Quinlan interview with Esteve Riambau

[Wellesnet]

http://quinlan.it/2016/07/13/intervista-esteve-riambau/
Here's a crude translation:

INTERVISTA A ESTEVE RIAMBAU

You are both a leading scholar of Welles as well as a restorer and film preservationist, primarily for your role as director of the Film Library of Catalonia . So what are the problems that a Welles film poses to those who restore movies? *

I believe that among all the most important filmmakers in the history of film, Welles poses the most problems for restoration, because his work is huge and chaotic. Welles finished in fact only thirteen feature films, but among the uncompleted projects there is an incredible amount of material, whose bulk is perhaps greater than that of his finished film. Not to mention other aspects of Welles, of which I am still very interested, namely Welles radio, the theater and the television. This is why I am part of a group of twenty madmen around the world who have followed his work for thirty years and we never run out of material, because new materials come out, new things are discovered, new biographies speak of periods never seen before, such as the new book by Pat McGilligan, “Young Orson”, which speaks of the young Welles with information absolutely unpublished until now. I myself last year did research on Falstaff, and incredible stories came out even from there. So Welles is an endless mine for researchers and academics...

And this is for the purpose of restoring the unfinished film of Welles?

I am very cautious in using the word restoration, in this sense. I think it should mean to restore something back to its original stage of completion. And so, if we have a picture of Velázquez, or Picasso, or who knows who else, you can go back to the original object if there is a benchmark. In the case of cinema, things are more complicated, first because in recent years all of us have come to realize that the phenomenon of multiple versions of a film is very frequent. During the time of silent movies for example, a large production was filmed with two or more cameras which produced more negative, and thus the studios had the ability to print a larger number of copies for export. The best take was chosen for the version that was to be released at home, while bad ones were used for export copies. As a result of this, for example, there are five different versions of Murnau's Faust, and this is also why Metropolis has been successfully changed so many times.

In the case of Welles then, most of the new films are films that were not finished. For example, when we speak of Don Quixote we talk about a film that began in '57 and was never finished after so many years in the making. This means that there are different Welles Quixotes; that it is a film that is constantly evolving. And that's why the operation of Jess Franco’s 1992 “Don Quijote de Orson Welles”, was wrong, because it claimed to offer the public the supposed version of Orson Welles. What is Don Quixote of Welles? It simply does not exist. Are there any materials on which Welles worked during his last twenty years? To understand what the unfinished movies could have become we can use F For Fake as a guideline. Here in fact the original materials were not by Welles, but François Reichenbach, who had made a TV movie about counterfeiters, who then became the protagonists of F for Fake.

On a movieola, I watched the Reichenbach films that were destined to be part of the Welles film, with marks on the film for those parts that were to be put into F for Fake. We’re speaking of thirty to forty minutes, more or less. Welles therefore used external material, edited with things filmed by him, and so created a dialogue that had been partially acquired elsewhere. It is no coincidence that in this film is the scene in front of the center of Chartres cathedral, where Welles wonders who is the real author of that immortal work. No one, or everyone.

But wasn’t it excessive, on the occasion of the Welles retrospective that was made last year in Paris by the Cinémathèque Française, to have indicated F for Fake as a film co-directed by Welles and Reichenbach?

Esteve Riambau: No, because this was the initial agreement. To have that material, Welles had promised Reichenbach that they would sign the film together.

Staying with the Cinémathèque Française retrospective, we had at that time the opportunity to see, for the first time, the copy-work of Don Quiotxe, and were greatly surprised to discover that there is never at any time any narration by Welles, as had been stated in many interviews and articles. Rosenbaum said to us regarding this that Welles had decided to eliminate the role of the narrator. What do you think about it?

Esteve Riambau: This is a hard thing to know. Because if you want to give credit to Welles, and lend confidence to any of the things said by him, it does not hold water any more, because although he was a wonderful storyteller, he was at the same time a big liar. So yes, he decided, for example, to remove the character of Dulcinea, simply because the actress who played her had become an adult. But I'm not so sure that he had decided to abandon this idea of the narration, because in the images filmed many years later in Pamplona, you see Akim Tamiroff in Sancho Panza clothes appealling to Welles and asking him if he has seen Don Quixote. This approach was entirely consistent with the novel by Cervantes, which is solely meta-linguistic (addressing the audience), and also consistent with many other works of Welles.

