An eighteenth-century Venice
In the play, one of Iago’s favorite images is that of the net, the snare, the web, making him a fisherman, a hunter, a spider. “With as little a web as this, will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio,” he says. Our camera holds that image before your eyes and plays variations on it. We see it through the grate which Desdemona passes to escape her father, the net that holds her hair in Cyprus, the ships’ rigging, the rack of spears in the fortress, and the windows and doors of Othello’s bedroom. In the end Iago is caught in his own mesh; always hovering above him is the iron cage where the sun will scorch him and the gulls will peck at his flesh.35
In ‘The Shylock Story’ the motif returns, now suggesting both Jessica’s imprisonment by her father, Shylock, and his imprisonment as a Jew in an anti-Semitic city. Welles specifies the motif in the pages of the script: a shot of Lorenzo fixing a mask to Jessica’s face is to be through an “iron grill”, and as Shylock moves through the streets he is seen through a “grilled window”.36 On film Welles uses a variety of diagonal cross-bars and an echo of this in the pattern of paving stones on the edge of the canal.
In some ways ‘The Shylock Story’ recalls The Trial. Welles reconceived the Jewish themes of both source texts. On US television in 1967, introducing a performance of the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” monologue, Welles argued that “on the matter of bigotry nobody has ever spoken out as well as [Shakespeare] did three hundred years ago”. Joseph McBride notes that the “cold fury” of this performance of the speech was “consistent with his rewriting of Kafka to make The Trial’s post-Holocaust version of Joseph K. defiant at the end rather than acquiescent in his own execution”.37
In ‘The Shylock Story’, the moneylender encounters stationary figures in carnival masks on the edge of the canal: a chilling tableau vivant.38 It recalls the unsettling moment in The Trial when Joseph K. walks through a field of emaciated, half-naked stationary figures wearing numbered signs and waiting – a clear evocation of the Holocaust.
Tableaux vivants in ‘The Shylock Story’ and The Trial
NOTES
1 Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage, 1991), 279.
2 Uncredited [Orson Welles], The Old Chevalier, Script (mimeograph, 1978), 1. Box 11, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
3 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 211–12.
4 Orson Welles, The Dreamers ‘Ninth Revised Screenplay’ (photocopies of annotated typescript, 1980-85), 2. Box 12, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
5 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 82.
6 Welles quoted in Krohn, ‘My Favourite Mask Is Myself’, 56, 64.
7 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 270–9.
8 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 102.
9 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 71.
10 See Kirsten Yri, ‘Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front’, American Music, Vol. 24, No. 4, winter 2006, 421–44.
11 Bill Krohn, ‘The Force of the Work’, quoted in Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 112.
12 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 96.
13 Welles quoted in McBride, Orson Welles, 168.
14 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 102.
15 In the early 1980s Welles scripted a King Lear, created a video presentation for potential investors, and had a professional photographer seek out locations in France. Test photographs of Hautacam, Pierrefitte, and the fortress at Carcassonne survive in Welles’s archives. Even after a production deal with the French government broke down in early 1985, Welles continued to work on a draft of the script and a shot-by-shot breakdown for the first half. See King Lear (1983–85) (subseries), Photographs, 1983–85?, box 15, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University Of Michigan; King Lear (subseries), Script (20 September 1985), box 2, Orson Welles–Alessandro Tasca di Cutò Papers, Special Collections Library, University Of Michigan; and Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 452, 511–12.
16 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 387.
17 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 211–12.
18 Michael Anderegg, ‘“Every Third Word a Lie”: Rhetoric and History in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight’, in Bridget Gellert Lyons (ed.), Chimes at Midnight: Orson Welles, Director (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 327.
19 Treasure Island was finally produced as a feature starring Welles from his pseudonymous script in 1972. He did not direct. See Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 250–66; Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 268–9.
20 Orson Welles: The Paris Interview (Allen King, 1960) (USA: Kultur Video DVD, 2010).
21 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 256.
22 Andrew Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 127.
23 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 256.
24 Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 222.
25 Filming ‘Othello’.
26 Filming ‘Othello’.
27 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 167.
28 Filming ‘Othello’.
29 See Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 173, 179.
30 See Krohn, ‘My Favourite Mask Is Myself’, 46.
31 In Orson’s Bag (1968–70) (subseries), Draft pages (various scenes) (typescript, carbon, and photocopy, annotated), 10 April – 11 September 1969 (folder 1). Box 17, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan; Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 285–7.
32 I viewed the 2001 partial assemblage Orson Welles’ Shylock on 17 June 2013 at the Filmmuseum München, Germany. The reconstructed film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 1 September 2015. See also Anonymous, ‘Orson Welles Stars on Eve of Venice Film Festival’, Agi.it, 7 August 2015, at http://www.agi.it/en/people/news/orson_welles_stars_on_eve_of_venice_film_festival-201508071640-spe-inw0004 (accessed 6 September 2015).
33 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 30.
34 In Orson’s Bag (1968–70) (subseries), Draft pages (various scenes) (typescript, carbon, and photocopy, annotated), 10 April – 11 September 1969 (folder 1).
