University of Michigan creating annotated digital 'Heart of Darkness'

Orson Welles with a model of the Heart of Darkness steamboat.

The University of Michigan is building an annotated digital archive edition of director Orson Welles’ unproduced first RKO Pictures project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The project was detailed at the university’s M|Cubed Symposium in Ann Arbor on November 1.

Professors Matthew Solomon and Hubert Cohen of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts have teamed with Kathleen Dow, an archivist/librarian and curator in the Special Collections Library.

“Its themes of power and race are as relevant for today’s world as they were for the world of 1939,” Solomon told the University of Michigan Record.

The team, which also includes Ph.D. student Vincent Longo of the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures and 10 undergraduates, aims to create an annotated critical edition of the screenplay supplemented by archival materials that put it in context — correspondence, interviews, production records and audiovisual material.

“Although we all share a passion for research and creating new knowledge about media history, we never would have had the opportunity to forge a multigenerational collaboration such as ours without the institutional framework and the material support provided by the M|Cubed program,” Solomon said.

Welles planned to shoot the film in a series of long panning shots, representing the point of view of Conrad’s main character, Marlow as he journeys down a long meandering central Africa river on a battered old steamboat attempting to find Kurtz. The project was rejected by RKO and Welles made his Hollywood debut with Citizen Kane instead.

The University of Michigan holds the world’s largest, most comprehensive Welles collection.

Earlier this year, it acquired dozens of unpublished Welles scripts, reams of his correspondence and boxes of documents, including materials related to Heart of Darkness, from his youngest daughter, Beatrice Welles.

Besides the recent addition of The Orson Welles – Beatrice Welles Collection, the University of Michigan’s impressive holdings includes The Orson Welles – Chris Welles Feder Collection, a gift from Welles’ eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder; The Alessandro Tasca di Cutò – Orson Welles Collection from the personal papers of Welles associate Alessandro Tasca, which were purchased at auction in London; and The Orson Welles – Oja Kodar Collection and The Richard Wilson – Orson Welles Collection, both acquired by the university within the past 15 years.

Welles returned to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a March 13, 1945 episode of the radio program This Is My Best. As Welles noted in the introduction, he had performed the story with the Mercury Theatre On the Air ion November 6, 1938 and had attempted to film it at RKO.

The streaming audio of the 1945 radio broadcast and a pdf of his script for the unfilmed movie can be found below: