Reel Politique: Book Roundup on Orson Welles, Part Two
Twenty-two years after his death, a “new” Orson Welles is finally beginning to emerge. Slowly, this image is supplanting the calcified older one, which has been in place since at least the mid-1940s. This old image–which posits a reckless abuser of Hollywood courtesy, a frivolous spender with a “fear of completion,”–later evolved into that of a roly-poly TV raconteur and wine pitchman, the ruined hulk of a once promising filmmaker who was destroyed by Hollywood. This image is maddeningly tenacious. The new Welles who is emerging from a parade of recent, more enlightened books on the director is much more compatible with current critical and political thinking. This “new” Welles is a progressive independent filmmaker, a leftist and activist in race relations and free speech issues who perhaps by political necessity relocated to Europe, where his attitude to directing was finally free of deadline-driven, commercialite cinema. There, he could be a man who brewed his films at his own pace, who released no film before its time.
A key text in this slowly evolving new picture is “The Battle Over Orson Welles,” Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of four then-new biographies of Welles, which was published in Cineaste in 1996. That essay has now been reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 336 pages, $24.95, ISBN 978 0 520 25123 6), happily enough for those who require easy access to it.
This essay accomplished quite a bit in a short amount of space. It introduced to many readers the notion of Welles as an independent filmmaker, a man merely using the resources of the Hollywood machine as long as they would let him for his own ends. This should have replaced the idea of Welles as a talented but still initially compliant member of movie industry machinery. Welles’s philosophical and aesthetic distance from Hollywood is key to understanding his later years in a wholly different light, as a maverick hewing to his own schedule. And Rosenbaum’s essay first introduced to some readers the cracks in the plinth hoisting David Thomson to the skies, fissures later magnified by Adrian Martin and numerous other critics. It was here in this essay that one first realized that Thomson was, or had mutated into, a censorious Hollywood apologist who identified with the movie industry’s producers and studio execs rather than the film artisans he championed in earlier books.
The book gathers 26 essays spanning 1972 to 2005, a mix of dispatches, book reviews, public letters, liner notes, and forewords and afterwords, with attendant intros and suffixes that explain, describe, and offer codicils, revisions, and corrections of misfacts concerning the life and career of Welles. What Rosenbaum suggested in “The Battle Over Orson Welles,” was codified a few years later in “Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge,” a chapter from his 2000 book Movie Wars. Here, Rosenbaum develops further the idea that Welles was in direct conflict with prevailing notions of art and commerce.
Rosenbaum’s book is almost as complex as Welles’s career. Most of the essays demand these demurrals or clarifications or contextualizations from Rosenbaum, some of them engagingly autobiographical (for example, how he once met Welles ), and many are for Welles specialists only, that is, for readers who like to dig into the intricacies and conflicting testimony of Welles’s career the way others like to look for Badge Men in grassy knolls.
The University of California has done a fine service by gathering together Rosenbaum’s essays in one convenient location (with the addition of an enormously helpful appendix in which Rosenbaum methodically goes through Welles’s oeuvre and delivers a status report), but eventually the question arises, why this book and not a massive biography of Welles, one that sets the record straight and shows some actual sympathy for the man and artist, unlike most of previous bios? Rosenbaum explains in passing why such a project would not be congenial to him, only part of which is the fact that, despite all the attention he has lavished on Welles over the years, Welles isn’t even his favorite director.
The fellow critic whom Rosenbaum resembles the most, or at least mirrors in one facet, is Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog. Both are concerned first with getting the facts right, and only then building critical observations. But as journalists, their revisions and updates threaten to lose not just the general reader but the specialist as well. Presumably, Lucas’s new book on Mario Bava is the definitive book on the director, by in part synthesizing all the qualifications and updates posted in VW over the years. Rosenbaum has yet to address Welles in a single volume directed at the filmmaker’s work, as opposed to his career, though who knows, perhaps this anthology is a prelude to such a book. As a collection of chronologically arranged journalism, though, with its revisions and updates, Discovering Orson Welles, as its title suggests, is more about Jonathan Rosenbaum than Orson Welles, valuable to have as secondary, or even tertiary, material.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
To quote the man himself, “What does it matter what you say about people?”
While that was fascinating, I often grow tired of the fact that all anyone really has to say is about Welles’ person rather than his work. Growing up in a generation that has no clue what Citizen Kane was about, much less why it’s de rigueur for cineastes to place it at the top of their “best ever” list, I’d like to hear some solid justification for putting Welles automatically above Lean or Ford (other than the existence of John Wayne).