'The Eyes of Orson Welles' - documentary on Welles artwork

[JMcBride]

"Being Irish, it's my prerogative to answer a question with a question." -- John Ford.

Please explain what you mean by writing this quizzical comment, that "the Irish accent often introduced a comical character to the text, probably unintended."

[I=Eye]

It is indeed essentially fodder for the Welles cognoscenti and not an introduction to his work for the uninitiated. ...the second-person narration which generally sounded like bad nouveau roman from the 50s and 60s.

Do the italics mean this is intentionally grandiloquent?

[Florinaldo]

Please explain what you mean by writing this quizzical comment, that "the Irish accent often introduced a comical character to the text, probably unintended."

A voice-over which evokes for me vocal echoes of Barry Fitzgerald in "Going My Way" or "The Quiet Man" cannot be perceived as comical at times?

Do the italics mean this is intentionally grandiloquent?

Of course it is, though perhaps not as much I would have liked it to be. But my training was on the "Grandiloquent Style Guide" which provides for words borrowed from other languages to be in italics. But I might begin, because of emulation, to try and be more free with them.

[Wellesnet]

"Eyes of Orson Welles" reviewed from a political angle by World Socialist Web Site:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/0 ... ccd7QF8BV8

[Wellesnet]

"Eye" is currently playing as part of the Boston Welles fest, and The Boston Globe has mixed feelings about it:

Boston Globe: 'You probably know that Orson Welles was a great artist of the cinema. You probably don’t know that he was a prodigiously talented visual artist as well, with a lifetime of incessant painting, drawing, sketching, and doodling that both informed his film and stage work and served as an expressive end in itself.

Early in the documentary “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

Cousins is an Irish film critic and filmmaker whose chief claim to fame is “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (2011), a 15-hour documentary that was shown in this country on Turner Classic Movies. He has also made shorter works in the style of the new film: personal meditations on legendary directors that interweave film clips, fresh footage, and a voice-over soundtrack of strained poetic worship.'

[Wellesnet]

From the Orson Welles Appreciation Society:

Scott:
Avoid the movie “Eyes of Orson Welles”; Mark Cousins is a conspiracy theorist not at documentarian...I mean he is making links between facts that he has no evidence for. A lot of that film is fiction. It’s like the de Vinci code of documentaries.

Chris:
Sorry to be awkward, but could you please mention one of his links that don't have evidence. I just want to understand what you're getting at. I've seen the film a few times. I must say I thought the Welles voiceover didn't work. I liked some of the visuals, though he seemed to enjoy the scenes of Welles past that had altered beyond recognition (Kenosha, Harlem). Cousin's revelation at the end that Welles was an artist and that this showed up in his films, seemed obvious to me.

Scott:
The whole voice over is composed in 2nd person. "You went to Morocco and you saw women carrying bread on their head. You're line was becoming more sensitive" The facts there are that Orson went to Morocco and drew some pictures. There is no evidence he saw the women; they could be copied from a book. I too am an artist, and most of the things i draw are from inside my head. There are often moments where Cousins speculates how Orson would react to the modern world. Why is that in a documentary? I think Mark Cousins gets away with a lot of waffle because he has a nice speaking voice.

Chris:
Yes, you've voiced some of my concerns, and put them into words.
I'm an artist too, and Cousins obviously thought his analysis of the drawings very clever. One drawing better than another - for no clear reason.