New, 'The Eyes of Orson Welles' (2018) Film, Welles Artwork, TCM Tonite, Now
'The Eyes of Orson Welles,' Mark Cousins’ whimsical but heartfelt love letter to Welles connects the director’s films to his paintings and drawings. The Guardian, May 9, 2018. (~ Very interesting, I was unaware of Welles' artwork & this new film).
The Netflix dispute means that the restoration of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is not showing at Cannes. Here is an engaging consolation prize: Mark Cousins’ wayward, very indulgent but deeply felt love letter to Orson Welles. In particular, he looks at Welles’ huge body of drawings and paintings – examining them, rhapsodising about them, free-associating from them.
Welles painted and drew indefatigably from his teen years to his bearded age: fiercely energetic, muscular lines of charcoal, pencil and paint, which were ideas for set design, movie storyboards, sketches of faces, and just visions. Cousins makes a convincing case that his movies were an extension of his (unrecognised) brilliance as a graphic artist, and the people who love the literary filigree of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet or Henry V will never like the more muscular, broad-brush concepts that Welles created for his Shakespearean movies.
Cousins doesn’t appear on camera himself, or only fleetingly; he just gives us his gentle, musical speaking voice, narrating over an attractively assembled kaleidoscope of visual fragments. Sometimes it is so thoughtful, so withdrawn, that it is as if he is recounting a remembered dream. Again and again, Cousins returns to a photo of Welles that fascinates him: Welles sprawled, apparently on a bed, in his handsome early 20s, staring with a frank challenge into the camera. Those great soulful eyes.
The movie clips are chosen with great connoisseurship: there is an intriguing moment when he shows how sketches for a Julius Caesar project show up in his movie of Kafka’s The Trial. Cousins also shows us his own video-diary moments of travelling to the places in Welles’s life, showing us their comparative ruin or obliteration by modernity, and speaking to his daughter Beatrice Welles. He talks about Welles taking his pencil for a walk; Cousins takes his camera for a walk. Perhaps no other film-maker is a better example of Alexandre Astruc’s ideal of the film-maker wielding a camera like a pen...More, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/09/the-eyes-of-orson-welles-review-cannes-mark-cousins
(2 mins). Film trailer.