I have tried to imagine Welles’s Don Quixote in the seventies, and I'm sure it would be something like F for Fake. Already in 1958, both in The Fountain of Youth and in Portrait of Gina, he had worked on this meta-linguistic level, although in a television environment. This mechanism, with him on stage to act as a narrator - a highly original use of the language of television and yet characteristic of the medium - had then been transposed to the cinema in F for Fake. And perhaps, if he could have, he would have done the same thing with Don Quixote. But there is also The Merchant of Venice: why film at least twice the monologue of Shylock in contemporary dress? Because in the seventies he would have no problem integrating this monologue of the 'present' into the period film. This was Welles of the transgressive seventies who escaped from the classic narrative in order to go to a more off-center vision.

Then, at that time in particular, Welles filmed compulsively - using Gary Graver as an assistant cameraman and director of photography - and when he found something that seemed interesting, just made it. And now, regarding these materials, it is impossible to know for which use he intended it and if indeed he was going to make any precise use of it. To return to Falstaff, there is the pre-final stage when the new king publicly disregards Falstaff. Welles filmed this in seven different locations, and yet it is almost impossible to realize it. Yet that moment - that seems a unit of place and time, since this is a single scene - is made up of seven different places filmed over five months. He had everything in his head, he knew exactly what he had shot and where, and how to assemble it. And to close on Don Quixote, I at one point, in something I've written, I have made the assumption that Welles had suddenly left the still-in-process, Don Quixote of Cervantes in order to make his re-reading of Don Quixote by Miguel de Unamuno. Then, he was going to create another essay film.

But the workprint in Paris ...

Esteve Riambau: No one can prove that this is a workprint.

Oh really?

Esteve Riambau: Sure, those are materials for Don Quixote, but one of the great mysteries to be solved with regard to Welles is to determine where the materials that are in each library came from. Where did the material in Paris come from? Where did the material that was in the United States and then ended up in the hands of Jess Franco come from? From where was the material Mauro Bonanni had, before it ended up at Cinecittà? Why was part of the material that was in Spain turned over to the Friuli, in Cinemazero?

Thus, in my opinion, that which was seen in Paris should not be considered a workprint. However, that material is important because you see how Welles worked, for example in the way he used the sound, overdubbing himself the voice of Don Sancho Chsciotte. But this is something very typical of Welles. In The Process, for example, there are some lines of Anthony Perkins’s which were redubbed by Welles himself, and it is absolutely impossible to understand which are the moments in which Welles's voice replaces that of Perkins. Moreover, as we know, he was a master in the use of voice, thanks to the work he had done on the radio.

What do you think of the restoration of the Merchant of Venice?

Esteve Riambau: That is a reconstruction that was made from materials where you do not know whether it is finished or not. We will never know if The Merchant of Venice was really finished, and then there is still the story that the missing reel was stolen.

What do you think of the theory of Stefan Drössler, from the Munich Film Museum, which manages all the unfinished Welles projects inherited by Oja Kodar, who said that the film should not be restored, but rebuilt?

Esteve Riambau: Going back to the idea that a theoretical restoration makes sense only when it can be traced back to an original perfectly identified. In all other cases, it becomes a public display of the project’s materials. In the case of the Merchant of Venice, we have traces left of what were the original materials, and therefore it is a proposal, offered to the contemporary viewer, to get an idea of how Welles’s Merchant would have been. With The Other Side of the Wind, it is the same situation. It is a film that has not been finished. And any operation intended to pretend that The Other Side of the Wind is a film somehow completed will be doomed to failure. First, because it is not true [see in this respect also the interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum , editor's note], and also because the assembly and editing of Welles was absolutely unique and inimitable.

I spoke of the hours with the two editors of Falstaff about the way of working of Welles at the moviola. And, at some point in processing, the second editor, Fritz Muller, was commissioned to 'parry' assembly, of trying to put order in all that material, without throwing anything away so that Welles could decide to reclaim unexpectedly that which at one time he had decided to discard. The battle as seen in Falstaff initially lasted half an hour, then was cut to ten minutes, so it was even dropped to three! A curtailment process with no end in sight. And it is in this sense that it could go on and on endlessly with Welles. Because it could happen - and it happened again for the Falstaff - that the editor was aware that he was missing something and then said to director of the second unit, "Go and film this thing here, I need a first floor of a horse falling. "So they filmed the new inserts according to the rhythm that the scene took on while being assembled. No one has the power to do this thing today. In The Other Side of the Wind there are about 25, 30 minutes directly assembled by Welles, and the rest will be assembled by others, in order to have a structure, in order to sell to HBO. But it is not the Welles way.

