Cover art for the latest issue of the Italian film magazine Cabiria.
The Italian film magazine Cabiria has pulled together reflections from a dozen Orson Welles scholars across the globe to mark the one-year anniversary of the release of The Other of the Wind.
Welles’ long-unfinished 1970s film was completed last year by producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza, executive producer Peter Bogdanovich and editor Bob Murawski.
The Other Side of the Wind debuted Labor Day weekend 2018 at the Venice and Telluride film festivals before being streamed worldwide by Netflix on November 2, 2018.
Organized by Alberto Anile (Orson Welles in Italy), the Italian language magazine Cabiria sought out essays from Americans James Naremore (The Magic World of Orson Welles), who offered an essay previously published in Cineaste, Shakespearean scholar Richard Burt, and Ray Kelly of Wellesnet; Spanish film scholar Esteve Rimbau (Orson Welles: An Immortal Spain); Brazil’s Adalberto Müller (Don Quixote Reconsidered); Italy’s Alessandro Aniballi, co-founder of Quinlan.it, Formacinema co-founder Massimiliano Studer, and Cabiria editor-in-chief Marco Vanelli, among others.
In the days ahead, Wellesnet will run English translations of several Cabiria submissions. Here is Anile’s introduction to the 120-page special issue:
A Symposium on Paper
The announcement of the world premiere of The Other Side of the Wind at the 75th Venice Film Festival had raised enormous expectations. Obviously: more or less, this film was expected since 42 years. There was also a bit of controversy, linked to the initial placement of the film at the Cannes festival, which then went down due to the known disagreements with Netflix.
The three Venetian screenings went well, very well, beyond all rosy expectations: the work of reconstituting of the film appeared substantially faithful to the dictates of Welles, anyway very far from operations like the Jesus Franco one on the materials of Don Quixote. The film then followed a triumphant festival route, especially in U.S., after which an attentive reconsideration and punctual analysis work would come. Which, beyond some scattered essays, has not actually arrived. After a long wait, and tons of paper inked in the past decades, it seemed to have dropped a blanket of silence, as if the film criticism had been struck and stunned in front of an object still not well identified.
Also for this reason, with Marco Vanelli, the chief editor of Cabiria, we were thinking to investigate the Wind case, by organizing a symposium on paper to compare the opinions of the international Wellesian community. The result is in the following pages, which I had the honor and the pleasure of coordinating.
I decided to give up at the start to all those (like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride) who, having concretely collaborated in the Netflix operation, could not have guaranteed the necessary serenity of judgment; and to privilege an analytical, occasionally philological but not necessarily academic, approach. However, asking everyone to answer two questions: if The Other Side of the Wind edited and distributed by Netflix could be called a film by Orson Welles; and, if so, if it is a good film by Orson Welles.
Someone preferred not to participate, above all because of the impossibility of analyzing a work without having available the sources that determined it, but most of those we have invited agreed with fresh contributions (only in two cases taking up essays already appeared outside of Italy and translated into Italian after being reviewed by the authors). The American squad can count on one of Welles’ world greatest scholars, James Naremore, to whom we have entrusted the widest initial location; Richard Burt, a Shakespearean specialist, spoke with a bold illustrated essay, while Ray Kelly, founder and manager of the irreplaceable Wellesnet site, chose an autobiographical approach. Esteve Riambau, another exceptional name in an excellent community of writers, says his opinion from Spain — and he does so quite outspoken — while Brazilian Adalberto Müller bravely proposes a political angle. The Italian group is naturally the thickest, with the participation of Alessandro Aniballi, Adriano Aprà, Gabriele Gimmelli, Luca Giuliani, Massimiliano Studer, Marco Vanelli and myself, each following different trajectories, tracing working hypotheses and making small discoveries. This “special” ends by re-proposing John Huston’s autobiographical pages on his participation in Welles’s film, all the more pleasant and necessary in a publication like Cabiria, which has always held in great value the document and the testimony beside, and even more, than analysis and theory.
Sum up, what came out of it? A year after the world premiere in Venice, the general verdict on the Netflix operation appears substantially positive but with a considerable harvest of doubts and notes, as well as some explicit criticism, partly reducing the initial enthusiasm. And providing reflections that could prove decisive for a careful reconsideration of The Other Side of the Wind, intended as the value of the film and as an evaluation of its reconstruction.
However, the following pages do not run out the debate on an important work (in Welles’ filmography and, tout court, in the cinema history), but they relaunch it towards new opportunities for further study, which we hope will come soon. Meanwhile, I warmly thank all those who have accepted to participate, for the quality of a work which, combined, reaches a total value greater than the sum — already significant — of the individual contributions.
— Alberto Anile
__________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.