Copyright Contemporary Review Company Limited Nov 2004'A BLIND man', Orson Welles said, 'should be capable of appreciating a film'. He was referring to the contribution of sound in so visual a medium. Music certainly is, and always has been, quintessential in the nature of film. Experiments with sound accompanied the development of film as an art. Though it took many years to establish the technique of sound on film, live music accompanied public performances. A totally silent film is a strange experience. Especially in the flickering monochrome of the pioneering years, a silent film seems to resemble a dreamed recollection of something personally witnessed. It is ghostly.
The dream-like or spectral qualities of film remain even as sophisticated familiarity reduces the privileged mystique of the experience. A film made with integrity can continue to entrance by its appeal to our imagination. Art is never solely a matter of technique. It was another of Welles's observations that anyone can make a film. Perhaps he was recalling his meeting with John Ford who told the young Welles that he could learn the craft of filming in a day. The rest was a question of having something to say. Let us say it was a question of having a vision that did not depend entirely on artifice and illusion.
It may be the sound of a Welles film which is the more arresting than the visual experiments, interesting as these are. The visual effects still serve to remind us how conservative and limited is cinematography. This is true even as film since Welles is capable of a quasi-realism indistinguishable from actuality. Turn away from the special effects and there is nothing beyond a cacophony. A Welles soundtrack is a composition in its own right. He and his team served a famous apprenticeship in radio. Listening now to those broadcasts is like seeing the still photographs of the Moscow Art Theatre come to life. There is Stanislavsky moving as Chekhov listens. They are fashioning the way we will come to understand things. Welles shaped his radio work like films. The rhythms are faster than the conventions of theatre (he played his theatre rapidly, too). There is the montage effect with cross-cutting from scene to scene. Voices overlay one another. And where a longeur is necessary, it is punctuated by something unexpected, inappropriate even. We are required to remain alert.
The intensity contributes to the authorial signature. For Welles art is a subliminal dream of powerful intentions-erotic or violent-tamed by the charm of an extraordinarily revealed personality. He allows us, unknown and anonymous onlookers, to imagine ourselves privileged to his secrets, though we suspect these are no more than chiaroscuro tricks of light and shadow. Turn on the arc lights, which we never do, and there may be nothing. And yet. Effects, however marvellous, need the purposive coherence of authorship. With the least of resources an artist can yet produce a masterpiece. Cervantes in captivity can dream of the Quixote. How much great art from Homer onward is the work of the deaf, the blind, the diseased and the mad? Welles was unafflicted except by being a romantic venturer, a condition defensible as a vantage towards a more forgiving future.
When Welles arrived in Hollywood, Scott Fitzgerald - then a script writer predicted that Welles would change film so radically that it would be necessary to return to the beginning and to rediscover the art of film. Fitzgerald died before Citizen Kane was complete. What he might have said would have been enlightening. Would Fitzgerald have been disappointed by the derivative script grounded in the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel? Would it have been a further disappointment that the panoply of narrative devices under Welles's supervision had the suspicion of a jeu d'esprit! Or would Fitzgerald have surmised that Welles and his team were imaginatively dismantling the accepted structures of film in order to open the latent possibilities so often proscribed by consumer populism?
Then we must bear in mind the film that Welles proposed, the unmade masterpiece, American, from which Kane was hastily assembled by a hack scriptwriter and a director reluctantly taking the central role in a film intended for another. 'That would have been some film', Joseph Cotton, the intended star of American, mused many years later. Cotton himself was one of those who anonymously doctored the script of Kane into capable life. On seeing the finished work in his native Argentine, the young Jorge Luis Borges recognised a complement to his own vision of human nature as a series of infinite reflections. It was, he concluded, not intelligent but creatively powerful. As soon as it was possible to do so, Jean Cocteau visited Welles in homage. For he saw in the mass market of Hollywood one whose artistry might equal or surpass anything available in the European art houses. Inspired by what Orson Welles had sought, Cocteau was one of those who began to fulfil Scott Fitzgerald's prophecy but not in the terms that Hollywood might understand.
