| I went to a screening of rare Orson Welles reels today by Stefan Drößler of the Munich Film Museum called "Unknown Orson Welles," which turned out to be fascinating. Welles, of course, loved new mediums: he started out in theater and radio, moved to the movies, and finally tried his hand at television. Unfortunately, most of his television programs were never screened, and exist only as pilots, though he did appear in several interviews on popular American television programs near the end of his life, doing Shakespeare monologues and being an amazing conversationalist—the sort of thing that you probably couldn't find today.
The first selection was one of a set of programs he did for the BBC sometime in the 50's called "Orson Welles's Sketchbook," which consisted mainly of his talking to the camera punctuated with (his own) illustrations in ink. This one dealt with his distaste for bureaucracy and officialdom and an incident at the frontier (of an unnamed nation) where he told the guards that his bag contained "a very small atomic bomb."
The next one was a program produced for American television called "The Fountain of Youth," involving a scientist who (it is hinted) has come up with a compound that grants people not eternal youth, but two centuries of it. The story, starring Joi Lansing (who was in A Touch of Evil) and Rick Jason. The story was fairly predictable, but the filming tricks and editing are, as you might expect from Welles, superb, with characters sometimes speaking with the voice of the narrator, jumps back and forth through the story, and occasional breaks in the fourth wall. At one point, Jason's character—an aging tennis champion—nervously refers to the new chaps from California, as the narrator (Welles) calls the viewer's attention to "the melancholy that comes over every tennis player at the mention of the West Coast." (I'm paraphrasing.) The television show was deemed too avant-garde and shelved. A year later, it was aired, won a Peabody, and then was never aired again. But today it's available on Youtube, albeit in pretty bad quality compared to the print we were shown.
Then came an unnamed documentary-type thing, variously referred to as the Portrait of Gina or Viva Italia, about the great actors and directors of Italy. Rozzano Brazzi and Vittorio De Sica are both interviewed (with Welles drily noting the oddness of artists who are acclaimed outside their native lands, but who never achieve popularity in them), but the focus of the film is always on Gina Lollobrigida, who continually slips away just as it seems she might make an entrance. The camera spends quite a lot of time lingering over movie posters of her, but eventually, Lollobrigida is found and interviewed in her country home. She complains about the tax authorities, but ends by saying that Italy is an adorable country—but a strange one.
The piece contains several distinctively Wellesian touches: many of the interviews in it apparently didn't take place in the way shown, but were heavily edited together from Welles's questions and the responses, expertly, often with overlapping sound or a humorous juxtaposition. (Welles came from radio, and was a master of such things.) At one point, he places a bottle on a table, which on close inspection has turned into another bottle in a different shot. During Brazzi's interview, a different shot from the back shows a clearly different fabric from another shot.
Apparently the reel for this was lost for many decades, but found a year after Welles's death in the Lost and Found of a French hotel. Gina Lollobrigida saw it at the screening, and apparently threatened to take legal action; as a result, like many rare Orson Welles work, its legal status is unclear and it can't be released and distributed.
Then we were shown "London," a set of guides Welles did of England for American audiences, though apparently many of the interiors were filmed in Italy. It consisted of four short episodes, which have had to be restored by the Munich Film Museum—the original filming was done in 1968 and 1969, I think, and then Welles came back in 1971 (with a full beard), and did the questions, to be edited in. Since he also plays several of the parts in the 1968-69 sections, a lot of it features Welles, bizarrely and hilariously interviewing himself.
As for the work itself, I don't exaggerate when I say that Monty Python has nothing on Welles. Welles plays an extremely bourgeois English aristocrat (showing out his country manor at the best value for the money), a one-man band, and a dancing bobby, among others. In one selection he visits a Savile Row tailor (always beware of an Englishman's smile); in another, an gentleman's club is shown, no less funny even though the sound is missing. My Criterion Collection DVD of F for Fake has a documentary (Orson Welles: The One-Man Band, available here) that includes "Swinging London," but the others have not been released to my knowledge.
Lastly, we saw a selection of Welles's work on The Merchant of Venice. Chimes at Midnight is often thought to be his final Shakespearean film, but he apparently wanted to play Shylock his whole life. (He does do his monologue on American television, and also, bizarrely, several times in a trench coat at unearthly hours during the shooting of another film.) A few scenes are available (though it's unclear that they were meant to, or could be, combined: some are shot in 30 mm film and others in 60 mm), with Charles Gray as Antonio and Irina Maleeva as Jessica.
A great presentation—I'm looking forward to Part 2 tomorrow! | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Y'all might be interested to know that the 1970's radio drama of Dorothy L. Sayers's The Man Born to be King is being broadcast by the BBC. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Via Matt Yglesias, news on Obama's first appointees:
- Chief of Staff: Jeremiah Wright
- Secretary of State: Rashid Khalidi
- Secretary of Defense: Bill Ayers
- Attorney-General: Bernardine Dohrn
- Secretary of the Treasury: Tony Rezko
Obviously, that still leaves a lot of posts to be filled, but the feeling is that given the current state of crisis in the country the new administration needs to act swiftly to fill the major jobs and these are them.
UPDATE: New appointments — Franklin Raines at HUD, Michael Phleger for the office of faith-based initiatives.
| | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Like every other paid-up coastal elitist, I've been reading up on the fascinating subject of Palinology.
The go-to place on the web for discussion of Palin's regional accent seems to be Mr. Verb, where the comment thread turns up gems like this one from James Crippen, a linguistics student (and Tlingit!) from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. Apparently her dialect is characteristic of the Mat-Su Valley, where plenty of people maintain the distinctive dialect in spite of pressure from Anchorage, about 25 "air miles" to the southwest. And her husband's speech bears traces of so-called "village English" varieties found among Alaskan Natives in Western Alaska.
On the subject of her children's names, I've found the Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing site hilarious for years, but with the uneasy suspicion that the names I was sneering at were just as characteristic of a certain culture (in this case, working-class whites) as Jawaharlal or Windradyne. Apparently it's true. But I had never realized just how regionally-based some names are. The popularity of the names "Jack" and "Jackson" also exhibits fascinating regional trends. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Okay, so about three weeks ago I had a massive hard disk crash. The drive was too physically damaged to recover the data, but I had backups of the important stuff. (Though it turns out I left my iPod connector cable at home, so my mp3s are still unavailable.) I had to reinstall everything, which was a pain, but man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.
The problem is, in a rare fit of responsible password-management, I had reset my livejournal password just before New Years. And I'd forgotten the new one, since I always relied on the cookie, and rarely typed in my password. (This is actually pretty unusual; I think this is the first time I've forgotten a password.) I could just get LJ to send me my password, except for the fact that when I joined several years ago, I used a Sneakemail password in order to avoid spam, and my monthly bandwidth quota had expired.
Which of course is why I'm back on February 1st. I regard this as a sign from the LJ-gods to post more, so poke me if I don't. Happy Black History Month, everyone. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Scott Aaronson writes:Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers
I tried to think of a witty, ironic title for this post, but in the end, I simply couldn’t. The above title is a literal statement of fact.
My favorite comment:Perhaps you could shame Ricoh into creating an endowed chair for you. Or they could fund your research. Or at least send you a printer. Printer made in Australia? Pass!
Update: Apparently incorporating random pictures of Americans into ads is a popular pastime in the antipodes... | | comments: Leave a comment |
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