Doc Corner: Orson Welles x2
Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 1:30PM By Glenn Dunks
It has been suggested that Mark Cousins is a very unique brand of filmmaker. In that regard, he makes a perfect filmmaker for a project about another very unique brand of filmmaker: Orson Welles. I have not seen Cousins’ much-loved The Story of Film: An Odyssey nor any of his other film-centric documentaries so I can’t speak to how his latest fits into his oeuvre, but I do know that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that The Eyes of Orson Welles was not a typical bio-doc about Welles.
Instead, it takes the novel approach of using his work in another medium, his love of drawing and painting, to approach his cinematic output and his character as a man more broadly...
It is a decision that is bound to frustrate those expecting something more traditional full of movie clips from Citizen Kane, The Trial and The Magnificent Ambersons... interspersed with rhapsodic talking heads from familiar movie-makers. And certainly, those movies and more like F for Fake, Macbeth, Touch of Evil, The Lady from Shanghai and The Chimes at Midnight do feature prominently. But they do so within the context of his work with pencils and paint, a tactic that offers Cousins’ film something special and not just a glorified and gussied up Wikipedia entry.
Certainly, it is a side to Welles that I was previously unaware of, and I suspect many other viewers, too. That immediately gives it something of a leg up, yet just offering these works up would not be enough to make it a good movie. Where Cousins succeeds most of all is in offering these works of Welles’ non-cinematic art – albeit a lot of set and costume sketches, cinematic images, as well as a significant number of people’s faces and locations – and weaving them throughout his other creative output, including on stage as well as screen, in a way that illuminates both.
It must be said that Cousins is a fan of a flowery turn of phrase. Sometimes to his film’s detriment as his oft whispery Irish accent can easily get lost in his overwrought screenplay. A well-stretched bow between Welles' death and the release of Groundhog Day eight years later is a particularly baffling example of narration that occasionally, to borrow a far less elegant expression, vanished up its own arse. Still, Orson was something of an indulgent fellow himself, so perhaps it’s appropriate. Whatever the case, I found it easy to forgive, at least in the moment, because the rest – odd-shaped and unexpected – is so interesting. It’s not entirely surprising that it won the Cannes Film Festival’s documentary prize.
The film actually works as a wonderful companion and comparison to Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Both films use a similar technique of telling a wider story about Orson the man around a more focused entry point of his artistic career. In Neville’s case, the making of Welles’ final film The Other Side of the Wind. But Welles’ unique kind of scallywag genius is enhanced by watching one after the other where with just one he may come off as merely brattish and full of himself.
The latter film, an improvement on Neville’s other 2018 documentary, the now infamously Oscar snubbed Won’t You Be My Neighbor, is awash in wonderful archive footage from the later years of his life as he went about the elongated production of Wind. Beyond Welles himself, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead works as an exploration of the changing film landscape of the 1970s that runs parallel and adjacent to the more commonly discussed wave of New Hollywood, and works as a compelling behind-the-scenes narrative of one of the most trouble-plagued (self-inflicted and otherwise) film productions you’ll likely here.
Both films are entertaining and it’s a true wonder that the cross-over between the two is minimal to non-existent. Both shine their own unique lights on Welles, adding dimensions to his story through less expected means. As we’re flooded with biographical documentaries, they’re both refreshing and befitting Orson Welles’ talent and memory.
Release: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is streaming on Netflix. The Eyes of Orson Welles is currently playing in New York and will make its way to the Criterion Collection soon. If you’re in the UK, you can already watch it on demand.
Oscar chances: We frequently mention Oscar’s strange dislike for documentaries about movies (though narrative features about movies are fine with them). They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is the more awards-friendly of the two, but it was on the 166-long list of documentary finalists last year.
Reader Comments (2)
I've seen They'll Love Me When I'm Dead as it's a must for anyone interested in Orson Welles.
I found The Eyes of Orson Welles to be SO facile and borderline insufferable. Maybe I've just run out of steam with Mark Cousins and his ASMR-like voice after the seven hundred hours of The Story of Film, but his ultimate thesis is a point that could be made by literally anyone (Welles's drawings show the same visual eye he displayed in his films!), and with such unprecedented access to so many never-before-seen pieces of art, it's a letdown. And the connections he makes between the drawings and the films didn't strike me as particularly noteworthy or even all that interesting.
I still liked it well enough, but MAN did I roll my eyes A LOT.