35 Filming ‘Othello’.
36 In Orson’s Bag (1968–70) (subseries), Draft pages (various scenes) (typescript, carbon, and photocopy, annotated), 10 April – 11 September 1969 (folder 1).
37 McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 236.
38 McBride writes that some of the masked figures were “full sized wooden puppets”. McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 235.
CHAPTER 13
IN THE LAND OF DON QUIXOTE
Among the films commercially released during Welles’s lifetime, Spain appears as a setting only in parts of Mr. Arkadin and F for Fake, and as a travel destination in two relatively obscure television documentary series. This group of films does not comprehensively communicate the profound significance of Spain across decades of Welles’s creative life; a fuller appreciation can only be reached by examining his numerous unfinished or unproduced projects. Although he often located the action of these films in the pastoral countryside and the village, Welles also frequently filmed, or planned to film, Spanish cities – particularly Madrid, Seville, and Pamplona.
The setting appeared early on, long before Welles had the opportunity to film on location in the country. Sometime in the mid-1940s Welles developed a film based on Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845). There seem to have been alternative conceptions, one set in Latin America and another retaining the original Spanish settings – the Upper Andalucian sie
rras, the Basque Country, Cordoba, and Triana, the Gypsy quarter of Seville, where Welles had lived for a spell the century after Carmen.1 Welles sent a Spanish-set treatment written by Brainerd Duffield to Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, appending a note promising “not the operatic dilution, but the original melodrama of blood, violence, and passion”.2 Although Welles’s Carmen never went beyond pre-production, Rita Hayworth co-produced her own version, The Loves of Carmen (Charles Vidor, 1948), without her by-then ex-husband’s involvement.3
Mérimée’s Carmen was an early classic of the españolada form, a folklorish vision of Spain populated by familiar characters and a range of melodramatic actions rooted in the stasis of a feudal, patriarchal, and superstitious society.4 Years later Welles claimed to “hate anything which is folkloric”,5 so it’s intriguing to imagine how he would have renovated the source text.
In addition to providing colourful story material for European opera and operetta, the españolada was exploited by Hollywood in adaptations of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s bullfighting novel Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922; Rouben Mamoulian, 1941), Rudolf Friml’s operetta The Firefly (Robert Z. Leonard, 1937), and The Adventures of Don Juan (Vincent Sherman, 1948). The form had been propagated at home in early Spanish cinema in films such as Florián Rey’s Nobleza baturra (Nobility of the Peasantry, 1935) and Carmen, la de Triana (1938). In the Franco era such “nostalgic and uncritical recuperation of the past” proved politically useful, even as the españolada form was ridiculed within Spain; see, for example, Luis García Berlanga’s comedy ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Welcome, Mister Marshall!, 1952).6 But the old stereotypes died hard. Spain’s supposed cultural timelessness licensed Hollywood films to blend the folkloric and the contemporary in films such as The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954).
In 1953 Welles visited Spain for the first time in two decades.7 Ernest Hemingway, another public opponent of the Franco regime, also came back to see bullfights and visit the Prado. Hemingway later rationalised:
I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as any of my friends there were in jail. But in the spring of 1953 in Cuba I talked with good friends who had fought on opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War about stopping in Spain on our way to Africa and they agreed that I might honorably return to Spain if I did not recant anything that I had written and kept my mouth shut on politics.8
In 1954 Welles shot part of Mr. Arkadin in the city of Segovia. He used the exterior of the Alcázar de Segovia as Gregory Arkadin’s Spanish residence (“Well, that’s a castle in Spain for sure!” notes Guy Van Stratten). Arkadin’s masked ball, much of it clearly shot in a studio, featured costumes based on the art of Goya.
Although Arkadin’s brief depiction of Spain is merrily unrealistic, the film avoids the obvious folkloric clichés. Welles would continue to explore his own personal vision of Spain for the rest of his career.
Welles lived with his third wife, Paola Mori, and their young daughter, Beatrice, in Aravaca near Madrid between about 1963 and 1968, the period of filming Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story.9 He seemed cautious about flaunting his Spanish residency except for a period in the summer of 1966 when he was following the season of corridas, shooting yet more parts of Don Quixote in Pamplona, and pitching a bullfighting film called The Sacred Beasts. The Welleses relocated to England in 1968, although they did not yet sell their Aravaca residence. Part of that house caught fire in August 1970, while the Welleses were absent, and some of Welles’s documents and possessions were destroyed.
