The Other Side of the Wind

Netflix has assembled Orson Welles' legendary last project, The Other Side of the Wind, a film maudit shot between 1970 and 1976 and edited, intermittently, during the last decade of the great director's life -- Welles died in 1985 with the film only partly cut, bequeathing to posterity a 100 hours of footage and a chaotic mass of instructions and memoranda.  I use the term "bequeathing" advisedly --  Welles' estate was a mess, besieged by competing factions and, of course, creditors desirous of recouping their investment in the picture.  For most of my life, critics and journalists have breathlessly reported that someone was working on the film and that release was imminent.  But these reports were always wrong -- the movie remained under legal lock-and-key and was not released until November 2018.  Peter Bogdonovich, who appears extensively in the picture, seems to have been instrumental in securing the movie's completion and release -- but Bogonovich, himself, has grown old in these efforts.  After Citizen Kane, Welles' work labored under a sort of curse, vexed by all sorts of problems, many of them self-inflicted -- Welles woes sometimes seem to have been contagious.  Bogdonovich's own career has been blighted as well. 

In a broad way, The Other Side of the Wind resembles Truman Capote's and incomplete Roman a clef, Answered Prayers.  The film, like Capote's draft of a book, is fantastically ambitious, yet, also, weirdly gossipy -- it's an account of a famous, or some might say, infamous film-maker's last day alive, a movie that is surely intended to invoke for the cognoscenti real personalities in Hollywood and the film industry.  In fact, a number of actual directors appear in the picture, notably Bogdonovich, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, and Curtis Harrington.  Industry stalwarts like Darryl Zanuck are mentioned and someone who looks like Dennis Hopper mutters to the camera that he wants to produce a film that will attract John Wayne fans.  The film within the film seems to parody Antonioni and there are innumerable "inside" allusions.  Various sorts of Hollywood celebrities appear either in person or by proxy -- Lili Palmer, whose beautifully impassive mask-like visage dominates many of the images, imitates Marlene Dietrich; Georgie Jessel appears as himself.  As with Capote's unfinished magnum opus, the film is concerned with fashion, notoriety, envious gossip, and most of its running time is devoted to a party for the 70th birthday of the film director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston) -- a party at which Hannaford's unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind is sporadically screened.  (There are power outages that plunge the assembled multitudes in darkness during the screening -- thus, allowing Welles to demonstrate elaborate and picturesque chiaroscuro techniques.)  The film's conceit is that Hannaford's celebrity is so great that a hundred or more videographers and cineastes (a term hurled around with contempt) have crashed the party and filmed its proceedings, either covertly or with the permission of those in attendance.  The movie is shot on a variety of film stocks, all spliced together, probably a device that allowed Welles to shoot the movie as economics dictated and according to what kind of film he could afford at the time.  Although the movie was filmed at intervals over six years, it is surprisingly coherent -- it seems, however, that Welles likely invited his participants to large blow-out parties and, in some cases, simply recorded their antics. 

