The Other Side of the Wind blowing into Cannes?

It's still alive. In a recent Variety article about Frank Marshall's work on The Other Side of the Wind, there's a quote from Peter Bogdanovich about the film buried at the bottom:

"'It's going to happen in the next month or so,'he says. 'We're aiming for Cannes. Everybody wants it. It's film history. It will be something for it to finally be seen after all these years.'"

Bogdanovich has been sounding this horn for years, ever since Oja Kodar secured a deal with Showtime in 2002 for financing to complete it. A handy timeline at Wellesnet details the tortured history of the project, ever since Welles' daughter Beatrice sued over her rights to the project. Beatrice has long suppressed much of Welles' late work, much of which he produced together with his partner Oja. Beatrice's suit was settled in March of '07, but then the work was put on hold in late '08, perhaps due to the fact "that the negative is still unavailable for inspection in the Paris film vault where it is being held by French Officials", as Wellesnet opines.

Did Bogdanovich finally get access to the vault? Who knows? But we can still dream that a version of Welles' final feature could soon hit screens, 45 minutes of which were already edited by him. It could be the film story of the year, or another over-optimistic tease from Bogdanovich. Let's hope for the best.

YouTubeArt: "The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema " - Giorgio Agamben

Jonathan Rosenbaum, on the Chicago Reader blog On Film, has just posted an astonishing piece of video. It's a short, silent scene from Orson Welles' unfinished Don Quixote, one not included in Jess Franco's much derided edit of the film. In the interview which precedes the clip, Rosenbaum states that this scene was shot immediately after he was booted from the editing process on Touch of Evil in 1957. It takes place in a movie theater, and in its short running time expresses the joyful contradictions of moviegoing. Think Edison's Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show rendered sublime. [the clip starts at -5:00]



I won't argue with Agamben's quote [and the clip is edited, so it does run closer to 6 minutes]. Rosenbaum, via Adrian Martin, quotes the piece in full:

"Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle--a kind of gallery--is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them--to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea--whom we saved--cannot love us." --Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

YouTubeArt: Orson Welles, Hammered

Linked to in a fine article about the original Transformers movie on Slate. Remarkable. Have a good weekend!

YouTubeArt: Orson Welles Reciting Moby Dick

In 1971, on a break from acting in Claude Chabrol's Ten Days' Wonder, Welles started filming scenes for an intended one-hour adaptation of his 1958 stage production Moby Dick-Reheased. Started in Strasbourg, he continued in his home in Orvilliers, with his cinematographer Gary Graver improvising the look of being at sea with a broken mirror and a splash of water. The above is a snippet of the surviving 22 minutes, which were reconstructed by the Munich Film Museum, and which I was lucky enough to see during Film Forum's Welles retro in '05.

I cribbed all of the above info from Joseph McBride's invaluable book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, which describes the astonishing amount of work Welles produced in the later years of his life...all of which is caught up in legal limbo due to the jerry-rigged financing Welles had to construct since Hollywood wouldn't support any of his projects.

Also on YouTube: a clip from his final feature The Other Side of the Wind, which has never been released (but Peter Bogdanovich says a deal with Showtime is in the works); and a clip of Welles reciting a monologue from The Merchant of Venice.