At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 1
AT THE END OF THE STREET IN THE SHADOW
AT THE END OF THE STREET IN THE SHADOW
ORSON WELLES AND THE CITY
Matthew Asprey Gear
A Wallflower Press Book
Wallflower Press is an imprint of
Columbia University Press
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Copyright ©2016 Matthew Asprey Gear
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-85090-2
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ISBN 978-0-231-17340-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
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Cover image: Orson Welles photographed in Paris in 1952, by Fred Brommet
This book is for my mother
Contents
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
PRELUDE
A NUISANCE IN A FACTORY | Hollywood: 1939–48, 1956–58
WELLES’S U.S.A.
1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE LINCOLN REPUBLIC
2. AN EMPIRE UPON AN EMPIRE | Citizen Kane (1941)
3. THE DARKENING MIDLAND | The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
PAN-AMERICA
4. DARKNESS AND FEAR | The Early Anti-fascist Thrillers
5. THE RAUCOUS RAGGLE-TAGGLE JAMBOREE OF THE STREETS It’s All True (unfinished, 1942)
6. RATLINE TO MAIN STREET | The Stranger (1946)
7. PORT TO PORT | The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
8. THE BORDER | Touch of Evil (1958)
9. RETURN TO THE PERIPHERY | The Other Man (unproduced, 1977)
INTERLUDE
A FREE MAN IS EVERYWHERE | Europe & Beyond: 1947–55, 1958–85
POSTWAR EUROPE
10. SKIES AND RUBBLESCAPE | Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report (1955)
11. LOST IN A LABYRINTH | The Trial (1962)
IMMORTAL STORIES
12. TO ADORE THE IMPOSSIBLE
13. IN THE LAND OF DON QUIXOTE
Index
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Orson Welles scholars who generously shared their time and ideas with me during the research for and writing of this book: James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Stefan Drössler, Josh Karp, and Scott Simmon. I also want to thank Kate Hutchens at the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan and David Frasier at the Lilly Library at Indiana University for their hospitality and help during my research visits in January and February 2014, respectively. This book builds on the Touch of Evil chapter of my PhD thesis, completed at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 2011. Further funding from the university allowed me to make a research trip to the Filmmuseum München and present a preliminary version of the chapter on Mr. Arkadin at the ‘Screen’ conference at the University of Glasgow in the summer of 2013. I also want to thank Peter Doyle, Noel King, Theodore Ell, Yoram Allon at Wallflower Press, Gary Morris at Bright Lights Film Journal, Ray Kelly at wellesnet.com, Luc Sante, Will Straw, Adrian Martin, Clive Sinclair, the late Lester Goran, Kathryn Millard, Mark Evans, Nicole Anderson, Iván Zatz, and from the early days Bill Wrobel and Adriano.
Many thanks to Soledad Rusoci for her support throughout the writing of this book. Thanks also to Julie Asprey, Luke Asprey, Clare Anderson, Jace Davies, Amanda Layton, Ben Packham for his early insights into Citizen Kane, and in Buenos Aires Sabrina Díaz Bialos, Ignacio Bosero, Arthur Chaslot, Valeria Meiller, and Nuestra Señora de los Candados.
Matthew Asprey Gear
Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros, Buenos Aires
September 2015
INTRODUCTION
1.
We could begin almost anywhere. He seems to have visited all the cities so precociously early that every return was tinged with saudade – that untranslatable Portuguese word signifying nostalgic longing and the sweet sadness of loss. In fact, he picked up the word in Rio de Janeiro during what he later remembered as “the last great carnival in that greatest of carnival cities”.1 In the words of Bill Krohn, Orson Welles was “a man of many nostalgias”.2
So let’s begin in Vienna, close to the Cold War border but also the former heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of several politically obsolete cultures Welles gently lamented during his forty-five years in cinema. In ‘New Wien’, a short travel segment he made for television in the late 1960s, our corpulent guide puffs a cigar and trails a billowing lodenmantel – “purely utilitarian”, he insists – through the wintry solitude of the city.3 Welles peers through the front window of Demel, “the greatest of all the great Viennese pastry shops”, and remembers how “when the world was young I used to run riot in there. How sweet it was”. The grand opulence of Welles’s hotel suite is merely de rigueur – “here at the Hotel Sacher that’s the way it is”. He wonders “how much pink champagne must have been poured here into how many pretty ladies’ slippers”, and remarks that late at night one can still “seem to hear again the clop clop of the horse-drawn Fiakers bringing the old playboys back”. He remembers from his “own childhood days the formidable Frau Sacher herself”.
As a child Welles was an international gadabout – “the best cities were certainly Budapest and Peking”, he recalled4 – who dubiously claimed early acquaintance with such world figures as Sarah Bernhardt and Harry Houdini. The latter taught him magic “as a favour” to his father.5 He also recalled a particularly boring lunch in 1920s Bavaria seated beside Adolf Hitler. However accurate these unverifiable memories, Welles’s absurdly interesting early life was an education in history, culture, and the panoply of human types.
