J Rosenbaum at "It's All True" Fest in Rio

Discuss events related to the 100th anniversary of Orson Welles's birth.
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J Rosenbaum at "It's All True" Fest in Rio

Postby Wellesnet » Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:55 pm

Noted Orson Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum was the opening speaker at the 2015 É Tudo Verdade (It's All True) documentary film festival in Brazil on April 14.
http://www.wellesnet.com/video-jonathan ... -festival/

In part of Rosenbaum's lecture, he speaks of Welles's working relationship with Oja Kodar:
The original press release for F For Fake indicated that it was “written by Olga Palinkas”, the original name of Oja Kodar. In fact, the script is partly written by her. The whole Picasso episode was written by her. People don’t know what to do with (Oja), but I know her much better than I knew Welles. I only knew Welles for about an hour, whereas I’ve known her since shortly after Welles died. People are very confused by her as a figure, but she was one of the only women in Welles’s life who became a VERY active collaborator, on many, many projects. Not only did she co-write “The Other Side of the Wind” too, but the title is hers as well. And I think that, because she’s outside the world of cinema, people are even further confused by her role in a lot of these things. I even discovered on my own, because she didn’t tell me this, but I guessed it and then later had it confirmed by her, that one of the sequences in “The Other Side of the Wind” was actually directed by her. She did the set designs for a lot of things, because she’s a sculptor and an artist herself.

So I think it becomes very confusing because, Welles is the ultimate figure of the “auteur” in many people’s minds, so it’s kind of hard to make room for the idea of Welles and someone else being the auteur in some of his films. But I think one of the things that’s very interesting about his interest and his use of Oja Kodar, is that, and when I first saw the film I thought, “Oh, this is an old man sort of showing off his beautiful, sexy girlfriend.” But in fact, Welles himself was an exhibitionist and he identified with Oja. But it’s not simply that, it’s also that she becomes Welles’s representation of himself in a funny sort of way, in some of the films in which she appears. Most obviously in the film he was never able to shoot more than a few sequences of, “The Dreamers”, from Isak Dineson, where she plays a former opera singer who goes out into the world and leads different lives as different people, gets involved with different men; a person who goes through several different identities. It was a very personal project for Welles, but it obviously made sense to have Oja play the part.


tonyw
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Re: J Rosenbaum at "It's All True" Fest in Rio

Postby tonyw » Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:49 pm

All this not only illustrates the complexity of authorship as a creative concept but also affirms Welles's definitions to Bogdanovich in THIS IS ORSON WELLES, namely that the auteur does not have to be the solitary director. Instead, the director is someone who mobilizes the different forces involved in direction into a creative whole. This is not, of course, to deny Oja's contribution but to recogize her as a key creative element within Welles's authorship at this time.


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