Welles himself spent most of his life in exile. American culture accepted him as a personality, and as a showman, without according him the respect of an artist. The ashes of Orson Welles are laid to rest for ever in the well (the pun is surely intentional) of a garden in the Andalusian mountains. Spain had been the exile's haven, for it was a restless life supporting his prodigious talent. Yet he remained American, a man seeking the recognition of the culture which had created him and had given him that essentially American confidence, primitive (though it thinks itself innocent) and protean (though it thinks itself liberal). The affinity with Walt Whitman (whose Song of Myself Welles recorded memorably) is telling. Whitman, so deeply sensuous that his poetry has the emotive compulsion of the fairground mountebank, was famous enough to be used in advertisements. Those who knew nothing of the poetry knew of the face in the least poetic of contexts when they opened a cigar box. It was American fame, a celebration of achievement harnessed to a commercial enterprise.
There is about Orson Welles a comparable myth forged by publicity which tells no lies yet speaks no truth. He feasted on his myth, from the boy genius to the grand old man. There was in fact nothing unusual in his early entry into the theatre. A casual glance at a biographical dictionary will confirm this. And Welles began playing old in life as in art when he was not yet forty. He shed his youth as he shed his bid for stardom in the Hollywood canon. He went to Europe to play Faust and Falstaff and Captain Ahab. The unkind said he could have played the whale, but Welles was too intelligent to be a fool for ever. He had little pride, though an exceptional fund of passionate integrity.
Michael Redgrave, a man of many talents himself, said that working with Welles was so exciting he didn't want to stop. Certainly the energy of Redgrave's performance for Welles is incandescent with the uncoiling of the character. That was the characteristic Wellesian style. It is there in his literary style, a narrative volition which makes one regret that he wrote so little.
The nervous vitality is there even in those later, reflective pieces. The Immortal Story tells of a dying old man's grasp at life by watching a young man enact desire with the old man's mistress. It is a return to an earlier theme of the devious merchant and the naive sailor. Whereas in the earlier Confidential Report the old man seeks to cover the tracks of his life, in the later, shorter film we see a vignette of a deeper corruption, of a manipulation of others for its own sake. It is a metaphor, perhaps, of the theatre itself, cynically presented as if art were a snare for the unwary idealist.
Perhaps, then, there we are witnessing the conflict between the commercial compromise of the showman and the integrity of the auteur. Françoise Sagan was surely right when she said that Welles would have loved to have been rich. It was his saving grace that great wealth eluded him, and that he needed to strive for selfexpression in whatever came to hand. He could have been many things, because of his talent and his charm. That he chose not to seek power, politically or through social influence, is testament to a belief in a humane contribution to the world. He would do anything to finance his projects, but he would not surrender that inner voice which whispered marvels in his mind's ear.
His intelligence was a natural wisdom which the disciplines of intellect might rationalise without enlightening. He possessed an artist's intuition and a fluency with articulate meanings. He never quite came to terms with the world, for Welles was devoid of cunning. Perhaps that is an American quality. It is a legacy of the frontier where survival depends on honesty and trust. That may be the meaning behind Scott Fitzgerald's curious dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. It is true of all those who know how to fight but not how to win. Ahab may be, therefore, the quintessential American. His pursuit is of a chimera, a savage enemy more cunning than he, and stronger, who must be defeated. Welles's own play Moby Dick Rehearsed is not only a powerful commentary on its sources (Melville of course, and King Lear). Welles recreated the whale hunt as an event in the mind of Ahab who is himself an impersonation by an actor in search of an heroic role. It stands as a literary work of merit in its own terms, as well as a hint of the elusive essay in American hubris which Welles promised throughout his life. Significantly another play by Welles's own hand, Time Runs, was a version of Faust.
We should not think of Orson Welles as a failure. There is too much enriching work in a number of forms. We might think of him as misplaced, a tragedian performing in cabaret perhaps. That would be to deny Welles his place in the world as he found it. He was socially conscious in every sense, alive to the possibilities of celebrating what he found. There are brilliant fragments of an early, unfinished film on the carnival at Rio. The jazz documentary with Duke Ellington proved stillborn at the studio's refusal. These absences intrigue. They lead us closer to the spirit of the man by evoking our imaginative sympathy. They make more real what we can see in its finished state.
Two works seem to reveal Orson Welles more assuredly than anything. The first is a private sketchbook, posthumously made public at a time when attention was turning again to this American maverick. The artwork contained in Les Bravades is a narrative series of the festival by that name in St. Tropez. Though it may be art in a minor key, it has the fluid energy and the vibrant contours of an inspired response to its subject. The mid-century modernism of style identifies an artist in debt to his contemporaries, but the feeling is personal and fresh in the way of a genuine art. Therefore it wouldn't be true to say that Les Bravades is a rehearsal for work in another form. It lives as itself, and testifies by its existence to the range of abilities within Welles's reach.
