida on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula – the frayed bullfighting and boxing posters, the distorted music sweeping past from car radios, the spectre of menace at the end of the street in the shadow.)
At the same time Welles was also a committed political artist whose work was frequently informed by anti-fascism – a strain that began in an entertaining if superficial Hitchcockian mode during the Second World War but became increasingly sophisticated and radical. He developed insightful ideas about the operation of power within the very institutions and built structures of cities themselves. This is the critical aspect of Welles’s cinematic cities. We see this in Touch of Evil and The Trial, and also in what evidence survives of the pre-release working cut of The Lady from Shanghai (the opening sequence in Central Park almost entirely lost its context of aggressive police surveillance and was much diminished). The unfinished ‘Carnival’ segment of 1942’s It’s All True and the much later unmade script of Graham Greene’s Honorary Consul explore Welles’s ideas of political exclusion in the Latin American context of the peripheral urban favela or shantytown.
Sometimes Welles completely segregated the poetic and the critical modes, but usually he let them sit in happy conflict.
Financial limitations often forced Welles to use one locale to double for another (Spain as England in Chimes at Midnight, the Yugoslavian coast in The Deep). How much do you think it impacted his work?
The more I learned about Welles’s immensely complicated circumstances, the more I saw his career as a heroic (if often Quixotic) quest to find a workable production model, a way to function independently as an experimental artist in a commercial industry. Doubling one location for another provided more flexibility. It was all part of his low budget patchwork method.
Urban authenticity was never at the top of Welles’s priorities, anyway. In my book I discuss his 1969 segment ‘New Wien’ from the TV special Orson’s Bag (aka One Man Band), which was posthumously presented by the Munich Film Museum as Orson Welles’ Vienna. He shot parts of this purported documentary segment about Vienna in the Croatian city of Zagreb in what was then Yugoslavia, where he’d shot parts of The Trial some years earlier. And why not? He admits in his commentary that his Vienna is a city of the imagination. “Your true Vienna lover lives on borrowed memories,” he says. “With a bittersweet pang he remembers things he never knew, delights that only happened in his dreams.”
In the 1950s and 1960s Spain and Yugoslavia were autocratic dictatorships of very different political orientations, but they each had somewhat amenable state film industries open to foreign co-production. It was a good way for those countries to bring in foreign currency. Welles was able to seize the opportunity to make a number of films by working with these state industries in various official and unofficial ways. And for a while it worked quite well, although it was never easy. In retrospect the 1960s was really the golden age for Welles, in the sense that it was the decade he was able to consistently make movies his own way. The last fifteen years of his life was much more difficult.
I think Spain’s lingering medieval qualities, preserved in the supposed stasis of Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship, provided perfect locations for Chimes at Midnight. But Welles was so endlessly resourceful he would have found a way to make the film anywhere as long as most of the money had been available.
In preparing and researching this book, you travelled a great deal in the past three years. What did you learn from visiting specific Welles’ locations?
I don’t think it is necessary to live on the road like Orson Welles in order to write a book about Orson Welles, but it’s a fun way to do it. I’m from Sydney, but I wrote the book mostly in Buenos Aires during the last days of CFK – which stands for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, not Charles Foster Kane. Welles did pass through Argentina at least once (in 1942), and the noirish city at the beginning of The Stranger is probably based on Buenos Aires (a note in the script calls it ‘Puerto Indio’), but I was there because it was a relatively inexpensive place to write a book.
My other travel was not specifically to visit locations used in the films, but to visit archives and to meet Welles scholars. The key Welles archives for scripts and letters are the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. The staff at both libraries were generous and welcoming, and their archives are wonderfully expansive and in many aspects still to be explored. Bloomington, just outside Indianapolis, is Ambersons country (although the film was shot in Hollywood). I’m afraid Eugene Morgan’s dinner-table prophecy was correct: the automobile has been a step backwards in civilization. Nobody in Indianapolis could fathom why I expected to get to nearby Bloomington without a car. Public transport seemed like a fantastical idea.
If you travel to any of the world’s great cities you wind up finding Orson’s trail. One night I was in Paris and decided to verify a famous story Welles told about coming up with the idea to shoot parts of The Trial in the Gare d’Orsay, the then-empty railway station on the left bank of the Seine. One night he was staring out of his window in the Hôtel Meurice on the right bank – he seems to have been drunk in the early hours with Jeanne Moreau – and was puzzled to see two moons shining in the sky. Was he that drunk? No. The moons were the twin clock faces of the station. And then he realised the station would make a great ad hoc studio.
So one night I wandered along the Rue de Rivoli to confirm that the angles from the Meurice to the Gare were plausible, as Chuck Workman later did in his excellent documentary, Magician: The Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles. Incidentally, by his own account Welles was banned from Le Meurice because his Trial producers ran out on his room bill.
I also visited the Munich Film Museum, where Welles’s unfinished late film materials have been stored, preserved, and in some cases reconstructed by Stefan Drössler. Mr Drössler not only allowed me view the museum’s extensive work on the Welles materials but also took me across Sebastianplatz to the tenement building used as Jakob Zouk’s residence in Mr. Arkadin. It stands almost unchanged. I learned something about Welles’s working methods by walking into the building’s interior courtyard and up its staircase, because the architecture had been completely reimagined in the editing room. He faked everything! He also shot his Munich Christmas scenes in April and May of 1954, so the very palpable winter snow and cold are just the magic of movies.
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At the End of the Street in the Shadow – Orson Welles and the City is available from Columbia University Press, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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