Reactions to 'The Other Side of the Wind'

[tonyw]

Thank you for this detailed post, Joe. One also has to ask, "Does it really matter"? since the emotional effect is key. I did not notice the STAGECOACH mismatch until someone pointed it out to me nor the YELLOW RIBBON example you just pointed out. However, I would say that only the acknowledged masters can do this and get away from it. I so remember the comment from a film production student in my first semester here - "Eisenstein would have failed had he taken Film Production 1"!

[JMcBride]

"Mismatches" are like any other aesthetic tool and can
be used to good or bad effect. Ford has an idiosyncratic
approach to editing, and not just to outwit the suits. Tag Gallagher's video essay on
STAGECOACH for the Criterion Collection does a good job analyzing
Ford's oblique editing of eye-lines. He points out Ford rarely
does what Hitchcock does in directly matching looks between characters.
But Ford, when asked by someone how to watch a movie, said,
"Look at the eyes."

Winton Hoch (who won two Oscars for photographing Ford films) told me that once on THE QUIET MAN he dared
to suggest to Ford where to set up the camera, so Ford
out of spite moved the camera to another position. He jealously
controlled his visual prerogatives. He once said in an unguarded
moment that he considered himself the best cameraman in the business.

[nickleschichoney]

Here’s another one...

Another superficial, passive-aggressive review of the movie by a pretentious young reviewer who doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to: https://muchadoaboutcinema.com/2018/11/ ... ates-life/

[RayKelly]

Vulture has ranked 240 Netflix original movies. Guess which movie finished in first place?
https://www.vulture.com/article/best-netflix-original-movies.html


1. The Other Side of the Wind
It’s a new movie from Orson Welles. Like, an entire feature-length movie. Directed by Orson Welles. And it’s new. Is this real life? At any rate, maybe this will be the thing to at long last banish his reputation as the boy genius who never re-attained his early success, a patent falsehood to anyone who’s seen his later work. There’s so much unchecked genius overflowing from Welles’ unfinished (until now!) swan song that it borders on arrogance, as an unimpeachable master chases his every artistic whim, no matter how far-out. He invests a whole lot of himself in Jake Hannaford, the freewheeling auteur portrayed by John Huston in a dual celebration and mockery of the so-called New Hollywood that put Welles’ contemporaries out to pasture. Hannaford spends his final day on Earth coasting through a fog of booze, lust, and other assorted off-the-wall excesses suffused with the hedonism and underlying sadness of the ‘70s. It’s a historical artifact with a restless avant-garde streak permanently placing it in the present.

[RayKelly]

VIDEO: San Francisco State University Cinema professors Joseph McBride and Steven Kovacs discuss Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

[RayKelly]

Angelica Huston speaking to The Los Angeles Times on May 17, 2019:

Last fall, {Angelica] Huston saw The Other Side of the Wind, which Orson Welles made over a six-year-period in the 1970s starring her father as an aging film director. The film was never completed until last year.

“I love that he was starring [in it],” Huston said. “I thought there was some of the most beautiful and memorable scenes I’ve ever seen. It also had that impressionistic empty feel that Zabriskie Point had. And then there were the very difficult scenes for me to watch where my father is either three sheets to the wind or convincingly appearing so.”

She remembered her father telling her during production “that he didn’t think [a movie] had ever been done before on a certain level. I think it was absolutely true. Orson was cobbling this thing together.”

[Wellesnet]

Other Side of the Wind Redux by
The Projection Booth:
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-pr ... e/60633353

Another very good program with some fascinating insights and observations.

[Le Chiffre]

A lot of fascinating observations in that San Francisco State discussion. Too bad the mic problems make it a chore to listen to at times. I especially like the bit about style, and how an artist's style is not something they do consciously, but is used by the media to describe their work.

"(The Other Side of the Wind) is partly about a man being swallowed up by the media, with his image destroying him...(Wind) was ahead of its time in its concerns about the power of the media to destroy people."

That of course, seems to tie it in with Charles Foster Kane's use of media to destroy people.

