Review: The Eyes of Orson Welles Meets Its Subject on His Grandiose Terms

The film honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

The Eyes of Orson Welles
Photo: Janus Films

Though studies of Orson Welles are an ongoing industry, North Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins has found a novel hook on which to hang The Eyes of Orson Welles. Near the beginning of this essayistic first-person documentary, Cousins reveals that he’s procured hundreds of Welles’s drawings and paintings with the help of the legend’s daughter, Beatrice. And Cousins uses the artwork as a springboard for examining Welles’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, suggesting that he was driven, in each medium, toward rendering “sketches” that reveled in a vibrancy of rough-hewn spontaneity and incompletion.

Though Cousins never directly says this, one imagines that Welles was stimulated by trying to remain as close to an initial artistic impulse as possible, without potentially killing it with revision. In this context, perhaps it’s ironic that one of the central elements of his late-period filmmaking process would be editing, in which he would refine incomplete footage into free-associative collages, rendering scenes into haunting subliminal shards.

However, some of the paintings clearly required more effort, such as a startling abstract work that Welles completed after being kicked off Touch of Evil by studio execs: a tableaux composed of a darkly colorful series of overlapping square-ish shapes that suggest considerable anger, as Cousins and Beatrice both observe. Later in The Eyes of Orson Welles, Cousins evocatively compares this painting to Piranesi’s print series “Imaginary Prisons,” which he suggests may have also influenced the gothic sets of films like Macbeth.

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This sort of free association is Cousins’s supreme gift as an artist, as viewers of his eccentric and daring magnum opus The Story of Film: An Odyssey will already know. In his documentaries, Cousins refuses to wear the critical straitjacket of faux objectivity, in which those reviewing art pretend that they’re impartial robots weighing quantitative data in support of a conclusion. Art, especially art we love, hits us in wild and wooly ways, often either contesting or affirming the knowledge, longings, pleasures, resentments, and all-around baggage that make up our shifting emotional temperature.

Cousins can’t really “prove” a connection between Welles and Piranesi, just as he can’t technically prove other cross-pollinations of references that appear in The Story of Film and The Eyes of Orson Welles. But such riffs are reflective of how pop culture becomes a hydra of consumption and memory. Welles was a deeply emotional and spontaneous artist, as well as a vast consumer: of art, women, food, booze, connections, global culture, and most especially the fumes of his own legend. Cousins meets him on his grandiose and melodramatic terms, emulating his hero’s compositions while riffing in all sorts of directions about a life that commands endless fascination. Cousins is as insatiably hungry for Welles as Welles was hungry for everything, and both men are obsessed with the notion of sketching—with suggesting an idea, for flavor and texture, and then abandoning it for the next passing fancy.

Cousins devotes quite a bit of the film to his subject’s liberal political convictions, detailing mother Beatrice Ives’s influential activism in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and following Welles as he traveled Europe as a teenager and vividly sketched the faces of working-class men and women. This portion of the narrative climaxes with an astonishing bit of footage, sampled from a 1955 BBC program called Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, in which the host details the brutal beating of Isaac Woodard Jr., an African-American World War II veteran. Welles referred to the cop who blinded Woodard as “Officer X” and called for his exposure and punishment, which he helped bring about only to see the attacker predictably unpunished by an all-white jury.

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In a characteristic flush of inspiration, Cousins rhymes Welles’s coining of the term “Officer X” with his earlier blossoming obsession with sketching faceless bodies amid the rise of fascism in Europe. Eventually, Cousins even rhymes these associations with one of the most intense moments in Welles’s filmography: Othello’s murder of Desdemona in Othello, in which he strangles her with white cloth, making her faceless. Later, Cousins rhymes this moment with a scene from The Trial, in which the villain is shown relaxing with a hot towel that obscures his face, with rising steam which suggests that the man has dematerialized, becoming pure will. Which is to say that Cousins does a succinct and thoroughly unique job of connecting Welles’s politics to his art, without over-interpreting the man and work to death.

Cousins’s wandering, sketch-like approach leaves other subjects dangling. The filmmaker mentions Welles’s many lovers, memorably including vulnerable notes and drawings that Welles made for Rita Hayworth while their marriage was crumbling. Yet Cousins is uncomfortable with the filmmaker’s womanizing, as well as with the opportunism Welles displayed as a young man on the rise who collected and discarded influential friends and collaborators like John Houseman. And, yes, these subjects are pertinent to a body of art that endlessly pivoted on betrayal and rejection. However, Cousins does poignantly, fleetingly acknowledge the irony of Welles wanting to simultaneously be a rebel and a king, empathizing with, say, Falstaff as well as Prince Hal—a hypocrisy that many people must wrestle with. (Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, also quoted here, is much more willing to engage with the manipulative side of a then-on-the-rise theater director.)

The Eyes of Orson Welles is at its best when sticking close to its initial conceit. Comparing Welles’s sketches to his films, Cousins captures the resonance and the sheer sensory exhilaration of Welles’s formalism as perceptively and viscerally as any critic ever has. Cousins is alive to the erotic, insular strangeness of Welles’s visions, which are often governed by movement, for its own sake, that’s so poetically divine as to be self-justifying.

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In a particularly astute bit of criticism, Cousins likens a few pencil strokes on a piece of paper to a scene from The Lady from Shanghai, when the camera drifts across Rita Hayworth’s semi-clothed body while she hands a man a cigarette so that he may light it. The movement serves no direct narrative purpose, but it’s instrumental to the film’s sensual hothouse atmosphere. Like many of Welles’s flourishes, such a camera gesture feels both self-contained and of a piece with a neurotic urge—a longing for control and for possession of people—that governs the auteur’s work at large. Like Welles, Cousins understands this ambiguous intoxication to be rooted in a privilege that can curdle into a kind of authoritarianism, or lead to a habitual self-martyring that can become a prison—even if he ultimately proves to be skittish about these subjects. Nevertheless, The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

Score: 
 Director: Mark Cousins  Screenwriter: Mark Cousins  Distributor: Janus Films  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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