Orson Welles as Professor Charles Rankin (aka Franz Kindler) in the actor-director’s 1946 thriller The Stranger.
(Editor’s note: Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film Studies at the Department of English, Southern Illinois University. He has recently authored the second edition of his book on George Romero and is editor of an anthology on the independent films of Evans Chan, published by Hong Kong University Press.)
By TONY WILLIAMS
What better additional element to this year’s celebration of Orson Welles’s centenary could there be than a class devoted to the late director? It was also taught several years ago as a 300 level Core Curriculum class appealing to students from all disciplines not entirely from Cinema or English. It had to be both rigorous and fun. As a young student at the Todd School, Orson co-wrote the indispensable Everybody’s Shakespeare in which he showed a wider audience that Shakespeare could be both accessible and fun. In this manner, I repeated the class in January of 2015 with the aim of not only celebrating the achievements of this unique Renaissance man within the confines of a classroom but also to show how creative and challenging his work is not just for his era but also today.
The class comprised juniors and seniors from diverse disciplines such as Fashion Design Management, Accountancy, Automatic Technology, Biological Sciences, Journalism, Finance, and Dental Hygiene. I mention the last category because students from that area are often very precise. When overcoming their initial reservations, I praise their major since if they remove the wrong tooth there is no make-up exam! Also I emphasize the relevance of other disciplines in terms of qualities of analysis and criticism they bring to the films shown in class. Each year the hand count of those who have already seen Citizen Kane (1941) becomes as small as those Confederate survivors in John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Teaching techniques must understand this missing cultural capital and introduce this lost heritage in an inviting manner.
“Boot Camp” training begins not with methods employed by R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket (1987) but review of the syllabus, overview of the first three chapters of the initial required text by Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film, and compilation of different types of film styles from international cinema using examples from Rio Bravo (1959), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Strangers on a Train (1951), October (1927) Blackmail (1929), and The Valiant Ones (1975). This illustrates diverse ways of treating different genres by directors with variable authorship styles.
The second session concludes by commenting on sections in the second part of Corrigan’s book before screening the film for the first assignment involving practical film analysis – Strangers on a Train. Many factors govern the selection of this film. Not only does it reveal classical Hollywood cinema’s tendency of combining entertainment with significant meaning but it is also a film noir. Students begin to understand how the visual meaning is crucial to analytic interpretation and programs how Welles used this style in films such as The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1962). Corrigan constantly emphasizes that what is crucial in analyzing a film is not the story but how the story is told. These involve not only vision and editing but also sound. While Thomas Schatz in Hollywood Genres (1981) believes that Citizen Kane is a film noir, Robert Porfirio’s doctoral dissertation more astutely comments that while Kane was not a noir, it did contain many features characteristic of this style such as expressionist lighting, deep focus cinematography, and the use of wide angle lenses.
Once initial film analysis concludes, Citizen Kane follows with each succeeding Welles film related to relevant pages in two other required texts – This is Orson Welles (1998) and The Magic World of Orson Welles (2015) by James Naremore. The syllabus lists other important books on the director and his films available on reserve in the library. An extract from the VHS recording of Welles’s AFI 1975 Life Achievement Award follows. Due to Kane’s length, this session involves preliminary comments of what to look out for in the film as well as answering student questions, a process always encouraged in this three hour class.
The following session analyzes Kane focusing on elements of sound, vision, cinematography, and editing with slide extracts from the film. Since sound is a crucial aspect of this film, an audio-recording of the 1938 Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of Dracula or The War of the Worlds follows emphasizing relevant aspects of sound and music especially of Bernard Herrmann’s contribution.
A scene from the lost ending of The Magnificent Ambersons.
During the following two weeks, focus is on The Magnificent Ambersons comparing the theatrical version to selected reconstructions of Welles’ original conception. Although I have at least three different versions, in my opinion the most impressive reconstruction of the boarding house sequence is that by Roger Ryan. By his judicious use of stills and emphasis on “The Two Black Crows” record being played during Eugene and Fanny’s last meeting, to say nothing of his emphasizing the creaking of her rocking chair in the best traditions of Welles’s sound montage technique, this version is probably the one closest to the director’s original intentions.
The following four sessions explore Welles’s use of film noir in The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, The Trial, and Macbeth, the last film leading to the Shakespearean noir of Othello. By this time students should be familiar with distinctive marks of Welles’s authorship. Not all students are acquainted with the Hollywood and Art Cinema many of us grew up with. The same is true of many Film Students so it is important to recognize this. However, this does not mean that more knowledgeable students will not recognize links between Touch of Evil and Psycho (1960). Student questions and contributions may also evoke original insights that are always encouraged.
