Scenes edited by Welles

[Le Chiffre]

>As Welles himself said, "A film is never right until it's right musically."<

Chief, especially for someone like Orson, imprinted as a youth by Silents, then coming as age as a creator in Radio, I think that was VERY deep in the man.

-Craig

Yes, good point about Silents. Even though I don't know of any examples of silent film where the film was actually influenced by the music, they were unquestionably music driven. As a small child, being groomed for a career in music by his mother, these would no doubt have made a big impression on the young Orson Welles. He even later related to Peter Bogdanovich how his first film heroes were Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks. I've always liked Welles's story of how his father, upon seeing his first sound film, walked out of the theater and never went to the movies again.

[Roger Ryan]

There is the example from Citizen Kane where Welles had the montage of Thatcher reading the various Inquirer headlines edited to match Herrmann's music cue instead of the other way around. However, I believe when Welles referred to a film being "right musically" he meant that the editing needed a rhythm and tone that was consistent with the emotion or action of the scene. When cutting multiple shots together, there should be a sense that the editing pattern lands on certain beats - the result should feel "musical" even with no score on the soundtrack. From this perspective, well-edited silent films can also be musical with or without a soundtrack - certainly the ones that do this well have inspired music scores composed decades later that seem perfectly married to the image.

[Le Chiffre]

When cutting multiple shots together, there should be a sense that the editing pattern lands on certain beats - the result should feel "musical" even with no score on the soundtrack.

Yes, that sometimes seems to apply to the dialogue exchanges in Welles movies too, particularly the old mercury theatre days. All these elements working together give his films an almost symphonic flow or continuity. As a lifelong classical music buff, Orson Welles is, to my mind, probably the closest thing to a symphonic composer that the movies have ever come, although some of the editing patterns of his later films seem jazz influenced as well.