F for Fake may prove to be the most complete, and the most satisfying of all his works. Innovative in form, this late film is an enquiry, serious without succumbing to the sombre, into the meaning of the authentic in art. It relates documentary fact in a narrative montage which artfully and delightfully conceals the truth it claims to reveal. It is the true story of the forger, de Houry. It is also the true story of his biographers who having written the truth about him proceed to write a fictitious account of a man who has not been seen in decades, Howard Hughes, the excessively rich recluse. Here Welles finds a personal involvement, for that first film, American, was derived from the curious character of Hughes. The question for Welles must be whether his own intended fiction was the more authentic than the hoax biography? Is there a truth accessible to the artist, but not to the objective realist? How can we distinguish the real from the fantastic? Or is all art, in its artifice a lie? And is truth also a lie?
These are strange, profound questions posed with characteristic bravura by Welles clad in Spanish cloak and hat, like an old master. He stands poignantly, contemplating the supremely harmonious beauty of Chartres. There he finds an answer, assured in his avowal that such a perfect work of art cannot be anything but the whole truth. The truth is imaginative without being imaginary. Welles savours the labyrinths of paradox he leads us down.
Welles was too much the artist, or showman, to allow his enquiry to be anything but a personal exploration. There is vanity, too, for he recognises his own ability to deceive. There is a mockery of human vanity, including his own, which makes F for Fake the most encompassing of all his statements. We can detect that mockery as a characteristic thread throughout the oeuvre. It may be called the humility of which a knowingly great personality is capable. The charm is in keeping with the manner of the man.
It is well to remember that we are talking of someone whose talents included accomplished stage magic. It is credibly reported that Peter Sellers had such superstitious doubts of Orson Welles that he refused to work with him. That proscription is merely a neurotic acknowledgement of a powerful magnetism. The conjuror defies us to discern how the trick is done. Welles adds to this the artistry of a performer who may convince us that there is no deception. It is the truth of a well-told story. It is true not to life but to a shared experience in imagination. Our interest lies not so much in the skill of the deception, but in the bravado of the performance.
That, however, is to ignore the possibility of a credible purpose in the Wellesian artistry. The suspicion, voiced by Borges with which many would concur, that the showman was swimming in the intellectual shallows. Was there a discernible meaning to sustain the performance? As cabaret entertainer the answer will be, and need be, no. But Welles claimed, if only implicitly, a depth of reflection. The answer may lie in the innocence of art. The suspecting and/or cunning glance is problematic for art. A prophetic role, even a kind of divination, is available, and perhaps necessary, for the story-teller knows more than he will tell. Welles was physically equipped for the prophetic role, yet there is a hint of the charlatan. The charlatan knows less than he will admit. He has an innocence turned sour, whereas Welles retained a quasi-naivety which never admitted defeat.
The saint must doubt his goodness. The true artist must wonder if he is not a forger. There is a terrible danger in certainty. Conviction is another matter, but the certainty of which I speak is the surety of damnation. The trickery Welles would use was the vitality released in an act of audacity. Consider the crazy mirror sequence in The Lady from Shanghai. It is the vortex uncoiling too quickly for the eye to interpret what is happening. It serves as a paradigm both of a style and of the career which it fed. It was the frenetic energy of questioning the unanswerable. Conclusions were ever tentative.
To return to The Immortal Story, there is no resolution beyond the enigmas encompassing desire and fulfilment. An old man plays puppet-master to a sailor and a courtesan. They must embody and enact the selfless, empathie passion of love, a picture-book romance for the pleasure of one corrupt in body and spirit. It is a commercial enterprise desperately self-deceiving. The suspicion is that this may be true of life, not least for the travelling showman. The artist here doubts his art, and by doing so creates a consummate artistry.
It may be that the problem was immoveable for a European sensibility in a New World heart. If that is so, then this American life in art was essentially the supreme exemplar of its kind. To engage with life in its relentless evolution requires greater power than confidence. The tendency of American culture to self-parody circumscribes its civilising capability. Orson Welles could not be other than he was. The marvel is that in his circumstance he was so much.
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