Edited for release 50 years after it was shot, this autobiographical satire is just as wild, dated and brilliant as you’d expect
A new film by Orson Welles? Even in a vintage year like Venice 2018, that has to be something special. This is Welles’s experimental found-footage-style autobiographical movie about an unfinished movie which was ironically unfinished in Welles’s own lifetime, abandoned in financial chaos in the mid-1970s. Or perhaps this was not at all ironic. Perhaps leaving it unfinished was Welles’s ultimate, secret tribute to the central truth of The Other Side of the Wind: how the agony and the ecstasy of creative art lies in the process not the product, and how the finished work will never measure up to the ideal version in your head.
Now, under the auspices of Netflix, a 122-minute film has been retrieved from more than 100 hours of raw footage by editor Bob Murawski in association with the project’s executive producers, Peter Bogdanovich and Beatrice Welles, Orson’s daughter. The resulting work is as every bit as brilliant and chaotic and exasperating as you would expect, garrulous and madly disputatious, with plenty of tragicomic lechery and crassly dated wisecracks about Native Americans and gays. It’s a fascinating image of Welles’s own fierce self-questioning yet self-affirming state of mind, and the state of American cinema itself as the Hollywood golden age was about to give way to the New Wave.
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