The third major Welles celebration going on in Europe right now is the Munich Museum's
"Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles", which started on July 7th, and ends on August 2nd. Here's a pdf of their schedule (in German, natürlich):
http://www.muenchner-stadtmuseum.de/fil ... Welles.pdf
Here's our writeup from this past March:
http://www.wellesnet.com/munich-film-mu ... -rarities/
Here's an English-translated writeup on the Munich Fimmuseum's website:
http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... rev=search
Munich Museum's "Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles"
Re: Munich Museum's "Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles"
Here's a new and better translation by Leslie Weisman:
On His 100th Birthday
The hidden sides of the work of Orson Welles
When I agreed to write for my French publisher Bernard de Fallois a biography of Orson Welles in the year that marked the 100th anniversary of his birth (on May 6) and the 30th of his death (on October 10), my admiration for Welles was exceeded only by my lack of concern. There was my powerful memory of his radio show “War of the Worlds” and the ensuing panic (which was completely different from the way it’s portrayed today); some films believed lost, then found again (like the material from TOO MUCH JOHNSON, which opens the [Munich Film Museum’s] retrospective); of course the near-reverence for CITIZEN KANE, which to my surprise I only roughly remembered; and some vague memories of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Naturally I immersed myself in all of his films, watching them one after another. There was Welles: brilliant, but a bit dried up, like a plant in a herbarium. He’d kept his shape, but the colors were faded, the fragrance had evaporated, and he was missing a dimension. That was the moment when I figured I could either kill myself, admit my failure—or simply continue, unconcerned. I chose the last, true to the famous words of the sailor in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI: “When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me.”
I traveled to Croatia to meet with Orson Welles’ last partner and associate, Oja Kodar. The dried flower of the herbarium began to release a delicate fragrance, which reached my nose. The man Orson Welles slowly took on concrete contours: I was by the sea that he had regarded, seeing his drawings on the walls of the villa, and speaking with the woman he had loved. It was she who referred me to Stefan Drößler, whose name and work at the Film Museum were already known to me through the Welles Retrospective catalog from the Locarno Film Festival. It was the Munich Film Museum that not only held, but is restoring, preserving, and attempting to complete the unfinished films that Welles bequeathed to Oja Kodar. I traveled to Munich for a few days to see these treasures.
Months later, I am still unable to grasp it: The dried flower found its color, its blossoms straightened themselves and live again. It is no longer one-dimensional, but alive, thanks to Welles’ recorded tapes, which are like symphonies; his soaring intellect, his insistence on continually revisiting his work, his gift for spinning yarns. The director of the film museum graciously screened the films for me on the weekend, after the museum closed for the night. I saw treasures that can be found nowhere else. I quickly realized that Welles’ work is where it belongs: in the hands of careful, attentive, serious-minded enthusiasts. He, who didn’t feel right if he didn’t work 18 hours a day, is on familiar ground.
My faith in the character of Orson Welles and in my book project bloomed again; I felt “like a plant that has been watered,” to quote Marlene Dietrich’s words about her meetings with Welles. I was very lucky; you are very lucky. This program offers “everything you ever wanted to know about Welles”: a skillfully designed, chronological, painstakingly executed, playful stroll through the work of the “first genius to produce sound films.” Masterworks such as CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and FALSTAFF; other great Shakespeare adaptations such as OTHELLO and MACBETH; the brilliant television films. There are films that are considered unfinished, but that help us to better understand the way he worked, and his dreams. Also screened will be THE THIRD MAN, the film he didn’t direct but that is always ascribed to him, so indelible the impression his interpretation of Harry Lime (although he’s only in the film for half an hour). These are all real treasures. Just a few steps from the film museum in an inner courtyard is the wooden stairwell that served as backdrop for the opening of MR. ARKADIN. Welles is at home here. What luck, to be able to visit him here!
The central theme in Welles’ work is the search for identity, a problem we all share throughout our lives. Shot by Welles’ camera, it is beautiful, fascinating, and powerful.
