Months after watching Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, months of having a draft of this post on Blogger, I finally start writing. Not that I will finish in one setting. I start this with an hour to go before I need to leave for church. I drafted two other posts, attacked my email, read three articles in the past 90 minutes, and made a trip to the convenience store for smokes. Procrastination or trepidation, or both.
I think the first time I saw Orson Welles was in Jane Eyre. It is at least the first time I recall him, and that may be a memory shaped by mother. She had seen the movie when she was young, she told me, and Welles appearing out of the fog had scared her. Anyway, I became a fan.
The first thing about Welles was his voice. No one playing him has ever caught the voice. It is exclusively Welles.
The second thing is his mischievousness. He might have been shocked by what War of the Worlds caused, but I doubt the shock lasted long.
The voice does not matter in The Other Side of the Wind, Welles directs without appearing. Although, its "star" is another actor with a singular voice and a mischievous glint in his eye - John Huston.
No, what matters in The Other Side of the Wind is the mischievousness. As if the das wunderkind, l'enfant terrible, remains behind the skin of a man in his fifties/sixties.
The Other Side of the Wind disturbs me. The scene in the car described below is one that haunts one. It is fearsome in its execution; whether it is parody or nihilistic or both I cannot decide. It is frightening. About the same time I watched the original Oldboy; its scene with the live octopus is a comedy compared to the car scene in The Other Side of the Wind.
Yes, it is a Frankenstein's monster. The opposite of Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, where the studio hacked what might have been his greatest film without his permission or his presence. The Other Side of the Wind was put together by friendly forces without Welles.
It was hard for me not to think of Citizen Kane, so I gave up trying. They do seem like bookends. Charles Foster Kane seems to have had the more respectful treatment than Hannaford, the Huston character. Kane creates a newspaper regardless of the cost; Hannaford must beg for money to create. Kane writes a scathing review of his wife's horrible debut as an opera singer to preserve his newspaper's integrity; mystification, not integrity, seems to be Haverford's calling card. There is no grandeur for Hannaford comparable to Kane's misbegotten Xanadu; instead, there is plenty of money-grubbing, status-seeking ugliness surrounding him.
It is hard to think of Welles as bitter (although he had more than enough reason to be bitter), or nihilistic. There is the mischievousness, again. Also, one has to take into account his love of magic, the sleight-of-hand. Still, was money the only reason he did not finish the work? If he had finished the work, and it had appeared on screens, what would have been the result?
One result, the most brilliant takedown of Hollywood that had ever been seen. More than The Player, more than Barton Fink, this movie discredits the Hollywood machine as a philistine, blood-sucking, soul-killing, vampire destroying artists. This would not have been a case of one biting the hand that feeds, but of taking the hand and arm, then of spitting them out.
Secondly, there is the fate of an artist in a capitalist world. It is the Hollywood problem writ larger than the movie screen.
Watch it. Even in its reconstructed state, it is Welles and Welles is always worth watching.
Some other points of view that I have collected between viewing and now.
My time is up.
That sense of finality doesn’t redound entirely to The Other Side of the Wind’s benefit. Like Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, it might play better as a mutilated maybe-masterpiece than as a finished-feeling work. There’s a lengthy sex scene in “Hannaford’s” movie, starring Welles’ partner, Oja Kodar, whose acting skills can generously be described as extremely limited, and while shooting it in blood-red light filtered through the rain-drenched windows of a moving car gives the encounter a kind of eerie beauty, it’s clearly a takeoff on art-film T&A that’s trying to have it both ways. But then, that’s Welles’ method: As F for Fake was a fraud about fraud, The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.
What vision it finally presents is a continually paradoxical one. It is a curse on cinema and a blessing of it. Its explorations of sexuality near explicitness, but its musings on the subject have to do with nothing but secrets. A sniping critic/historian played by Susan Strasberg harps on Hannaford’s camera fixating on his movies’ leading men. She recalls that Hannaford had affairs with all the wives of his movies’ lead males, and theorizes that this was his way of sublimating his desire for the men. Certainly Hannaford’s fixation on John Dale (Bob Random), the hippie-curled leading man of the new project, is not healthy. Dale came into Hannaford’s life while the latter was vacationing. The older man believes he saved the younger when he was trying to drown himself. A drama teacher brought to Jake’s party has a different story about Dale’s own ambition. Repressed homosexuality is not especially emphasized here as a betrayal of one’s self, but “Wind” is a movie in which everyone is selling everyone out, or at least is susceptible to doing so. Its web of relationships is vertigo-inducing, and the breakneck cutting, constantly shifting film stock, and seesawing aspect ratios don’t construct the easiest through-line by which to track them
'The Other Side of the Wind' Review (Hollywood Reporter)
So has Welles come to bury Hannaford, or to praise him? Or is it a little of both—an ambivalence that may be misconstrued at a moment when it is little understood that the discourse of a movie character is not necessarily the discourse of the movie itself, and when the depiction of toxic masculinity running amok in Hollywood risks resembling a celebration of the same. A mordant eulogy for an old guard that’s outlived its time—Dennis Hopper can be briefly viewed, seeming to urge on the coming revolution—The Other Side of the Wind is a portrait of the genius as charming sham, all bluster and hot air. Debunking a legend, it completes a legacy.
sch 5/11
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