Orson Welles in Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, BBC TV, 1955
This review appears in the June 2018 edition of Sight & Sound un der the headline ‘The Welles Spring’. Reprinted here with permission.
In his later life and after his death, discussion of Orson Welles’s work gravitated around two perceived poles: unjustly thwarted genius and self-sabotaging wastrel. Recently, a more refined critical consensus has emerged that attempts to do justice to the nuances of this titan’s protean, promethean output through a number of related turns. It tries to see past the alluring, unreliable mythology of Welles created by himself and others (not least the figure of the lone genius); it tries to generate complex, reflexive understandings of the dynamic conditions and products of his career; and, fundamentally, it tries to get to grips with the sheer volume of work, complete and incomplete, preserved and lost, that Welles engaged in.
Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts offers some fruits of this approach. This scholarly collected edition emerges from the Welles centenary symposium and exhibition held in 2015 at Indiana University, home of the primary archive of Welles’s career up to the mid-1950s. Editors James N. Gilmore and Stanley Gottlieb note their commitment to research that unpacks “what has been avoided, overlooked, underappreciated, or misunderstood” in Welles studies, while curator Craig Simpson notes in his article about mounting the 2015 exhibition that our era of YouTube clips and DVD extras is more sympathetic to the value of “fragments, alternative endings, and multiple versions of the same work of art”. The other eight essays in the volume testify to this by attending to less familiar facets of Welles’s career, neglected aspects of canonical works and key interpersonal relationships, using a range of previously unexplored archival sources. The results are fascinating.
Some chapters present compelling new takes on familiar texts. Marguerite Rippy, for instance, reconsiders Welles’s sensational 1936 Broadway production of Macbeth (often referred to as the ‘voodoo Macbeth’) by highlighting the little-acknowledged contributions of dancer-choreographer Asadata Dafora and musician Abdul Assen. Dafora, from Sierra Leone, and Assen, from Nigeria, had successful American careers but their indispensible contributions were elided or erased in contemporary and subsequent considerations of the production, sometimes by Welles himself. Shawn Vancour, meanwhile, offers a surprising take on the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, insisting on the value of the latter part of the show. The first-person storytelling that follows the cod-news-report high drama of the Martian invasion is typically deemed boring or unoriginal by comparison but Vancour frames it as thoughtfully distinctive in the context of contemporary radio drama and part of a movement whose eventual influences included the first-person narration characteristic of film noir.
And Catherine L. Benamou gives a brilliant anatomy of how the largely Brazilian-located wartime documentary project It’s All True became a kind of generative aesthetic crisis for Welles. Benamou shows how what began as a more or less neocolonialist project for Welles as wartime goodwill ambassador evolved into a deeply committed process of ground-level participant observation, drawing him through a deep process of “transculturation” towards a hybrid internationalist understanding of “sociocultural resilience and remembrance”, thereby alienating Welles’s industry and state backers and resulting in his first major unfinished work.
Welles’s activist political engagement underpins other pieces. Gottlieb, for instance, analyses the column Welles began writing for the New York Post in the final months of the war, attending to his shrewd critiques of politics, media and entertainment and his warnings against nascent authoritarianism. Highlighting racism and labour relations among other issues, Welles took seriously this opportunity for “advocacy journalism” (though I think it’s also true that the columns sometimes read like rush jobs). Welles sought to put his public profile to civic use elsewhere too. Gilmore anatomises his correspondence of 1946, demonstrating that Welles was widely viewed as “a prominent, sympathetic cultural figure who regularly participated in political action and argument” and was actively engaged with Washington and the promotion of Jewish, humanitarian and anti-racist causes. This article also supplies a thoughtful examination of The Stranger, a feature often disparaged by Welles himself as well as critics but whose deployment as part of its story of real-life concentration-camp footage was bold and provocative. Both that film and the Post columns showed Welles’s interest in using popular forms as vehicles for politically activated social engagement.
Other entries powerfully illuminate aspects of Welles’s sensibility and personality. Matthew Solomon charmingly traces the significance to Welles of ‘old-time movies’, specifically the unruly knockabout shorts that preceded the codification of cinematic form around the time of Welles’s own birth. Solomon identifies Welles’s love for the fledgling industry and locates ‘old-time’ tropes in several of his projects, from The Magnificent Ambersons to the recently rediscovered footage from Too Much Johnson, rendering early Hollywood another Wellesian lost Eden. This milieu deeply influenced the stage production Around the World (1946), which Vincent Longo explores with gloriously detailed attention to the ambitious fusion of theatrical and cinematic forms that dictated the show’s form, conjuring a sense of Welles’s joyous exploration of technologies of wonder for their own sake. The proposed bank-robbery scene involving portals between stage and screen and guns brandished at the audience sounds like an absolute treat.
François Thomas’s article about his relationship with Louis Dolivet in the mid-1950s, meanwhile, reveals that a liaison familiarly described as a meeting of political minds undone by an ill-advised business partnership was also an incredibly passionate and intense friendship: at one point Welles insisted “there is never any time in the day or night when you aren’t the person I most want to see”.
Welles’s correspondence with Dolivet also highlights the extent to which his colossal industry operated in relation to his precarious mental health – a subject that would bear sensitive further exploration. His television work is also notably underrepresented here despite various points of connection with other projects: the attention to place that Benamou notes with regard to It’s All True, for instance, maps handily onto the travelogue series Welles made for ITV, while the formally experimental storytelling techniques described by Vancour (with regard to ‘The War of the Worlds’) and Solomon (with regard to Around the World) inform the bold innovation of the pilot Welles made for Desilu. But when it comes to Welles there is always more to say – exciting as this volume is, it’s even more tantalising to imagine the revelations to come concerning the period covered here and those sure to emerge around the subsequent decades of an unparalleled career.
More information about Orson Welles in Focus here. The June 2018 edition of Sight and Sound is out now.
