Skip to main content

The Other Side of the Wind review – lost Orson Welles epic is hurricane of anger and wit

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Nymiqd
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more