Chimes at Midnight follows Othello. By this time students are familiar with Welles’s aims of making Shakespeare accessible to audiences by techniques of re-editing that he used in his stage and radio productions. Acting is always crucial in understanding any Welles film. The final meeting between Hal and Falstaff is emphasized in terms of dialogue intonation, camera placement, and revealing expressions on the faces of Welles and Keith Baxter displaying tense conflicting emotions. This scene reveals screen acting at its best and most challenging.
The final segment of the class examines Welles’s role as an independent director. By this time, students are familiar with the arguments of Jonathan Rosenbaum, Joseph McBride, Naremore and others who emphasize that Welles was always an independent even within the films he made inside studios utilizing radical use of vision and sound. This concluding part of the class complements, rather than contradicts, previous studio films revealing that Welles’s contribution to cinema extends far beyond Citizen Kane. One student recognized this in his evaluation. Most students are now free of misunderstandings concerning the director’s involvement in wine commercials and talk shows now seen as avenues he used to fund his films. Mr Arkadin (1955) can be analyzed on many levels. But it is best understood as an independent film dismantling genres as well as a work of exuberance and fun. F for Fake complements Arkadin challenging fixed conceptions of truth and reality, an innovative work of a director who enjoyed being a magician leading audiences into new ways of perception. Welles is not just one innovator of the essayistic-documentary film like Chris Marker but also someone who has indirectly inspired the present work of others such as Chinese independent filmmaker and critic Evans Chan.
Orson Welles as host and director of The Fountain of Youth.
The Fountain of Youth (1957) reveals that Welles was equally proficient as an independent in the field of television combining many techniques in a magical persona linking narration to diverse forms of fictional representation. During the last class session, I run the Munich Museum’s work-print release of Welles’s Vienna 1968 short. Preparing students by screening the famous Ferris Wheel sequence from The Third Man (1948), now totally unknown to the class, I found it an important preliminary to this ten-minute 1968 work where a clean-shaven Welles begins talking to the camera in the documentary manner familiar from his 1950s television work such as Around the World with Orson Welles, Portrait of Gina, and Orson Welles’s Sketchbook. These are important towards understanding the director’s unique artistry as Claudia Thieme aptly demonstrates in her F For Fake monograph. In this later short, styles quickly change from documentary to Third Man comic send-up to a magic show filmed in Hollywood with disparate figures of Mickey Rooney, Senta Berger, and Henry Gibson from 1960s the Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In series doing his “Very Interesting” routine. Gibson’s appearance needs some explanation for the students as do the presences of Rooney representing Hollywood and Berger European cinema. Her brief role complements those foreign actresses Welles used so often in his films such as Elsa Martinellli, Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Flon, and Oja Kodar.
A class of this nature needs a delicate approach with the instructor exploring the background and knowledge of students in the same way as a director makes a film to appeal to a particular type of audience. Students are now very different from those who grew up seeing a variety of films and this changed group needs to be understood in any educational process. The goal is to stimulate imagination not play one-up-man-ship games such as “You’ve never seen Antonioni’s L’Avventura!” – pronounced in shocked tones. How many of them have, let alone in the 1980s when many students came from areas whose local cinemas rarely rose above the Friday the 13th franchise? Cultural capital has changed but this does not mean that minds, imaginations, and potentials cannot be encouraged to understand and enjoy different forms of artistic achievement especially those of Welles.
Orson Welles on Arena in 1982.
Every semester changes films. If The Stranger does not appear in one class then it occurs in the next. Orson’s sincere political commitments and sympathy for ageing appear not only in his films but also the London segment of Around the World where he marvels at the traditional care for elderly widows and Chelsea Pensioners, the latter forming a marked contrast to the way American veterans were treated then and now. Whenever possible segments of the 1982 Arena interview are screened. It is almost as if Orson himself were with us in class instructing and talking in his genial manner fulfilling that thwarted ambition of the mid 1940s when both he and Rita were prepared to walk away from Hollywood and dedicate their talents to education. Unfortunately, nobody thought they were serious and dismissed the offer. Yet today even in a Core Curriculum class, it is possible to work within the system and stimulate students like those directors in the old Hollywood classical studio system whose work I both admire and screen in a situation that allows me (for however brief a moment?) to stimulate perceptions and view films differently. Although I never met Orson or worked with him like Joseph McBride and others, I do try to collaborate with him in this particular realm and promote his artistry and vision to those who are prepared to accept what he did and respect his memory, one that is a living memory.
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