Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Discovering Orson Welles.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 520 25123 6
US$24.95 (pb)
346pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

It’s one of those delectable ironies of film history that the United States’ greatest (that is to say, most interesting) director should have been so profoundly un-American as Orson Welles. Everyone knows the story: of the boy genius and provocateur who sailed into Hollywood on the crest of sensation, made a certain studio film about a certain media mogul with an unprecedented degree of creative freedom, made another with considerably less freedom, another with less still, another destroyed, and so on, until all that remained was the sad parody of a man selling whiskey for the Japanese. The moral we take from the tale might be said to depend on the level of importance we place on genius as compared to that which we place on maturity. The heady apologist position on Welles will, for example, point to the man’s biography as the clearest example of Hollywood’s war of attrition on imaginative expression, originality, indeed on art itself. Alternatively, the more sober and dismissive position will question why other Hollywood directors did not suffer a similar fate to Welles. Did RKO betray the genius and castrate his career after less than three years? Or was the studio the benevolent victim, of a volatile and irresponsible brat? Better yet, was the breakdown between filmmaker and studio a mutual decision, implicitly agreed upon and expected from the beginning? Was there in fact any injustice done at all?

For Jonathan Rosenbaum, the uncertainties surrounding Welles’ filmmaking career have been the source of fascination for almost forty years. This hardly makes him unique. Many, allured by the labyrinth, have attempted to get to the bottom Welles once and for all, a fact evidenced by the hoards of biographical studies on the director (each with a different version of events) that continue to materialise on film library shelves. What does differentiate Rosenbaum though is that unlike most of Welles’ biographers his interest is not in resolving the problem, but quite the reverse: Rosenbaum wants to open the mystery and bring the true Welles to light, with all of his contradictions intact. It is with this goal in mind that the author’s recently published Discovering Orson Welles makes for such interesting reading.

A collation of Rosenbaum’s articles and papers on Welles (the first an article written for Film Comment in 1972 and the last a paper presented at a conference on ‘Don Quixote and the Cinema’ held in Valencia in 2005) Discovering Orson Welles presents in the author’s words, “a chronological and historically minded ordering of still-evolving research, and one that considers the very notion of a ‘definitive’ view of Welles an ideological and practical roadblock” (1). To uphold this conception, Rosenbaum chooses not to revise his early articles but rather to present them errors included in their original forms, “as part of a record of my evolving and still-fallible research into Welles’ work” (4). While such a seemingly unprofessional decision might seem contrary to the essential idea of scholarship – that of ironing out the creases over the years – Rosenbaum’s flawed approach is especially apt for his particular subject.

As an artist, or simply, as a person, Welles was strangely uninterested in ideas of perfection, wholeness, completion; all those values of unity that are supposed to stir artistic creation in the first place. An immensely prolific filmmaker, writer, theatre director, painter, magician, liar, Welles left the living (on the 10th of October 1985) with something unfinished; a puzzle, the pieces of which we may never fully have to complete the more or less incongruent image. “As a filmmaker who delighted in the very process of continuous revision,” Rosenbaum writes, “Welles challenges commodification like few other directors” (3). Nothing was or is ever over with Welles. Even films completed thirty years earlier, albeit problematically, always remained open for further tinkering. During their sole meeting in Paris in 1972, for example, Welles told Rosenbaum of his intention to “shoot a new ending of The Magnificent Ambersons, ‘with the surviving actors, showing the characters ten years later’ (50) And so it continues today. Over twenty years after the man’s death, as new footage is found and new intentions revealed, the Wellesian oeuvre remains ‘in a perpetual state of becoming” (225).

What we have in Rosenbaum’s book then is a life’s work of sorts, an engaged and vulnerable piece, and all the more rewarding because of its vulnerability. An oft-neglected thing, good criticism is borne not of authority but of passion for the subject. Discovering Orson Welles – a Wellesian document – occasionally reveals the true strengths of its author’s considerable critical skills when, like Bazin, Rosenbaum discusses the artistic qualities of Welles’ films without resorting to any of the institutionalised uncertainties so prevalent in contemporary scholarship (like ‘perhaps’ or ‘arguably’). Instead he makes decisive claims.

Of particular interest for this reviewer was the author’s idea of Welles’ incompatibility with classical values, an incompatibility rooted in the director’s “refusal to repeat himself” (269). In an article first published in 1986 Rosenbaum writes:

If Welles, along with Murnau, was the most poetically gifted master of camera movement in the history of cinema, this was largely because he wasn’t a rationalist like Mizoguchi or even Ophüls in his charted arabesques and flourishes, but an explorer of unconscious or semiconscious drives and transports. (74)

Welles’ uncharted approach to artistic exploration is evident in the director’s ‘incongruous’ stylistics. Rosenbaum notes for example of the profusion of rapidly edited close-ups in the unfinished It’s All True, a montage style totally “at odds with the mise-en-scene of both Kane and Ambersons” (183); that profondeur de champaesthetic with which Welles is traditionally associated. This kind of aesthetic inconsistency – dare we say carelessness – would continue throughout Welles’ career. “By conservative estimate,” Rosenbaum points out, “in the 1980s alone Welles was working on at least a dozen separate film projects, no two of them alike” (102).The Big Brass Ring, Welles’ post-war companion piece to Kane and a development on the theme of American power, showed particular promise. And here the rest of us were thinking the old man had by then given up.

Of other real interest is Rosenbaum’s inclusion of an extract from the script of Welles’ first, aborted feature length project Heart of Darkness (adapted from the Conrad novel), which reveals the director’s overtly modernist ambitions in an early incarnation. Preceding the film proper was to be a five-or-so-minute long preamble in which the director would introduce himself to the audience and lay bare the dynamics of the experience that lay ahead of them. “You’re the camera” a giant Welles was to explain over an image of an eye superimposed over a lens. “The camera is your eye” (47).

Discovering Orson Welles also turns out to be something more: a discovering of Rosenbaum and in turn a discovering of the dominant ideological trends that have informed professional film scholarship for the past four decades. From his writings of the early 1970s, into the 80s, 90s and the new century, Rosenbaum’s tone shifts: from once lively, ambitious and combative to technically measured and dry. This change is not just a symptom of the author’s age, but of our time as well. We are at a loss for ideas and gorged with facts. Although this secondary history remains only an implicit aspect of Rosenbaum’s book, the author does at one point acknowledge the film critic’s own historical entrapment when he writes, “what we call film history,” he writes, “includes the history of film criticism” (65). One senses, however, only the critic’s vague theoretical acknowledgement of this precondition.

Ultimately, and I use this word with the deepest regret, the discovering of Orson Welles leads to nothing, or, worse still, back to the beginning. This shouldn’t be disconcerting, nor should it be surprising. The nature of all born artists is to lie and Welles, it is clear, perceived his artistic nature from a remarkably young age. For the rest of us, Rosenbaum suggests that to believe in the lie carries its own creative value. “Gullibility, after all, is only just another form of imagination” (144). Thus it would be inappropriate to expect a disentangling of Welles’ life and absurd (or, rather, just stupid) to attach a negative moral value to the man’s deceits. Deceit was Welles’ business. The illusion began with a four-year old perfecting his card tricks and grew from there into the whale, inside of which all of us now have to sit, watching shadows caste by fire.

Thomas Redwood,
Flinders University, Australia.