What can we learn from this man who was so totally free? Power, success, passion and sorrow are the enemies of this search. In becoming the social “self,” we lose ourselves. Like the protagonists of MACBETH and CITIZEN KANE, or in TOUCH OF EVIL, MR. ARKADIN and even THE TRIAL. Living in society leads individuals to become alienated. But does life without social relationships have meaning?
Orson, who could not live without making films, even when no one would finance them anymore, teaches us a lesson: We must never give up. We must accept ourselves with all of our contradictions, because that’s what makes us human beings. Accepting our own contradictions mean accepting our own richness.
I would like to address another matter that is, in my opinion, infrequently dealt with: Welles’ ambiguous positioning in the feminine / masculine discourse. Which has nothing to do with his sexual orientation, but with his work—the work of a Puritan, who waited until 1968, in THE IMMORTAL STORY, to shoot his first bedroom scene. Which he did just one more time, in his uncompleted THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Welles the actor hardly ever kissed his partners. And the one time it occurred in a film (with his then-wife Rita Hayworth), the kiss was shot with an aquarium filled with giant fish in the background.
As handsome—yes, irresistible—as he was, in his youth Welles, as he would often tell interviewers, had to fend off the sexual advances of men. Which didn’t prevent him from having enormous success with women. He did what he could to destroy his image as a youthful lover, including gaining an excessive amount of weight. Was this a manifestation of a self-destructive impulse, or was it simply a refusal to be relegated to the category of handsome young man?
Despite his success, for example, as Edmond Rochester, the virile, mysterious leading man par excellence in JANE EYRE, Welles, paradoxically, hated nothing so much as playing youthful heroes. Had he been content to do it, a successful career, free from struggles and traumas, would have been a straight shot. But Welles didn’t want to be a youthful hero. He did everything to obliterate his outward appearance, and for a long time, before he was 40, limited himself to roles filled with power and authority: kings and fathers, or a combination of both, as in KING LEAR; dictators like MR. ARKADIN and MACBETH; criminals, as in THE STRANGER. Always men whose principal concern isn’t love, nor is it sex. OTHELLO is a story of pride and impossible purity, but it is no love story.
Welles always filmed his women at the moment of separation (Dolores del Rio in JOURNEY INTO FEAR, Rita Hayworth in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI) or early acquaintance (Paola Mori in MR. ARKADIN). Always just one film with each, no more. Oja Kodar is another matter, perhaps because he had at last become emotionally mature, perhaps because she was his last love. He filmed her constantly in his later works. Yet—as if they were cursed—all the films with her, except F FOR FAKE, remain unfinished.
What is true of the four important women in his life: His first wife, Virginia Nicolson, wanted to be an actress, which he forbade when she became a mother. His second wife, Rita Hayworth, was an actress, but he destroyed her image, seeing in her a strange sort of victim, a Delilah whose role he, Orson the man, held—and whose hair he cut off.
His third wife, Paola Mori, a beginner, he made into an actress, but she preferred to remain a housewife—which was perhaps the best choice. Oja wanted to be an actress, but she was as diversified as he. So he did everything with her, both in life and in work.
Adding up the starlets he had affairs with in his early years, we could say that he was a seducer who enjoyed showing off the number of his conquests. That brings us to the most important woman in his life: his mother Beatrice, a pianist and markswoman who died when Orson was nine. It was because of her that he hid his worship of women behind a macho-mask. Conceptually gifted but emotionally slow, Orson Welles needed age in order to love a woman who possessed the same gifts his mother had showed him, and given him.
As a side note, it’s amusing to find out that this man had only daughters. Three, like King Lear. “I can’t talk to my daughters. I’m very awkward and don’t know how to do it.”
King Lear’s greatest mistake, and his tragedy, inhere in his inability to understand women and what they want. [François] Truffaut appears to have gotten to the heart of it with a remark which to my knowledge, has never been published. “Welles loves King Kong because he feels closer to him than to, for example, Bogart. Welles must have dreamt of Beauty and the Beast. But the Beauty was himself, and he could never accept that . . .”