His 1969 homage to his fantasy Vienna – an invitation to warm in the afterglow of faded glories – is hardly a radical, interrogative film essay on this city’s dynamic culture and history. Instead, Welles explains:
Your true Vienna lover lives on borrowed memories. With a bittersweet pang of nostalgia he remembers things he never knew, delights that only happened in his dreams. The Vienna that is is as nice a town as there is. But the Vienna that never was is the grandest city ever.6
The mode of nostalgic reverie was hardly reserved for Vienna. It was, in fact, Welles’s characteristic approach to the past. His explanation to Peter Bogdanovich around the same time has been frequently quoted:
Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly. Every country has its “Merrie England,” a season of innocence, a dew-bright morning of the world. Shakespeare sings of that lost Maytime in many of his plays, and Falstaff – that pot-ridden old rogue – is its perfect embodiment.7
It’s also characteristic that this Vienna segment, and the television special of which it was to be a part, Orson’s Bag (aka One-Man Band), was never broadcast. And although he certainly appeared in front of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel he’d immortalised by his role in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), Welles made only part of the segment on location in Vienna itself. He shot other parts in Zagreb, another former Austro-Hungarian city but by then a northern outpost in Josip Broz Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Other parts were filmed in Los Angeles.8
It was typical of Welles’s happy embrace of fakery to shoot parts of a documentary p
urportedly about ‘Vienna’ in other cities. In this period he worked independently across Europe by what has been called ‘patchwork’. Alternating between multiple projects over long periods in different places, Welles funded stages of production via the film and television industries of various countries, when necessary with his acting income, or else by siphoning the resources of other directors’ projects through special arrangement or by subterfuge. No other major filmmaker of the time worked in this way, and certainly none with Welles’s ambition. Disenchanted with Hollywood, he invented both the methods and aesthetic forms of an independent personal cinema.
‘New Wien’ was not his first use of Zagreb as urban imposter. In 1962 he filmed parts of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in Zagreb as a substitute for inaccessible Prague. Yet the mood is starkly different. For The Trial Welles said he wanted a “modern European city, yet with its roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire”,9 but in fact most of the Zagreb locations centred not on relics of the dual monarchy under which Kafka was born but instead on its Modernist architecture – symbols of the grim autocratic future Kafka did not live to see. Many of the interior spaces of this unnamed cinematic city were created inside the empty Gare d’Orsay in Paris. Welles created an expressionist labyrinth that mirrors the unfathomable bureaucracy of the legal system, self-reflexively defying spatial logic.
The city’s stunning blend of Austro-Hungarian ambience, fin-de-siècle industrialism, and the symbols of modern conformity provided the spatial context for a dystopian fable about power and human dignity – quite a contrast to a catalogue of Viennese pastries. But in fact such strict segregation of modes is rare. Most of Welles’s cinematic cities are the context of both nostalgia and politics: we see this in his New York (Citizen Kane, 1941), his Munich (Mr. Arkadin, 1955), and his bordertown ‘Los Robles’ (Touch of Evil, 1958).
2.
[A] work of art is good to the degree in which it expresses the mind of the person who created it. I always feel very involved with my scripts, ideologically. I’m not interested in them as scripts, it’s their ideological basis I’m interested in. I hate rhetoric in a play, or moralizing speeches, but nonetheless the moral basis of a play is the essential thing, in my view […] I think every artist has an obligation to criticize his own civilization.
– Orson Welles, 195810
This book is a study of Orson Welles as a poet and critic of the city. It is structured around key themes in his film work: historical and contemporary urban change; fascism, racism, and the corruption of institutional power; anti-nationalism and the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism; and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture.
This approach situates Welles in a tradition of experimental twentieth-century artists who sought to reimagine cities in their work, often through an approximation of subjective urban experience, and often in the service of a critical or ideological motive. This particularly Modernist project sometimes embraced grandly synoptic ambitions: examples outside cinema include novels by James Joyce, Andrei Bely, Alfred Döblin, and John Dos Passos.
In cinema this synoptic ambition is most evident in the ‘city symphony’ cycle epitomised by Walter Ruttland’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). But innovations in reimagining the city on film also occurred in narrative-based contexts: in German Expressionism, the Hollywood gangster cycle of the 1930s, and in film noir. Mike Davis has written that distinct from such explicitly avant-garde films as the city symphonies, which were comparable to the innovations of other mediums in their “mappings of the metropolis”, Golden Age Hollywood films (including the film noir) “generally preferred to meet the city on the familiar terms of literature (and, later, of commercial photography and advertising)”.11
By contrast, Orson Welles, maverick experimentalist, usually sought the emphatically cinematic in his creation of cities on film, even when adapting literary works. Welles’s very first cinematic city was a New York of about 1910, invented for a series of silent film sequences intended to be screened during his stage production of William Gillette’s Too Much Johnson (1938). The project was made entirely outside Hollywood and its industrial norms. Welles apparently worked without a script for these sequences.12 Even in the brief period when Welles had access to the resources of Hollywood studios, he constantly sought new approaches to ‘mapping the metropolis’.