Glad to read that Anjelica Huston saw and liked the film. When are we going to get Oja's reaction?

[Le Chiffre]

Byron Stayskal wrote: But first of all, I think it’s important to address a stylistic issue. Many seem to count “choppiness” as a major flaw of TOSOTW. The criticism, however, is a bit like faulting the painter Seurat for using all those little colored dots to make his paintings. But that, after all, is the point of pointilism. So, it’s not quite fair to imply that TOSOTW is somehow flawed because of it its “choppy” or “cutty” qualities when this very effect was what Welles’s intended, and in creating it, he was wildly successful. Better to think of the “choppy” sections as a kind of mosaic. In a mosaic, all the discrete bits of stone come together into a unified whole without quite losing a sense of the hard little elements that are its constituent parts.

I've read several reviews that describe TOSOTW as a Mosaic. I like the comparison with Seurat, although to me, the film's choppiness seems to resemble even more the Cubism of Picasso. Here's an interesting article on how many works from Picasso's Mosaic period of the 1950s are missing. This, while he was fooling around with a young woman 46 years his junior. Hmmm, sound familiar?:
http://www.mosaicartnow.com/2012/06/whe ... f-picasso/

[Byron Stayskal]

I think Le Chiffre’s comparison of TOSOTW to Cubism is really quite illuminating and makes sense when applied to either of the two main phases of the cubist movement. Or put the other way around, both major phases of Cubism throw interesting light on the film.

In the first or “analytical” phase of Cubism, when Picasso and Braque were hammering out the new visual idiom, a key stylistic element was “faceting.” Images are built up out of facets or “shards” of the appearance of persons or things pictured, and these facets usually show various parts of the subject from different angles or viewpoints. A face, for example, might depict some features from the side and some straight on. Picasso’s Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde (1910) is a good example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pablo_Picasso,_1910,_Portrait_of_Wilhelm_Uhde,_oil_on_canvas,_81_x_60_cm,_Joseph_Pulitzer_Collection.jpg

In the next or “synthetic” phase, Cubism still builds up images from different pieces, but now the effect is more like collage, and the prominent characteristic is the disparity of the pieces. They’re different colors, different shapes, and sometimes different materials, and yet they assemble into a single picture. Picasso’s Harlequin Playing a Guitar (1918) is only one of many possible examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pablo_Picasso,_1918,_Arlequin_jouant_de_la_guitare_(Harlequin).JPG

The parallels to the style of TOSOTW are, I think, fairly clear. Fast cutting and a multitude of short clips from different viewpoints give the film its jagged pieced-together look, a quality which parallels the shards and facets of analytical Cubism. But the film, like synthetic Cubism, also has the feel of a collage. Different film formats, black & white and color photography, quick cuts and long takes, hand-held and smooth tracking shots, all combine together to give a picture of Jake Hannaford on the last day of his life.

Ultimately, of course, demonstrating exact parallels between mosaics, collages, or Cubism and TOSOTW isn’t what’s most important. Instead, it’s a better understanding of the film’s form and methods so we can experience this remarkable work on its own terms. But for this particular film, analogies and comparisons (and other explanations) may be especially needed since TOSOTW is so daring and so different from the usual movie experience.

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, I agree with that, that many analogies are needed. To me, the "cinematic Cubism" effect seems most apparent during Hannaford's entrance to the party, a scene edited by Welles. This is what might be called the "public" Hannaford, seen by many viewfinders. Later, when we start to see the private Hannaford, seen probably by only one or two hidden cameras, the technique is less apparent. The private Hannaford is the real Hannaford, while the public Hannaford seems like more of a jigsaw puzzle. As we've discussed before, the interesting question is: who put that puzzle together within the story? Otterlake, or someone else? Outside of the story, the puzzle was of course, put together by Welles and Bob Murawski. Thanks for the interesting point on the different kinds of Cubism.