What appears indisputable is, at bottom, a great richness. Even if his woman characters often lack depth, Welles’ work still remains part of his female side, above all with regard to the Rita Hayworth / Orson Welles sensibility that courses through all of his films, independent of the fact that the words are always masculine.
One is tempted to dedicate the words of Victor Hugo to him, as a compliment: “I am of both sexes, because I have the spirit of each.” He himself said that if Picasso is a child of the sun, then he is a child of the moon.
Do not miss the chance to get to know both sides of Welles, in all his generosity and complexity! Feel him living behind the celluloid, with all of his paradoxes and contradictions, which reveal to us so much about of our own.
Have a good screening! anca visdei (tr. Leslie Weisman)
On His 100th Birthday
The hidden sides of the work of Orson Welles
When I agreed to write for my French publisher Bernard de Fallois a biography of Orson Welles in the year that marked the 100th anniversary of his birth (on May 6) and the 30th of his death (on October 10), my admiration for Welles was exceeded only by my lack of concern. There was my powerful memory of his radio show “War of the Worlds” and the ensuing panic (which was completely different from the way it’s portrayed today); some films believed lost, then found again (like the material from TOO MUCH JOHNSON, which opens the [Munich Film Museum’s] retrospective); of course the near-reverence for CITIZEN KANE, which to my surprise I only roughly remembered; and some vague memories of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Naturally I immersed myself in all of his films, watching them one after another. There was Welles: brilliant, but a bit dried up, like a plant in a herbarium. He’d kept his shape, but the colors were faded, the fragrance had evaporated, and he was missing a dimension. That was the moment when I figured I could either kill myself, admit my failure—or simply continue, unconcerned. I chose the last, true to the famous words of the sailor in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI: “When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me.”
I traveled to Croatia to meet with Orson Welles’ last partner and associate, Oja Kodar. The dried flower of the herbarium began to release a delicate fragrance, which reached my nose. The man Orson Welles slowly took on concrete contours: I was by the sea that he had regarded, seeing his drawings on the walls of the villa, and speaking with the woman he had loved. It was she who referred me to Stefan Drößler, whose name and work at the Film Museum were already known to me through the Welles Retrospective catalog from the Locarno Film Festival. It was the Munich Film Museum that not only held, but is restoring, preserving, and attempting to complete the unfinished films that Welles bequeathed to Oja Kodar. I traveled to Munich for a few days to see these treasures.
Months later, I am still unable to grasp it: The dried flower found its color, its blossoms straightened themselves and live again. It is no longer one-dimensional, but alive, thanks to Welles’ recorded tapes, which are like symphonies; his soaring intellect, his insistence on continually revisiting his work, his gift for spinning yarns. The director of the film museum graciously screened the films for me on the weekend, after the museum closed for the night. I saw treasures that can be found nowhere else. I quickly realized that Welles’ work is where it belongs: in the hands of careful, attentive, serious-minded enthusiasts. He, who didn’t feel right if he didn’t work 18 hours a day, is on familiar ground.
My faith in the character of Orson Welles and in my book project bloomed again; I felt “like a plant that has been watered,” to quote Marlene Dietrich’s words about her meetings with Welles. I was very lucky; you are very lucky. This program offers “everything you ever wanted to know about Welles”: a skillfully designed, chronological, painstakingly executed, playful stroll through the work of the “first genius to produce sound films.” Masterworks such as CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and FALSTAFF; other great Shakespeare adaptations such as OTHELLO and MACBETH; the brilliant television films. There are films that are considered unfinished, but that help us to better understand the way he worked, and his dreams. Also screened will be THE THIRD MAN, the film he didn’t direct but that is always ascribed to him, so indelible the impression his interpretation of Harry Lime (although he’s only in the film for half an hour). These are all real treasures. Just a few steps from the film museum in an inner courtyard is the wooden stairwell that served as backdrop for the opening of MR. ARKADIN. Welles is at home here. What luck, to be able to visit him here!