In fact, should these materials be seen as they were, without being assembled?

Esteve Riambau: But that makes me think of the Too Much Johnson footage. We have made Barcelona the Fourth World projection. We made a presentation where I explained everything with the microphone, the plot, the characters, etc. Because if you see all of the material as it is, the audience - the audience of a film library - will not understand anything. Therefore, you have to 'help' a bit 'these images, however, without pretending that it is a finished product. The original score of Too Much Johnson , Music for a Farce, which was written by Paul Bowles, lasts about thirteen minutes, much less than the duration of the film. And then I spoke to the musician who usually works for us, specializing in silent films, and he replied that Bowles looked back to the American avant-garde musicians from the school of Erik Satie and thus their compositions were always so very limited in time, and then from there were improvisations.

So he has done so. And it went pretty well, although some viewers were still saying, “but this is not a movie!” In fact, it's not a movie; they are the materials for the three acts of a play called Too Much Johnson, and that had never been done. The public must be conscious of these materials: what their meaning is and why they should be shown. So this is the work of a film library: be a preservers of the original material, and to show these materials to the public in a format that can be understood. An error on the one hand, in my opinion, is to show the raw materials, without any intervention, but another mistake is to show the film as if it were done, when it is not. Then in the first case there is the subjectivity and interpretation. With the interpretation that Stefan Drössler makes the material from Mercante you can say: I am more or less in agreement, I would have done so, or maybe I would have done something different there.But the difference between what Drossler does and what Jess Franco did is that Franco was pretending that it was the Don Quixote of Orson Welles. Drössler never says this. They are simply presented and interpreted as material for an unfinished film by Orson Welles. I absolutely agree with this idea of the presentation, highlighting that it is not finished materials. I also think of The Deep ... I saw it four or five times, and the version presented by Drössler lasts 110 minutes. Because Stefan said: “I leave most of the material that is left, structured in a chronological order.” I am sure - and Stefan obviously knows this - that if Welles had been able to finish the film, this would last 80 minutes, no more. Why does this montage last so long? Because then you have the chance to see pretty much all that's left, though of course often with no dialogue between the parties, other scenes in black, etc.

In Italy, the Orson Welles film began to be taken seriously by the film critics only since the Sixties. Which was rather critical acclaim Welles in Spain?

Esteve Riambau: Well, as you know, the Welles relationship with Spain has always been very intense. He came to our country for the first time in 1933, when he was only eighteen. Then he was very active during the war in Spain, in defense of the republican government, both with radio programs and some newspaper articles. And he was also the narrator of The Spanish Earth, the Joris Ivens film of 1937 on the war in Spain, written by Dos Passos and Hemingway. This meant that, as of 1939, upon the seizure of power by Francisco Franco, it was no longer possible for him to return to the country for a long period. And, starting from this moment, you can see that Welles had replaced Spain with South America.

This is my guess, although I consider it quite established: from '39 onwards Welles had a love affair with Dolores del Rio; he married Rita Hayworth - whose name was Margarita Cansino, the daughter of Spanish parents; he does the preface of the book of Toreadora Mexican Conchita Cintron; He writes several unrealized screenplays, from The Way to Santiago to others, with Latin-American elements; He directs The Stranger with the Argentinians characters working on the idea to block the Nazis from there, and of course he filmed It's All True in Mexico and Brazil. Finally, Welles returned to Spain between 1953 and '54, just a few months after the signing of the treaty of friendship between Eisenhower and Franco, and in this time of recovering the collaboration between Franco's Spain and the anti-Communist America, the first two great intellectuals who knocked on Franco’s door were Welles and Hemingway. Both had had a very active role in the defense of the Republicans, but for them Spain was too important and went beyond Franco.