Mr. Arkadin: The Alcázar de Segovia and the masked ball
* * *
Welles had visited Spain and France to film episodes of Around the World with Orson Welles in early 1955, shortly after his loss of editorial control on Mr. Arkadin. His ambitious agreement with Associated-Rediffusion called for twenty-six half-hour television episodes, an opportunity to renew his cosmopolitan public persona in a new medium. But in October Welles broke his contracts and departed Europe without notice. Associated-Rediffusion completed and broadcast the material as a six-part series. Another episode on the Dominici murder case near the village of Lurs, France, was not completed, possibly due to censorship concerns; it was reconstructed as part of a documentary in 2000.10
The series as it was broadcast represents an innovative development of Welles’s ‘first person singular’ approach for the medium of television, a technique that would mature by the time of F for Fake. He conducted interviews on location, but his responses in counter-shot where obvious reshoots; he also tended to restructure the conversations in the editing room.11 In 1958’s Viva Italia (aka Portrait of Gina), an unshown television pilot made in much the same energetic style as Around the World, the editing recasts interview subjects such as actor Rosanno Brazzi as agreeable commentators on what edges close to a Welles monologue.
Two episodes of Around the World focus on the “contented, grounded Basques, who have lived for centuries satisfied in a static, agrarian society”.12 The village of Ciboure, legally in France, had preserved the Basque language and culture. The documentary allowed Welles to again ridicule the political fiction of national borders by celebrating the endurance of a culture that predated the French and Spanish nations and straddled the territory of both. It also gave Welles another opportunity to celebrate an Arcadia, an idealised pastoral counterpoint to the corruptions of modern urban life. In fact, the sequence of a procession of Basques through the hills almost exactly resembles in its framing shots in the staged funeral Welles filmed thirteen years earlier in the fishing community of Fortaleza, Brazil, but was never able to edit.
Throughout the episodes Welles praises the Basque village’s isolation from the mania for technological progress but, ever the inclusive diplomat, is at pains to avoid offence: “If we appreciate the Basques,” he says, “it doesn’t depreciate what is often called the ‘American way of life’.” Welles admires the Basques’ independent attitude, joie de vivre, and stoicism during the recent war. But only his charisma and enthusiasm offset a tendency to infantalise the Basque people, particularly in some of his ‘interviews’ with the welcoming villagers.
‘Pays Basque I (The Basque Countries)’, Around the World With Orson Welles (1955)
‘Four Men on a Raft’ in It’s All True (1942)
Welles with a Basque couple
One of the episodes features a conversation with Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, an expatriate American writer raising a son in Ciboure. Wertenbaker is motivated by a belief that “what we need are intervals – all of us – in backwaters”. Although education is much more demanding than in the United States, in Ciboure the children are “kings of their kingdom” and free of “mechanical aids to amusement”. In his counter-shot Welles nods and opines:
An aid to amusement seems to me to be at the centre of a great part of the moral crisis that we’re faced with all over the world now. I don’t think we need aids to amusement. I think we have to amuse ourselves.
He also tells Wertenbaker:
I don’t think progress and civilisation go together particularly… I think if you move forward you are not very likely to be civilised in the process and the most civilised countries are likely to be those where progress is not considered a very important preoccupation. And I think it’s awful good for a kid – and awfully good for us, too – occasionally, to get away from those areas where moving somewhere and getting something done seems to be more important than living in a certain way and being a certain thing.
Despite his diplomatic disclaimers, it’s difficult not to read this as a statement that civilisation is lacking in progress-mad America. But neither does he grant Basque society that status. Wertenbaker makes a summary statement that the Basques are “proud of their past, and they’re easy in the present, and they’re not afraid of the future”. Welles calls it “a beautiful phrase and a wonderful formula” but criticises part of it. The B
asques may be easy in the present, he allows, but “very few civilised people are”. He explains: “I don’t think the Basques are totally civilised in the pure sense of that word, because civilisation does imply city culture, by definition, and these people don’t have a city culture.”
Welles also disagrees that the Basques have any justification to be “proud of their past”, because despite their longevity they’ve not “done a lot. You can only be proud of your past if … you’ve built a pyramid or have a library full of books to show for your past.” Welles probably didn’t read Basque fluently enough to come to this final conclusion on its literature, and was ignoring obvious figures such as Maurice Ravel, a Basque composer born right there in Ciboure. But the fact that the Basques had created a culture of their own, which endured despite decades of official repression, is almost beside the point. In many ways the Basque episodes say more about Orson Welles in the mid-1950s than they do about the Basques. The Spanish documentary Orson Welles en el país de Don Quijote (2000) concludes:
In front of Welles’s camera, the Basque country of the 1950s became transfigured into a curious mix of mythological nationalistic imagery and the rural folkloric fantasy used by the Franco regime to try to hide the complex reality of these lands. […]
Orson Welles toured Spain from the perspective of an Anglo-Saxon Hispanist, who with liberal progressive convictions tried to delve into the traditions that fascinated him while accommodating the reality appearing before him to the view he himself formed of the country.13
It’s true that Welles’s introduction of critical nuance to his otherwise celebratory picture of life in the Basque country upsets the easy clichés of the television travelogue. Becoming a Basque may not be a plausible option for the modern city-dweller, but to seek “an interval in a backwater” is a most welcome antidote to the forward-looking obsessions of modernity. Both Welles and Wertenbaker value Ciboure as a pastoral retreat, a place free of both progress and civilisation, an escape from urban society rather than a totally fulfilling alternative way of life in itself.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow Page 28