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Essays (book reviews) |
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Citizen Welles: |
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From his very first works, Orson Welles presented
himself in a chameleon’s guise. He loved the visual anonymity of his radio work
of the 1930s, which allowed him to provide the voices of up to a dozen
different characters in the one program. In The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the only film he directed in which he did not
himself appear, he identifies himself in the final credits simply as a
microphone, moving away on a boom into the darkness.
And these games do not stop once he is on screen:
beyond dubbing the voices of numerous characters (women included!), Welles was
a master of make-up and disguise. Who, looking today at Citizen Kane (1941) in which Welles plays a man at many stages of his life, can project a
clear picture of what he really looked like at the time, a perky 25-year-old
chap?
Such ambiguities extend to every aspect of Welles’ life,
art and career. Out of both predisposition and necessity, he multiplied his
performing personae. Anyone’s casual impression of Welles is bound to be a
strange palimpsest: grand cinema auteur, magician, Shakespearean scholar,
talk-show guest, imposing actor – as well as large, mellifluous, slightly
ridiculous figure on many TV ads, celebrity “roasts”, and fundraising events in
the American mass media such as the unforgettably dire Let Poland Be Poland (January 1982) scripted by film historian (and
Welles associate) Joseph McBride.
Welles’ prodigious, often secretive life offers a formidable
challenge to any willing biographer. Brady’s book is the third attempt in
English. The previous two are clearly skewed and partial: Barbara Leaming’s
semi-authorised Orson Welles (1983)
takes its fanciful subject at his word, while Charles Higham’s disgraceful Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an
American Genius (1985) amounts to little more than a hatchet job arising
from an obscure well of ressentiment.
Brady has it well over his predecessors in the depth
of his research, as well as the seriousness and even-handedness of his intent.
Tactful to the point of shyness about the more personal aspects of Welles’
life, Brady chooses instead to patiently trace the origin, production and
initial reception of almost all Welles’ major works. Fascinatingly, this auteur
is revealed as somebody who never ceased reworking, pulverising and recombining
his source materials – even when the source was the most culturally canonised
literature.
Welles returned time and again, for instance, to the
radically condensed pocketbook editions of Everybody’s
Shakespeare that he had edited and published before he was 18 – resulting,
many years later, in that most extraordinary Shakespearean montage, the film Chimes at Midnight (1966). [Note: the
2001 Routledge volume Orson Welles on
Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts, edited by Richard
France, contains and documents later theatrical reworkings of the Bard by
Welles.]
If Brady wisely refuses to reiterate Higham’s [and
later David Thomson’s] “rise and fall” account of Welles’ career, he nonetheless
evinces a milder form of the common, myopic view, borne out even in his title.
This view has it that, after the shining highpoints of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and Citizen Kane, Welles’ subsequent work is
all rather impoverished, incomplete, tampered with by other hands, i.e., in one
way or another, insubstantial.
Thus, after a minute account of the genesis of Kane, Brady gives successively shorter
space to such remarkable later works as The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Mr Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), The
Trial (1962), The Immortal Story (1968) and F for Fake (1973) – a couple (at least) of
which are masterpieces. Welles’ final release during his lifetime, the
delightful and revealing Filming Othello (1978), barely scrapes into a footnote.
Brady has written a good and useful book, but the
problem that eats it away from inside is simply that he has, finally, a quite
limited appreciation of Welles’ art and its significance. For him, Kane is a classic because it is whole,
coherent, noble, expressive; because it shows up on Sight and Sound polls of the best movies ever made; and because
Steven Spielberg shelled out 69,000 USD at an auction for the famous Rosebud
sled (which Welles later claimed was a fake). Welles just never had the
necessary resources to “get it together” again like he did at the start of the
1940s. Right?
Wrong. It is by far better to assume that, from the
start, Welles was not a conventionally classical, Hollywood filmmaker but a
truly experimental one. What if we looked at Kane as a film deliberately in pieces, a modernist “labyrinth with
no centre” (as Jorge Luis Borges described it), without a conventional notion
of truth or destiny, full of stylistic excess and florid spectacle? Then, we
might see not a decline, but a profound continuity – and, even more, an
astonishingly complex development – from Kane to F for Fake. And we would also
be in a better position to investigate, as some intrepid scholars have
initiated, Welles’ many partly finished projects, from the often-reworked Don Quixote to The Other Side of the Wind [assembled and released posthumously in
2018].
Brady, ultimately, is unable to square the hokey TV
magician with the auteur of Citizen Kane.
Yet the two are really not all that unrelated. For Welles was able to combine a
showbiz sense of playing for effect –
with all the patent artificiality and superficiality that act required – with a
modernist sense of splintering levels and artfully eluding any tidy theme or
single meaning.
But even this idea (courtesy of our postmodern age)
proves to be insufficient. For the young Welles, who in his promptbooks urged
theatre workers to “remember that every single way of playing Shakespeare – as
long as the way is effective – is right”, is indeed the same Welles who gave us
some of the screen’s most moving and tragic versions of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952). In sharp contrast to many who have followed his modernist example, the
idea of play for Welles never
precluded soul searching, or a necessary meditation on the most difficult
questions of (social) existence.
Welles’ playful brilliance lay in bringing to the
great humanist agonies of his time an incredibly agile scepticism – for, as he
once reminded us: “The most important thing is always to doubt the importance
of the question”.
© Adrian Martin August 1990 |
