Orson Welles à la Cinémathèque française

[tadao]

This 1982 interview has popped up on the Cinémathèque française 'Henri' site of films streaming free during Covid closures.

Using the search function says it had a screening on TCM in 2002 and Locarno in 2005, but no other refernce I could find.
https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/125173-orson-welles-a-la-cinematheque-francaise-pierre-andre-boutang-guy-seligmann-1983/

Quick whizz of the description through Google Translate:

Pierre-André Boutang, Guy Seligmann
France / 1983 / 1:33:11
With Orson Welles, Henri Béhar.

On February 24, 1982, invited to Paris to be decorated with the Legion of Honor by François Mitterrand, and to preside over the Césars ceremony, Orson Welles dialogued with an audience mainly composed of young listeners.

In 2014, on the occasion of the Langlois Centenary, digitization of a 16 mm (1,116 meters) reversal element from the collections of the Cinémathèque française.

In the crowded hall of Chaillot, filled with students from Parisian cinema schools with young assiduous young people from the French Cinémathèque, Orson Welles did not come to talk about his work, on which very few questions will be asked. . He spends the first ten minutes questioning his audience. Only a handful of aspiring filmmakers say they are committed? A handful are destined for pure entertainment? Once the temperature of the room is taken, Welles answers the most diverse questions with humor and seriousness, courtesy and the pleasure of shocking, by practicing with brio the art of the opposite, the paradox, the self-contradiction claimed, served by the fine and smiling animation and translation of Henri Béhar. Welles stubbornly develops his theories on the overestimation of the director to the detriment of these real creators who are the actors, these artists who must be respected, cherished and understood better than they do themselves. Even his distrust of color is linked to the glorification of actors: “Black and white is the actor’s great friend. In the temple of cinephilia, Welles advises against immersing yourself in movies, listening to teachers endlessly talk about Eisenstein or Griffith. He targets Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock or, for political reasons, Elia Kazan, not to mention the followers of the Actors Studio, Marlon Brando included. He claims more than once for objections: “You are really way too nice to me. "Ten days later, in an interview with the Cahiers du cinema, Welles partially dissociated himself from his words:" Each conference is a show, and it depends on your audience "; he wanted to shake up "the wealthy bourgeois who told their parents that they wanted to be directors". No doubt, but has he performed in front of television cameras many such sparkling shows?

François Thomas

[Wellesnet]

Thanks, tadao. Good catch!

[Wellesnet]

Good review in The New Yorker
What to Stream: A Blazing Interview with Orson Welles
By Richard Brody
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-f ... vnuENJtxIw

The event was filmed by Pierre-André Boutang and Guy Seligmann; the film is streaming, for free, on the Cinémathèque’s treasure trove of a Web site, and it’s both a moving portrait of the caged cinematic lion (who died in 1985, without making another feature) and an enduringly insightful set of lessons on the art and the practice of making movies.

[Le Chiffre]

Here's a rough attempted transcription of some of Welles's remarks:

'The enthusiasm for making films comes from going to them...(but filmmaking students) have fallen under the spell of the most wicked of the muses, because making a film is too expensive and too hard to get financing and distribution for. There are only two directors, C.B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, that have ever had enough "vedette", or star power, to get people into the movie theater, and I detest both of them. Normally, the audience is not going to the movies to see what a director does; they are going to see stars.

The director, like the symphony conductor, has become "bonflet" or quasi-useless in importance. The great old music used to be played by the orchestra and the concertmaster, and they got along very well without these incredible hams who jump up and down, and weep tears, and so on, calling themselves conductors. (Likewise) the director of the theater is an invention about 150 years old, maybe 200, maximum. (Before that), it was always the chief actor, with the assistance of the stage manager, who put on the play. Nowadays, I think largely inspired by the cinema, there is a new giant walking across the planet, who is called the conductor or the director.

Now, this is not to say that we have not seen incredible things on the screen, which are the work of great Metteur en scène ("scene-setters"), or directors. It is not to say that we haven't seen great theater, which was the work of great Metteur en scène. But the theater and the cinema must not depend on the director.

People frequently answer that by saying, "Ah yes, what's important is the story or the script." They are absolutely wrong. The story and the script is the third most important thing, because you can make a wonderful film about nothing. Look at Fellini. The most important thing about a movie is the actor, and everything which is in front of the camera, and the decadence of the cinema comes from the glorification of the director as being, not the servant of the actor, but his master.

This is because the job of the director is to discover in the actor something more than he knew he had. The job of the director is to choose what he sees, and to an extent, to create. But a great deal of what is applauded as "creation", is simply there, and was there already when he put the camera up: that actor, that bit of scenery; it was there, and you're intelligent enough to shoot it. So the director should be very intelligent, preferable not intellectual, because the intellectual is the enemy of all the performing arts.

So let us respect, cherish, and help actors to be great, because they are the people who have made the cinema unforgettable.'

Those statements would seem in line with Welles's earlier statement to Bogdanovich that, "Actors are the great unsung heroes in this vast amount of literature about films that's piling up."