Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
Orson Welles, Beatrice Welles
Intro:
There are truly fascinating observations put forward, particularly when he looks at the ‘facelessness’ of characters sketched or painted by Welles after the period that saw the rise of authoritarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s.
Analysing the thematics of Orson Welles’ oeuvre is no mean feat. Finding a through-line that cuts to the core of who the man was, that hasn’t been ground into a well-worn path by biographers and documentarians over the years, seems a tall order indeed.
Enter Irish film critic/author/filmmaker Mark Cousins, who earned his bones introducing cult films for BBC TV on a show in the ‘90s called Moviedrome before graduating to interviewing filmmakers (like David Lynch and Martin Scorsese) for the TV series Scene by Scene. He’s favoured the visual essay documentary format in recent years (in similar territory to Jean Luc Godard), where he re-frames the subjects of his documentaries via his personal perspective on them, addressing the subject of the documentary in the first person within the narration, posing questions to the subject that hang in air, unanswered. In his recent What Is This Film Called Love? he chronicled a three-day ramble around Mexico City, having a ponderous ‘conversation’ (of sorts) with a picture of Sergei Eisenstein.
The success of his softly spoken Northern Irish lilt, narrating in a ‘stream of consciousness’ fashion, depends on how you react to the documentary’s subject matter. In the ground-breaking series The Story of Film: An Odyssey or the wonderful A Story of Children and Film, it works remarkably well, with an almost ethereally beautiful synergy. In the films he’s made that don’t gel as successfully, it can tip over into self-indulgent wankery, with sharp rapidity.
In The Eyes of Orson Welles, Cousins stays true to form and steams in with his signature style and perspective, to wrestle with the core themes in Orson Welles’ filmmaking, drawings and paintings. He breaks the documentary into five thematic segments, numbered like chapters.
This rigidity in categorising an artist’s intent and thought process seems to draw a long bow but Cousins has a considerable amount of insight to offer on Welles’ work. There are truly fascinating observations put forward, particularly when he looks at the ‘facelessness’ of characters sketched or painted by Welles after the period that saw the rise of authoritarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. This concept of ‘facelessness’ became Welles’ go-to motif in films whenever alluding to corruption, loss of humanity and power and there are notable examples in Citizen Kane, Macbeth and The Trial.
Cousins also talks to Welles’ third daughter, Beatrice, who sheds light on her own relationship with her iconic father. However, it’s when Cousins uses Welles’ paintings and drawings (Welles trained to be a painter at the Chicago Art Institute) to find the connective tissue that linked his films, his romantic life and his political views, that the film soars. Using Welles’ artworks as a way in to examining his inner life is an inspired move, though it does shift the focus of The Eyes of Orson Welles, seeing it become less a dissection of a filmmaker than it is an overall reflection upon the creative impetus of an iconic artist.