The central theme in Welles’ work is the search for identity, a problem we all share throughout our lives. Shot by Welles’ camera, it is beautiful, fascinating, and powerful.
What can we learn from this man who was so totally free? Power, success, passion and sorrow are the enemies of this search. In becoming the social “self,” we lose ourselves. Like the protagonists of MACBETH and CITIZEN KANE, or in TOUCH OF EVIL, MR. ARKADIN and even THE TRIAL. Living in society leads individuals to become alienated. But does life without social relationships have meaning?
Orson, who could not live without making films, even when no one would finance them anymore, teaches us a lesson: We must never give up. We must accept ourselves with all of our contradictions, because that’s what makes us human beings. Accepting our own contradictions mean accepting our own richness.
I would like to address another matter that is, in my opinion, infrequently dealt with: Welles’ ambiguous positioning in the feminine / masculine discourse. Which has nothing to do with his sexual orientation, but with his work—the work of a Puritan, who waited until 1968, in THE IMMORTAL STORY, to shoot his first bedroom scene. Which he did just one more time, in his uncompleted THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Welles the actor hardly ever kissed his partners. And the one time it occurred in a film (with his then-wife Rita Hayworth), the kiss was shot with an aquarium filled with giant fish in the background.
As handsome—yes, irresistible—as he was, in his youth Welles, as he would often tell interviewers, had to fend off the sexual advances of men. Which didn’t prevent him from having enormous success with women. He did what he could to destroy his image as a youthful lover, including gaining an excessive amount of weight. Was this a manifestation of a self-destructive impulse, or was it simply a refusal to be relegated to the category of handsome young man?
Despite his success, for example, as Edmond Rochester, the virile, mysterious leading man par excellence in JANE EYRE, Welles, paradoxically, hated nothing so much as playing youthful heroes. Had he been content to do it, a successful career, free from struggles and traumas, would have been a straight shot. But Welles didn’t want to be a youthful hero. He did everything to obliterate his outward appearance, and for a long time, before he was 40, limited himself to roles filled with power and authority: kings and fathers, or a combination of both, as in KING LEAR; dictators like MR. ARKADIN and MACBETH; criminals, as in THE STRANGER. Always men whose principal concern isn’t love, nor is it sex. OTHELLO is a story of pride and impossible purity, but it is no love story.
Welles always filmed his women at the moment of separation (Dolores del Rio in JOURNEY INTO FEAR, Rita Hayworth in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI) or early acquaintance (Paola Mori in MR. ARKADIN). Always just one film with each, no more. Oja Kodar is another matter, perhaps because he had at last become emotionally mature, perhaps because she was his last love. He filmed her constantly in his later works. Yet—as if they were cursed—all the films with her, except F FOR FAKE, remain unfinished.
What is true of the four important women in his life: His first wife, Virginia Nicolson, wanted to be an actress, which he forbade when she became a mother. His second wife, Rita Hayworth, was an actress, but he destroyed her image, seeing in her a strange sort of victim, a Delilah whose role he, Orson the man, held—and whose hair he cut off.
His third wife, Paola Mori, a beginner, he made into an actress, but she preferred to remain a housewife—which was perhaps the best choice. Oja wanted to be an actress, but she was as diversified as he. So he did everything with her, both in life and in work.
Adding up the starlets he had affairs with in his early years, we could say that he was a seducer who enjoyed showing off the number of his conquests. That brings us to the most important woman in his life: his mother Beatrice, a pianist and markswoman who died when Orson was nine. It was because of her that he hid his worship of women behind a macho-mask. Conceptually gifted but emotionally slow, Orson Welles needed age in order to love a woman who possessed the same gifts his mother had showed him, and given him.
As a side note, it’s amusing to find out that this man had only daughters. Three, like King Lear. “I can’t talk to my daughters. I’m very awkward and don’t know how to do it.”
King Lear’s greatest mistake, and his tragedy, inhere in his inability to understand women and what they want. [François] Truffaut appears to have gotten to the heart of it with a remark which to my knowledge, has never been published. “Welles loves King Kong because he feels closer to him than to, for example, Bogart. Welles must have dreamt of Beauty and the Beast. But the Beauty was himself, and he could never accept that . . .”