Unlike filmmakers who repeatedly made films set in a single city, Welles adopted an approach that was staggeringly internationalist and broadly historical – the United States’ port cities, its industrializing midland, and its borderland with Mexico; the wild tumult of Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and the impoverished fishing communities of Fortaleza; the medieval streets and public taverns of fifteenth-century London; Pamplona’s enduring fiesta; and Munich’s postwar rubblescape.
Throughout this study I have avoided the term ‘represented’ cities in favour of the ‘imagined’ or ‘cinematic’. Although Welles preferred to shoot his films on location – he acknowledged that “stone is better than cardboard”13 – he seems to have had a limited impulse towards mere representation, towards mere spatial verisimilitude. On location, at the level of the individual shot and the creation of mise-en-scène, he embellished and transformed real urban spaces through art direction (notably the introduction of props and detritus to fixed structures), false perspective, expressionist lighting, camera techniques, and optical effects. Through montage the spatiality of these actual locations proved infinitely malleable; moreover, Welles frequently combined shots from totally different locations and conceived new soundscapes in post-production. These efforts to reimagine urban space on film served Welles’s dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes.
In his introduction to the anthology Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (2001), co-editor Mark Shiel promotes an interdisciplinary approach to film studies at “the nexus cinema-city”. He writes approvingly of the ‘spatial turn’ since the 1970s in leftist social and cultural theory, which is to say the emphatic examination of the relationship of space to power. Shiel argues that “cinema is the ideal cultural form through which to examine spatialization precisely because of cinema’s status as a peculiarly spatial form of culture”. He advocates critically approaching cinema as a “spatial system” rather than a textual one because “spatiality is what makes [cinema] different [as a cultural form] and, in this context, gives it a special potential to illuminate the lived spaces of the city and urban societies”.14
With this critical approach in mind, I argue that Welles contributed significantly to the language of cinema as a ‘spatial system’ through his innovations in mise-en-scène, extended takes, montage, and sound, and additionally in his quest for synoptic visions of urban space. Fortunately this exclusively urban prism of analysis focuses a broad spectrum of light on Welles’s sprawling, uncontainable oeuvre. Apart from such unfinished works as his sea thriller The Deep (1967–68) and most of Don Quixote (from 1957), Welles was principally an urban-based filmmaker. For that reason this book can double as a general critical survey of his movies. But inevitably the prism emphasises some films and individual sequences over others, and by necessity sometimes downplays what I consider to be major work (for example, F for Fake, 1974) in favour of the minor (Nella terra di Don Chisciotte, 1964). Nevertheless, I hope this different approach stimulates a fresh discussion of what is most valuable in Welles’s work.
3.
Is Orson Welles rightly to be considered a Hollywood filmmaker at all? His difficult position within that category has often sustained negative critical judgments in the United States – a prodigy in a lifelong decline from the height of Citizen Kane to the indignity of endorsing cheap wine on television. But really, Welles abandoned trying to reconcile his artistic practice to the Hollywood industrial model after less than a decade (1939–1948), with occasional unsatisfying return visits to gauge his compatibility with new evolutions of the industry. After the miracle of
total artistic control on Citizen Kane, every one of his subsequent American studio features was significantly (and sometimes disastrously) weakened by studio-ordered reediting, rewrites, and reshoots. Welles embarked on a heroic struggle for artistic independence in Europe, where he was able to complete to his satisfaction Othello (1952), The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1965), The Immortal Story (1968), F for Fake, and Filming ‘Othello’ (1978). Only Mr. Arkadin was finished by others.
But even in Europe Welles operated on the fringes of commercial filmmaking and for decades was cursed by limited theatrical distribution of his work back in the United States. In subsequent decades those films were often tied up in rights disputes and only occasionally commercially available (if at all), and sometimes in very inferior editions. This led to the effective invisibility of some of Welles’s most important work. The ongoing lack of a containable, finite Welles canon – shrink-wrapped and barcoded for purchase – has sustained those negative assessments of his career trajectory. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of Welles’s most radical champions, has aptly characterised Welles as an “ideological challenge” to what he calls the “media-industrial complex”.15 The breadth of Welles’s achievement isn’t easily quantified. It’s an ever-evolving debate.
In 1959, after losing final cut on his final Hollywood studio film, Touch of Evil, Welles published an essay in Esquire magazine, ‘Twilight in the Smog’, which asserts his estrangement from the industry and analyses Los Angeles’s failings as a city of culture:
According to the map, Hollywood is a district attached but not belonging to the City of Los Angeles. But this is not strictly accurate: Los Angeles – though huge, populous and rich – has never quite made it as a city. It remains a loose and sprawling confederation of suburbs and shopping centers. As for downtown Los Angeles, it’s about as metropolitan as Des Moines or Schenectady.