In all respects, the film adopts meta-filmic strategies. This is evident in the opening, a sort of foreword, that seems to be appended to the movie by Bogdonovich  who narrates behind still shots, including an image of the car crashed by Hannaford -- at the very outset, we are uncertain whether Bogdonovich, who speaks of "many years" lapsing between the time that the film was shot and it's final release, is describing a fiction or the actual series of events resulting in the film that we are seeing.  Throughout the movie, we are continuously teased with the notion that the film is a sort of distorted documentary, that it is showing us something about Orson Welles, although the director as actor never appears in the movie.  The film poses an initial riddle to be solved, a bit like the structure of Citizen Kane and Welles' later films like Mr. Arkadin -- did Hannaford commit suicide in the smashed car after the party?  Or was the crash a mere accident?  (As in Godard's Contempt, the sports car crash is a metaphor for a film that is vexed and can't be successfully completely, what we would call a "train-wreck.)  Borges' famously characterized Citizen Kane as a "labyrinth without a center" and this description applies even more aptly to The Other Side of the Wind -- the riddle posited as the film's raison d'etre is never solved.  Indeed, most of the enigmas devised by the film remain mysterious through the picture's final image.  And, at the outset, we are confronted with the question of how closely we should equate Welles and his baroque career with the central character, the 70-year old Jake Hannaford.  In fact, the equation is never clear and, at times, it seems that Welles is, in fact, satirizing Huston himself, that Huston's persona as big game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, womanizer, and drunk with tendencies toward self-harm (papa Hemingway for movie-land) is a sort of joke to which Huston may not be fully privy -- Huston plays a self-aggrandizing monster, a sacred monster who speaks in aphorisms and seems to be boundlessly narcissistic.  In some ways, he's like Welles as a bombastic, Falstaffian fixture on the late night TV shows -- he was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson and with Dick Cavett -- but, in other noteworthy respects, Hannaford is a parody of Huston's Hemingway affectations.  (Hannaford's 70th birthday is on July 2 -- the date Hemingway killed himself.)  But there's another element, one that seems obsessively if queasily superimposed on the narrative:  Hannaford's sexual vigor is waning and Welles shows the old man watching the sex scenes staged in the film within a film with a savage voyeuristic concentration -- Huston is shown in huge, unflattering close-up, his eyes bearing down on the images projected on the screen.  In the fragmentary film shown at the party, a handsome youth has sex with a beautiful older woman.  The older woman is nude for, at least, a third of the film within the film, mostly shown from the rear ambling around various scenic locations.  The older woman is played by Oja Kodar, Welles' mistress who is given a co-writing credit on the picture, and the sex scenes, very graphic by Welles' standards, seemed presented for the aging director's delectation -- he seems simultaneously aroused and intensely jealous as he watches footage of love scenes that he himself directed.  (This aspect of the movie bears resemblance to Welles' last completed picture, his adaptation of Isak Dineson's The Immortal Story, an uncharacteristically restrained and short film about an old man who arranges for a much younger man to seduce and impregnate his beautiful young wife.)  There is something perverse about the way that Oja Kodar is used in the film -- the camera both loves and despises her and her explicit sexual voracity is shown to be emasculating.  (The movie abounds in subtle, and not so subtle, castration imagery -- in fact, a final scene shows an inflatable bag of air shaped unmistakably like a phallus torn apart by the blade of a scissors.  In an early shot, someone asks if Hannaford regards the camera as "phallus.")  At the same time, Kodar as exotic sexual vampire is also referred to as God -- it's Hannaford's contention that God is female; she's also the archetypal "dark woman" from America's psychosexual thickets:  the movie is distinctly politically incorrect:  Kodar is referred to as "Pocahontas" and "Minnehaha" and she prances around nude, her skin glowing red in the "magic hour twilight", dressed only in turquoise necklaces. In any event, there's something distinctly unsettling about Kodar's presence in the film:  she's Welles' obscure object of desire, simultaneously the castrating Mother, the savage and sexually reapacious Indian maiden, God, the Devil, and the mythic object of the hero's quest. A haze of confusion hovers over the figure:  Kodar is also completely silent -- she exists solely as an object of contemplation for the male gaze.  Although we see her at the party, there's no indication that she can speak at all or that she has anything to say.  In the movie, she's mostly completely silent -- a nude phantasm darting through some psychedelic and surreal arcade.  (I suspect that Welles keeps her quiet because Kodar spoke with a strong Serbo-croatian accent that might have identified her, that is, established a place of origin, something that the film opposes -- in The Other Side of the Wind, Kodar is pure Jungian archetype and archetypes don't have home towns and aren't chatty.)

A central question raised by The Other Side of the Wind is how we are to interpret the film-within-the-film bearing that name.  From the footage shown in the picture, The Other Side of the Wind as mise en abyme seems ludicrously bad -- the movie that Hannaford has made is awful, a kind of pretentious mélange of bad Antonioni (think Zabriskie Point) and a spaghetti Western.  (The party scenes were actually filmed in Nevada within shouting distance of the mansion Antonioni blew to pieces at the end of Zabriskie Point.)  A film executive named Max, early in the movie, watches part of the picture's opening sequence and declares the whole thing a "waste of time."  But it's not clear what the executive means -- is the film a "waste of time" because its objectively awful or is the money-man commenting that he won't be able to make any profit on the Hannaford's self-indulgent project?  (Hannaford, we learn, is proceeding without a script -- although this seems contradicted by a later scene in which we are shown hundreds and hundreds of story-boarded images from the film.)   One of the characters announces that Hannaford, who began his career in silent films, is trying to make a movie for young people to show that he's "still with it" -- that is, relevant.  And the film-within-a-film is replete with garish rock-n-roll sequences, several of them very effectively filmed, psychedelic light shows, casual sex, drug use, and the like.  But Welles surely must know that the symbolic maunderings of the film-within-a-film, despite the beautiful way in which the scenes are shot and staged, are objectively terrible, indeed, risible -- in fact, interviews confirm that Welles regarded the film-within-the-film as a parody and a sort of joke.  But the people at the party are all predictably obedient and seem to consider the picture that Hannaford is making as some sort of masterpiece.  I presume this is Welles' satire on himself, on the notion that the great auteur can do no wrong.  (The auteur theory is represented in the film by the hapless Joseph McBride, an early essayist on Welles, here cast as the scholarly cinephile "Mister Pister.")   But it's not clear to what degree we are supposed to regard the film-within-the-film as wretched -- the satire is blurred, particularly because Welles' filmmaking is so ingenious and technically assured that he can't shoot an uninteresting frame of footage.  Although Hannaford's The Other Side of the Wind (as opposed to Welles' film of that same name) seems horribly flawed, it is, nonetheless, compulsively watchable.