By now, Welles had already come back to Spain, to shoot Mr. Arkadin. However, even in Spain, the the critical magazines of the sixties had begun vindicate the importance of Welles. At the time they knew especially of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, not The Stranger which was banned for political reasons. However, if Welles was known and appreciated by the critics, he did not enjoy the same esteem by producers. In Madrid, for example, in those years there was Samuel Bronston, who produced films by Nicholas Ray, Henry Hathaway, of Anthony Mann. Welles was also there - indeed, as mentioned, among the directors he had been the first to arrive - but never received proposals to shoot films in Franco's Spain. And so the only relationship he had with Samuel Bronston was to be invited to the wedding of his daughter, and nothing else.

A historian scholar of Welles film in Spain is Juan Cobos, who among other things wrote a book in two volumes with you, called Orson Welles: A España immortal and Orson Welles: España como obsession. Subsequently, Cobos also became a friend of Welles...

Esteve Riambau: Yes, Juan Cobos, one of the journalists who did the interview with Welles on Film Ideal, a great interview. They met as well, and then Welles offered Cobos the chance to become his personal secretary, his assistant during the filming of Falstaff. Years later, when I was asked to write a biography of Welles’s Spanish work, I asked Cobos to do so in cooperation and so we made the two volumes.

Among the many mysteries concerning the film and the life of Welles is one that revolves around the famous fire of the Madrid villa, which occurred in August of 1970. It is said that on that occasion they also burned a few movies.

Esteve Riambau: Go and watch the Spanish newspapers of the time and understand that only a part of the library's books were burned.

Yes, we went to see them, and in fact they say this. But then you do not understand why every time you refer to this fire - and even Rosenbaum in history I, Orson Welles does – it is said that the films were lost on that occasion. For example the Too Much Johnson - and Ciro Giorgini in particular to supported this - it is said that perhaps the copy of the movie was there in Madrid and was burned in the occasion of the fire. Therefore, he always maintained that the one that was found in Cyrus may be a second copy, a kind of discarded waste. Which would explain the mysterious absence of volcanic eruption scene, which took place upon arrival in Cuba of the characters.

Esteve Riambau: What I know is that the films were in a completely different part of the house from the library. I think it is very unlikely that Too Much Johnson burned in Madrid.

Thinking back to the operation of 1992 Jess Franco on Don Quixote , how was it possible that such a thing was authorized, without a minimum of cultural coverage by scholars of Welles' film?

Esteve Riambau: I knew when the operation had already begun. It was a commercial operation, there was money from the Universal Exposition in Seville in 1992; there was a producer, Patxi Irigoyen, and they decided that Jess Franco, because Welles knew him and had worked with him, was the person most suitable for working at an edition of Don Quixote. Oja Kodar was the trading partner, and she agreed to have this thing done. I repeat, the big mistake was to present it as a Don Quixote of Welles, whereas it is the Quixote of Franco, assembled from Orson Welles materials. We know very well that Franco even filmed parts from scratch for this release, without admitting it explicitly. But, you know, I have the proof. In fact, years later, while I was having dinner with some colleagues, I happened to know a girl who worked as a set designer. There was talk of this and that, what you do and what not to do. And she at one point said: "As I have also worked with production designer Franco for Don Quixote. I made the mill blades" she said. Absurd!

But what was the role of the Madrid Film Library in this matter?

Esteve Riambau: It was just to get the materials and to safeguard them for cultural preservation. There was no possibility of it having any decision-making power regarding the assemblege.

Do you think there is a chance we will see sooner or later Don Quixote in some form?

Esteve Riambau: You can see the material of Don Quixote, but it should first be examined by a committee, who can then make a more or less logical classification and always keep in mind that there has never been a Don Quixote of Welles, but a work in progress that is called Don Quixote, in which Welles changed opinion for at least twenty years, turning even in different formats, including 35mm and 16.

And this thing could happen at some point?

Esteve Riambau: Yes, but interest will be small because Welles is gone. And I'm sure that Welles would eventually made a completely different film from what we had in mind at the beginning. We will never know, for example, if he would have actually mixed all the material he had available. I go back to what I said at the beginning: the finished Welles's films are only the superficial part of a large iceberg full of materials. He always came down to the hidden part of the iceberg to look for materials to make his compositions, and the more he became free and independent, the more he was able to mix and innovate its language and cinema in general. The reason for which Don Quixote was never finished is because in the end there was no producer who said “enough, you have to finish it today!”

