AFI Award for Welles

March 18, 2006

Writing about Orson Welles, I am seeing, will take years. I wish I could follow my typical fashion and just watch everything and read everything.. and then have Welles out of my system. Unfortunately, his work is still just trickling out little by little. In April Arkadin will come out on Criterion, and that will be new. In 2007 I think The Magnificent Ambersons will finally make it onto DVD.. with new footage? So blogs on this topic will just have to accumulate over the years.

This week we watched the German documentary, Orson Welles: One Man Band. The documentary accompanies the Criterion release of Welles' film essay F for Fake.. and is itself something of a film essay. The style for this documentary on Welles and all his multiple unfinished projects reminded me of last year's Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog.

I found the opening to be the most rousing part of it, which featured Orson Welles receiving his AFI lifetime achievement award in 1975. After a gracious acknowledgment, he says:

This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. The maverick may go his own way, but he doesn't think that it is the only way, or even claim that it is the best way... except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different than yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work... in other words, I'm crazy. but not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could not have been made otherwise. Or if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is that I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it weren't for this: my own particular contrariety.

Let's hear it for the mavericks! The whole thing just makes me want to stand up and cheer. While careful to refrain from criticizing anyone, he defends his simple goal to make movies in his own terms. By all the usual measures for success— wealth or fame or respect—he really is crazy.. but for anyone who understands being driven by something further.. something wholly personal.. he makes all the sense in the world.

I was fascinated to catch snippets of some of his unfinished projects.. many of them unfinished or fragmentary. I think that in Welles' case the idea of "finished" is too restrictive. Someday all his fragments.. in whatever state they are.. should be edited and presented on a series of DVDs. Does that Merchant of Venice lack a crucial scene? Let it go. Are there only a few patchwork scenes of Welles reading scenes about Ahab from Moby Dick? Collect those. Let us see these fragments, and they will come to resemble those fragments of Greek poetry which exist only in a few tantalizing lines.. the rest destroyed by time.

At one point Oja Kador mentions that Welles would say that every human being should ask two questions: 1) Why did God create the world? and 2) What should I do next? And that final question, to me, is the most crucial.. to always be asking oneself about the next creative project. It may make on the laughingstock of Hollywood.. turn you into a ridiculous old man that has to do voiceover for Transformers.. but something will be yours at the end.