What appears indisputable is, at bottom, a great richness. Even if his woman characters often lack depth, Welles’ work still remains part of his female side, above all with regard to the Rita Hayworth / Orson Welles sensibility that courses through all of his films, independent of the fact that the words are always masculine.
One is tempted to dedicate the words of Victor Hugo to him, as a compliment: “I am of both sexes, because I have the spirit of each.” He himself said that if Picasso is a child of the sun, then he is a child of the moon.
Do not miss the chance to get to know both sides of Welles, in all his generosity and complexity! Feel him living behind the celluloid, with all of his paradoxes and contradictions, which reveal to us so much about of our own.
Have a good screening! anca visdei (tr. Leslie Weisman)
Re: Munich Museum's "Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles"
THE DEEP work print was shown and introduced by Stefan Drössler in Munich last night. Here's the writeup from their schedule:
The Deep-Work Print | 1969 | R+B: Orson Welles, based on the novel "Dead calm" by Charles Williams | K: Willy Kurant, ivica rajko Vic | M: François Rabath | D: Michael Bryant, oja kodar, Laurence Harvey , Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles | 115 min | of | AT THE DALMATIAN coast Welles filmed a thriller, which from beginning to end, plays on two boats with only five people shown. The film was crazy to a large extent, and it has also created a rough rough cut, but the project never got past the preparations for the after-synchronization and the sound mix.
"We just ran out of money. The picture actually had a beginning and an end, but it’s too poor. It shows its poverty, and it looks like a TV movie, I think, but it’s terribly well acted. By Jeanne Moreau and by everybody. And I think I’m very funny in it, I think it’s the funniest part I’ve ever played." (Orson Welles)
The Deep-Work Print | 1969 | R+B: Orson Welles, based on the novel "Dead calm" by Charles Williams | K: Willy Kurant, ivica rajko Vic | M: François Rabath | D: Michael Bryant, oja kodar, Laurence Harvey , Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles | 115 min | of | AT THE DALMATIAN coast Welles filmed a thriller, which from beginning to end, plays on two boats with only five people shown. The film was crazy to a large extent, and it has also created a rough rough cut, but the project never got past the preparations for the after-synchronization and the sound mix.
"We just ran out of money. The picture actually had a beginning and an end, but it’s too poor. It shows its poverty, and it looks like a TV movie, I think, but it’s terribly well acted. By Jeanne Moreau and by everybody. And I think I’m very funny in it, I think it’s the funniest part I’ve ever played." (Orson Welles)
Re: Munich Museum's "Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles"
Lecture: Orson Welles and Germany (July 28th, 2015):
(Translated from German)
Orson Welles in Germany | Lecture by Stefan Drößler with film examples | 90 min | 1950 toured Orson Welles along with Eartha Kitt by Germany . In Frankfurt , Hamburg , Munich, Dusseldorf and Berlin he played scenes from "Faust", " The Importance of Being Earnest "and" Henry VI " and led magic tricks before. A few weeks later published a French Newspaper his impressions of the Germans, who drunk still the "Horst Wessel Song" sing would, and caused diplomatic upsets.
In MR. ARKADIN adorned Welles his image from post-war Germany. The country he remained but until his death, not least because repeatedly flowed German money in his films. The Lecture presents rare documents, photographs, film clips and interviews with Orson Welles.
In 1950, Orson Welles toured Germany along with Eartha Kitt. In Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf, and Berlin, he did magic tricks, and then played scenes from "Faust", "The Importance of Being Earnest", and "Henry VI". A few weeks later, a French newspaper published his impressions of the Germans, and Welles claimed that the "Horst Wessel Song" (one of the national anthems of Nazi Germany) was still being sung, causing a diplomatic upset.
Welles adorned MR. ARKADIN with his image of post-war Germany. He maintained an association with the country until his death, not least because German money repeatedly flowed into his independent films. The lecture presents rare documents, photographs, film clips, and interviews with Orson Welles.