The producer of Falstaff had reached the point of destroying a set because there was no time. If it had not come to this drastic decision, he would have allowed Welles to continue to work on Falstaff for who knows how long. Because Welles was never happy and satisfied and always felt the need to improve, to change, to change everything. The story of Falstaff we now know very well: initially three months of filming was planned, then it took a year of post-production in which Welles did a thousand changes. In fact, for example, in addition to calling the second unit to shoot some new things, Welles, if needed the first floor of an actor, maybe that was now busy on another set, he took a total and in the lab was to have an extract the first floor. Then, if you cover the opening credits, there are those houses with the horses go by. Well, those houses were tricks. In reality there was only one. He has filmed so and then, for the second, he tipped the shot and he superimposed. Since nothing was of great things, as no one - not even his closest aides - Franco, Bogdanovich, Bonanni , Perpignani, can be said to know how Welles would solve a certain thing. It is absolutely impossible. He was a 'desbordante' filmmaker in every sense, not only for his amazing ability to work on the material, but also literally to have been much more than just a filmmaker.In fact, he was a multidisciplinary artist, who spun like spinning and rose like mounted also used because of the elements he had learned in the theater and on the radio, from the use of the lights passing through the way of putting the actors in the scene. In my book on Falstaff I had access to the theatrical release preparation materials that Welles did in Dublin before the movie and, among other things, there are small drawings made by himself. And in many cases the painted scenes and sequences designed to then shoot literally in the staging of the film. Then it is impossible to speak of Falstaff without knowing he had previously worked on this type of theatrical staging. Without forgetting that he knew Shakespeare so well as to be able to transcend it.

Having said all this, all right, he was not able to finish The Other Side of the Wind, failed to finish Don Quixote, and we will never know how badly he wanted those films to be finished. However, I have discovered, for example, that a film-but-not-a-movie such as Too Much Johnson was a very important step forward for a better approach to his films, to understand them better. Meanwhile, for the dialogue, well before Citizen Kane, Welles knew the film technique perfectly, and then for example because in Too Much Johnson there is a comic element as strong as in any of his other films.

Esteve Riambau: Yes, there are complementary philological elements, to better understand Welles. But what we have is the finite Welles of the finished films, then there is another less known Welles, which is the Welles of radio, theater, television; and finally there is the infinite Welles of the unfinished film. Incidentally, I have been lucky enough to see a King Lear in the theater directed by Ingmar Bergman, and later that day the Bergman films appeared to me in a completely different way. Because I saw that the there was a Bergman universe so rich that you could not simply say: there is the theatrical Bergman and Bergman of film. It is absolutely not the case: the Bergman film is as it is because it is influenced by the theatre of Bergman. You can say the same thing with Visconti and opera.

But Welles is the largest of all, because he is radio, theater, television, books and movies. When people ask me to give lectures or courses on Welles, my favorite is to start before the Welles of Citizen Kane. For me, Citizen Kane is not the beginning of a career, but rather the culmination of a previous career, carried out with radio and the theater. Citizen Kane is a transversal films in an incredible way because it is done by someone who comes from different worlds, and that applies to technology, the car-cinema, ideas, compositions that come from other elements. Then Too Much Johnson becomes absolutely interesting to see the missing link in the evolution of Welles, and to verify, that once again, Welles was a liar when he claimed to have learned how to make a film seeing Stagecoach forty times. Not true; he had seen it all before. Too Much Johnson, in fact, is the film of a cinéphile, someone who saw the German Expressionism, the Soviet avant-garde, the American burlesque. And it is the film of someone at that time used the film not as an end but as a complement of something that at that stage of his career was more important to him, the theater. So Citizen Kane is at once both the culmination of this process, and is the beginning of a film career in which - other interesting, important things from his point of view - had coexisted, also other experiences that had developed in parallel.

Many filmmakers make a career apprenticeship to get to the cinema and, when they become filmmakers, they do only what they do best. Welles was not like this, because when it came to cinema, he continued to do theater and radio. He left the radio only when he began to make television, never forgetting that it was a medium in which he worked. This looks very good in the famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which only makes sense with the medium of radio. It could never be a movie, could not be a play, it had to be a radio broadcast. Welles knew at all times what was the most appropriate approach to each medium and project, and at the same time appreciated the crossbreeding of differnet mediums, always in a simultaneous and never in a pyramidal way.