ORSON WELLES

The reissue of Citizen Kane in a new print and the forthcoming release of Richard Linklater’s delightful Me and Orson Welles provide the stimulus for a short season of films by a man who did much to shape our whole conception of the possibilities of cinema.

“It’s like meeting God without dying,” said Dorothy Parker on first encountering Orson Welles in Hollywood. His legend had preceded him: a boy wonder who could read by the age of two, could recite King Lear by the time of his eleventh birthday, and had written a treatise on Nietzsche. A voodoo version of Macbeth and an anti-Fascist, modern dress Julius Caesar had established his stage reputation as director; and his sensational radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds had been powerful enough to provoke mass hysteria. When, at the age of 25, his debut film Citizen Kane turned out to have the authentic artistry and authority of a true auteur before the terms had even been invented, there seemed only one way Welles’ career could go: down.

In fact, although Kane proved an all-but-impossible act to follow, it would be simplistic to view Welles’ subsequent development in terms of decline or anticlimax. It is true that his career was to have more than its share of disappointments, leaving him looking a bit like Kane in Xanadu: a king in unwilling exile. Equally, though, he was still to create some of the most dazzling moments of cinema — for example, the funfair finale of Lady from Shanghai, and the single-take opening of Touch of Evil. These scenes were caught in that unmistakeable virtuoso camera style of his that he said “describes that sense of vertigo, uncertainty, lack of stability, that melange of movement and tension that is our universe.”

Welles was fascinated by two main character types: the innocent who has his eyes opened to the guilty world around him; and the egomaniac who wants to dominate that world. He anatomised the corrupting effect of power. The situation that aroused his strongest emotion was the act of personal betrayal occurring between men who had seemed the closest friends, allies, confidantes — Kane and Leland (Citizen Kane), Harry Lime and Holly (The Third Man), Quinlan and Menzies (Touch of Evil). Welles was himself the victim of many such betrayals, but he never betrayed his own gargantuan, Shakespearian gifts, and even his flaws and failures dwarf many a director’s successes. His was not a self-effacing cinema, but it is an eye-opening one: the vision of a film artist of awesome intelligence and magical powers. — Neil Sinyard.

Citizen Kane is also showing in this programme as a re-release. Please see page 4 for details.

The programme notes on individual films are by Neil Sinyard, Richard Combs and Peter Walsh.