Movie Nation on Wind:
https://rogersmovienation.com/2019/06/2 ... -the-wind/

The story is about a director’s manly confidence and machismo fading away as his career collapses around him. Every scene where Hannaford gets bad news, either about the film-within-the-film’s dire financial straits or about the leading man he’s risked his career on, pushes him further into despair, until he can’t keep up his confidence any longer. Mostly, when he’s sure he’s being filmed/photographed, Hannaford tries keeping up a kind of cigar-chomping macho swagger, but when he thinks the cameras AREN’T filming him, he betrays a deep vulnerability lurking beneath the overcompensating surface...The character’s at-times unpredictable emotional swings are what makes Huston’s performance so good.

Hannaford is actually one part Hemingway (bullfighting love and suicide), two parts John Ford (hence the Irish ancestry, the male-star-making movies, and the homoeroticism)...a macho whose machismo is what both elevates his career (at least in the past) and destroys it.

RogerinOrlando: The film’s promised and notorious and whispered about homosexuality, a fixation of Welles from this era (“Big Brass Ring,” etc.) isn’t overt enough to discuss. Hannaford’s homophobia is the only trace of it, and is literally a “phobia” at any hint he’s gay. This feels closer to “F for Fake” than say, “The Immortal Story.” Over-edited to cover for the thinness of the material.

[RayKelly]

Director Joe Dante ("Gremlins," "The Howling") weighed in on the "The Other Side of the Wind" in a nearly five-minute YouTube video from Trailers From Hell. Well worth checking out at http://www.wellesnet.com/joe-dante-other-wind/

[tonyw]

Trust the erudite Joe Dante to make this very relevant comment about the Academy.

Back in 2015 when the university film production department ignored Welles's centenary I ran two English department semester classes on Welles foolishly hoping that one of them would end with THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

Now, in an age of declining enrollments and "dumbing down", any Welles class will be impossible and I don't want to hear the question "Who is Orson Welles and why is he important?" similar to reported reactions following a cancelled class on H.G. Wells!"

Anyway, I liked the freeze frame of young Joe in the Talk Show audience since it evoked memories of his appearance on a BBC TV late 70s documentary on Corman evoking a friend to remark, "He is so enthusiastic!"

Although both artists are different we must remember that William Blake had problems with The Academy in his day

[Le Chiffre]

Nice to have the opinions of a filmmaker of Joe Dante's stature. It would be nice to have some more interpretations as well as opinions, though. I guess many people are still reticent to offer or speculate on what they think the film means, or what they think Welles was trying to express, or how well they think the Netflix version captures what Welles was trying to express.

Interesting to hear that William Friedkin hated it. He's certainly not the only one.

I like the brief Vulture review listed above:
"Hannaford spends his last day on Earth coasting through a fog of booze, lust and other off-the-wall excesses, suffused with the hedonism and underlying sadness of the 70's. It's a historical artifact with a restless avante-garde streak permanently placing it in the present."

Glad you mentioned Corman, Tony. People talk a lot about how Hannaford's film is a parody of Antonioni, but I find myself wondering if it doesn't allude to Corman and Russ Meyer as well. A general mashup of different New Hollywood styles that either interested or infuriated Welles.

[RayKelly]

Nice to have the opinions of a filmmaker of Joe Dante's stature. It would be nice to have some more interpretations as well as opinions, though. I guess many people are still reticent to offer or speculate on what they think the film means, or what they think Welles was trying to express, or how well they think the Netflix version captures what Welles was trying to express. ... Interesting to hear that William Friedkin hated it. He's certainly not the only one.

William Friedkin from https://trailersfromhell.com/podcast/william-friedkin/ — around the 34-minute mark:

"Though I revere Citizen Kane, I think a lot of Welles films are rubbish, especially the last one, which I don't believe should have been released, The Other Side of the Wind... It should never have been released — and these were supposedly his friends. He had no idea what he was doing and he says so.... It's not shot by Welles like a Welles film."

Dante attempts to explain to Friedkin Welles' intent with the movie, including the intended parody of Michelangelo Antonioni, which annoys Friedkin.

"Why would you parody Antonioni? Who gives a shit ... Toward the end of his life, Welles could not hold Antonioni's jockstrap."