The Netflix dispute means that the restoration of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is not showing at Cannes. Here is an engaging consolation prize: Mark Cousins’ wayward, very indulgent but deeply felt love letter to Orson Welles. In particular, he looks at Welles’ huge body of drawings and paintings – examining them, rhapsodising about them, free-associating from them.
Welles painted and drew indefatigably from his teen years to his bearded age: fiercely energetic, muscular lines of charcoal, pencil and paint, which were ideas for set design, movie storyboards, sketches of faces, and just visions. Cousins makes a convincing case that his movies were an extension of his (unrecognised) brilliance as a graphic artist, and the people who love the literary filigree of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet or Henry V will never like the more muscular, broad-brush concepts that Welles created for his Shakespearean movies.
Cousins doesn’t appear on camera himself, or only fleetingly; he just gives us his gentle, musical speaking voice, narrating over an attractively assembled kaleidoscope of visual fragments. Sometimes it is so thoughtful, so withdrawn, that it is as if he is recounting a remembered dream. Again and again, Cousins returns to a photo of Welles that fascinates him: Welles sprawled, apparently on a bed, in his handsome early 20s, staring with a frank challenge into the camera. Those great soulful eyes.
The movie clips are chosen with great connoisseurship: there is an intriguing moment when he shows how sketches for a Julius Caesar project show up in his movie of Kafka’s The Trial. Cousins also shows us his own video-diary moments of travelling to the places in Welles’s life, showing us their comparative ruin or obliteration by modernity, and speaking to his daughter Beatrice Welles. He talks about Welles taking his pencil for a walk; Cousins takes his camera for a walk. Perhaps no other film-maker is a better example of Alexandre Astruc’s ideal of the film-maker wielding a camera like a pen.
But all the time, Cousins will keep addressing Welles in the second person: “Look, Orson …!”; “Guess what, Orson …!” He even imagines Welles writing a (very nice) letter back to him with Jack Klaff doing the voice. I’m still not sure quite what to make of that whimsical notion, and sometimes Cousins can sound naive – especially when he talks about Welles’ romantic chivalry as an omnivorous lover. Maybe in the era of #MeToo a more sceptical eye can be turned on Welles “omnivorous” romantic career.
Well, this is Cousins’ film-making voice; it’s an acquired taste but it is so distinctive, and so refreshingly uncynical. As for the second-person tic, only a cinephile as guileless, as knowledgeable or as passionate as Mark Cousins could have got away with it. That’s especially when you consider, in say Peter Bogdanovich’s book about Welles, the difficulty, complexity and hurt feelings involved in really talking to Orson Welles, when he was alive and in a position to answer back.
Shakespeare is in fact the centre of another shrewd point here. Cousins shows us the famous “I know thee not, old man” scene from Chimes at Midnight, when King Henry devastatingly and publicly rejects John Falstaff – devastatingly played, of course, by Welles. But he points out that his identification with the poignant underdog here is misleading. “You wanted to be Falstaff, Orson, but let’s face it, you were Hal.” That’s true: he was Hal, with a touch of Lear, the great king who spends much of his life in a state of exile or dispossession.
Cousins has a third and even more interesting suggestion: that Orson Welles has never been more contemporary, or more relevant, in our new age of fascism and bullyism. Fake news is on the march. Welles was the man who attacked the forces of tyranny in his radio broadcasts and he rallied the liberal imagination against fascism and plutocrats in his great Broadway production of Julius Caesar and in Citizen Kane. It’s exhilarating to imagine what he would have said about the current Washington potentate – or how he would have got stuck into his dressing-up box, with the wigs and fake noses, to play him on camera.
