The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

A blessing — another Orson Welles feature (i.e., masterwork) to live with over the years, to re-experience at every opportunity and to grow into and along with over time. Sure, 50 years after Welles’s filming, other hands finally put it together — but those hands knew Welles, knew his aspirations and instincts and know the medium. We can read Welles in it.

On my first viewing, my first take is the bookend it forms with his titanic debut, Citizen Kane (1941). Welles’s curtain call plays off his bow, his valedictory off his arrival.

  Both films start with the death of a famous, powerful man. Both films explore that character’s enigma. In both the apparent power is revealed to conceal a vulnerability, a weakness. Kane’s aspirations ultimately fail his need to achieve any reconciling grace or satisfaction. Long after he lost everything, he loses everything. 

The film’s lesson is that we can never know Kane — or indeed anyone —  on the basis of biographic facts and experience. We’re all unfathomable enigmas — which we take pains to remain. 

So even when we “know” what “Rosebud” is — whether it’s the sleigh we see in the film, or the psychological implications we can still within the narrative impute to it, or the flower's place in our poetry ("Gather ye..."), or even that it was Hearst’s private term for Marion Davies’s pudendum, as outside research teaches us — we’re no closer to knowing Kane. Or anyone.  
     The fire that identifies the burning sled kicks up a thick obscuring smoke, not light. That is, the illumination is a deception. Our "knowledge" obscures. Similarly, in the earlier projection room scene the heads project dark shadows not light. (And similarly unsettlingly, Joseph Cotten appears in the scene and speaks but not as the character he portrays). The film closes on the same dark wire fence and sign that brought us into the film: “No Trespassing.” The film let us in only to remind us we’re left outside.

In this last film as in that first Welles deploys an unprecedented command over his own expansion of film rhetoric and devices. However expansive the medium’s growth the Maestro could still deploy it in inventive ways. As a newsreel triggers Kane, here Jake Hannaford’s unfinished contemporary feature triggers a documentary about its ambitions and disappearance. 

Some cast members evoke the Welles career, most notably Paul Stewart — the secret bearer in Kane, is a similarly wily Costello here —  and Mercedes McCambridge, still a forceful gangleader, promoted from Touch of Evil. Lilli Palmer evokes the latter’s Dietrich. 

Welles deploys the wide range of film stock, sound and colour resources, the narrative liberty (chaos?) even beyond what the new bloods of the ‘70s were doing. Some 30 years after his initial mastery and innovation, the old guy struts that swagger again. 

As the film world raved about the new maestro Antonioni’s ground-breaking Zabriskie Point (1970), King Orson would have reclaimed his throne with this fascinating pseudo-documentary around an obvious parody of that film. Welles resets that particular film — and its culture — into an exoskeleton that’s like the hall of mirrors in A Lady From Shanghai. We see everything clearly but the mystery of perspective and reflection denies us certainty.

In addition to the new technology, the ‘70s cinema also gave Welles unprecedented freedom to show nudity. The inner-film footage predominantly deploys the nude beauty Oja Kodar, Welles’s last companion. The cast credits identify her only as “The Actress,” but she’s also named as Welles’s co-writer, presumably of the inner film. She’s more than just a pretty bod. 

The abundant nudity plays in several ways. Welles clearly embraces its new freedom in film. But for all Welles’s creative energy here, the blatant sexuality makes it feel like an old man’s film. It recalls Picasso’s late period of urgent, graphic sexuality — like an old compulsion recollected furiously in tranquillity.  

The sexuality also defines Jake Hannaford’s central enigma. Motorcycle actor John Dale evokes the success of Easy Rider and the doom of James Dean. Hannaford is himself reputed to hide his homosexual desires by seducing his actors’ women. As played by the gruff John Huston, Hannaford is the Man’s Man director, the Hemingway of the screen. The insecurity in this character’s maleness appears in his outrageous humiliation of the homosexual. 

While that scene feeds the current condemnation of Hollywood’s sexual power stricture, the film remains an open-ended, spiralling mystery. All the hints and eruptions don’t settle anything. Another enigma survives.

Again, Kane’s signature metaphor was Susan’s giant jigsaw puzzles. Isolated in the mansion she spent her life piecing together little bits of a large picture. That represents the jumble of pieces the questing journalist came up with on Kane — and left us with in the “No Trespassing” concluding dark. 

Having reached The Other Side of the Wind we’ve again been blown through a tumult of resonating and conflicting reflections on life and illusion — no better in the knowing but richer by the mystery. 
      I’m already looking forward to next time.