(Translated from German)
Orson Welles in Germany | Lecture by Stefan Drößler with film examples | 90 min | 1950 toured Orson Welles along with Eartha Kitt by Germany . In Frankfurt , Hamburg , Munich, Dusseldorf and Berlin he played scenes from "Faust", " The Importance of Being Earnest "and" Henry VI " and led magic tricks before. A few weeks later published a French Newspaper his impressions of the Germans, who drunk still the "Horst Wessel Song" sing would, and caused diplomatic upsets.
In MR. ARKADIN adorned Welles his image from post-war Germany. The country he remained but until his death, not least because repeatedly flowed German money in his films. The Lecture presents rare documents, photographs, film clips and interviews with Orson Welles.
In 1950, Orson Welles toured Germany along with Eartha Kitt. In Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf, and Berlin, he did magic tricks, and then played scenes from "Faust", "The Importance of Being Earnest", and "Henry VI". A few weeks later, a French newspaper published his impressions of the Germans, and Welles claimed that the "Horst Wessel Song" (one of the national anthems of Nazi Germany) was still being sung, causing a diplomatic upset.
Welles adorned MR. ARKADIN with his image of post-war Germany. He maintained an association with the country until his death, not least because German money repeatedly flowed into his independent films. The lecture presents rare documents, photographs, film clips, and interviews with Orson Welles.
Re: Munich Museum's "Zum 100. Geburtstag von Orson Welles"
The Munich museum wound up their month-long Welles celebration last night with showings of "The Immortal Story" and scenes from Welles's incomplete "The Dreamers."
Other highlights from the last week include rare showings of the 17-minute short "Golden Honeymoon", based on the Ring Lardner story, and made for Sears Roebuck in 1970; plus the German version of "Mr. Arkadin", known as "Herr Satan, Personlich".
Welles quotes on other films (from the German pdf):
Other highlights from the last week include rare showings of the 17-minute short "Golden Honeymoon", based on the Ring Lardner story, and made for Sears Roebuck in 1970; plus the German version of "Mr. Arkadin", known as "Herr Satan, Personlich".
"Arkadin is a person who has made his way largely in a corrupt world; he doesn’t try to be more than that world, he’s trapped in it and is the best he could be within that frame of reference. He is the best possible "expression" of that universe."
(Orson Welles)
Welles quotes on other films (from the German pdf):
TOE: "Most of my friends and most critics who comment on TOUCH OF EVIL believe Quinlan had an essential goodness, while I think he’s a scoundrel. The fact that he’s human, that one can understand him in his humanity, all this is fine. But I for one have a profound belief in the primacy of law. And I think that a corrupt policeman is society’s worst creation.
Othello:
The picture was made in pieces. Three different times I had to close it and go away and earn money and come back, which meant you’d see me looking off-camera left, and when you’d cut over my shoulder, it would be another continent – a year later. And so the picture had many more cuts than I would have liked; it wasn’t written that way, but had them because I never had a full cast together.
Filming Othello:
"It was a film on order like a painting on order: they wanted me to do an OTHELLO and I’ve done a new OTHELLO. Personally it inspired me a lot because there are a lot of anecdotes around the
filming of OTHELLO."
Lady From Shanghai:
"Instead of allowing me to get a composer who would work with me, Cohn snuck in some fast fellow who put terrible music wherever he felt like it. I didn’t mind the theme song, but the incidental music was clumsily handled throughout. For example, the mirror scene at the end should have been absolutely silent except for the crashing glass and ricocheting bullets."
Citizen Kane:
"There are more conscious shots – for the sake of shots – in CITIZEN KANE than in anything I’ve done since, which just came from the exuberance of discovering the medium."
Ambrersons:
"The basic intention was to portray a golden world – almost one of memory – and then show what it turns into. Having set up this dream town of the "good old days", the whole point was to show the automobile wrecking it – not only the family but the town. All this is out. What’s left is only the
first six reels." (Orson Welles)
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