As The Other Side of the Wind proceeds, the film (here meaning the whole enterprise) becomes increasingly cruel, desperate, and sad.  The specter of Hannaford's suicide (or accidental death) casts a shadow over everything.  Sources of funding for the film-within-the-film dry up -- the studio shows no interest, some Texas oil-men proposing funding vamoose, and, finally, Hannaford "puts the touch" on his protégée Brooksie Otterlake.  Otterlake has been successful with his pictures and he is the scion of a lumber dynasty.  Hannaford simultaneously denounces others for suggesting that Otterlake be tapped for money while, at the same time, making a demand for cash himself.  When Otterlake hesitates, Hannaford directs his rage at his protégée and the film ends with the two men tragically estranged.  (This mirrors Bogdanovich's relationship with Welles.  When Welles mocked him on TV on the Tonight Show, making demeaning comments to the guest host, Burt Reynolds of all people, their previously close relationship soured and Bogdanovich didn't talk to Welles again until a few weeks before the old man died.  The rift prophetically on display in The Other Side of the Wind also arises in a context in which Welles seems to be cruelly caricaturing Cybil Shepherd, then, Bogdanovich's wife -- Hannaford has a baby-concubine, a little 16-year old blonde named Mavis, cute as a button, but so stupid that people mock her to her face.  Her principal role in the movie is to pour drinks for Huston's character.  Critics claim the character was based on the very young Cybil Shepherd who began her relationship with Bogdanovich during the shooting of The Last Picture Show.)  Welles taunts John Dale while directing a sex scene with Oja Kodar -- Dale's genitals somehow get tangled in Kodar's dangly necklace and she has to use an alarmingly sharp knife to cut the necklace free.  Needless to say, this interlude intimidates Dale and Hannaford, while shouting voice-over directions to his actors, implies that he's impotent.  Dale, then, stalks off the set creating yet another impediment to the film's completion.  At the party, things become increasingly dire.  Hannaford and Otterlake, with their nasty cronies (led by the loyal Edmund O'Brien) mock a schoolmaster who has been invited to the party to share salacious anecdotes about John Dale. It's no surprise that these anecdotes all suggest that Dale is homo- or, at least, bi-sexual.  (One hopes that Welles didn't act the way that Hannaford is shown as behaving -- Hannaford ceaselessly bullies people both on the set and at the party, generally employing sexually inflected taunts to compel his actors to despise one another.  We know that Fassbinder behaved compulsively in this way, both from an innate sadism and a notion that the more tension he created on the set, the better the performances.  This seems to be Hannaford's modus operandi.)  Midgets get on the roof and start shooting off fireworks.  Hannaford drags out a puny-looking rifle and begins to gun down the paper-mache dummies of John Dale posted in the rocks by the swimming pool.  He engages in a racist rant about killing Indians, calls Oja Kodar "Pocahontas" whereupon she gets a gun and starts shooting lanterns (the power outage remains ongoing), presumably in the hope of burning down the house.  Aware that the film will never be completed, many of Hannaford's acolytes and "yes-men" decamp, several of them indicating they plan to work with the studios on films that can make money.  The Baron, Hannaford's longsuffering scriptwriter describes the director's remaining supporters, most of them old alcoholics, as "the good soldiers" like the men who crossed the Alps with Napoleon and Hannibal.  The film critic, modeled on Pauline Kael, announces to the world that Hannaford always seduced the wives of his leading men so as to "possess his actors" by possessing their women -- her gossip suggests Hannaford's conflicted sexuality, something that has been on display throughout the movie.  Welles engages in a little wish-fulfillment here:  he has one of Hannaford's henchmen punch the critic in the jaw, knocking her out.  The party-goers adjourn to an outdoor theater where everyone gets increasingly drunk and disorderly while the art film-within-the-film is projected on a huge screen in front of the parked cars.  (All of this is spectacularly filmed.)  Otterlake and Hannaford quarrel -- Otterlake says:  "What did I do to offend you Daddy?"  Hannaford tells him to kiss his ass.  Otterlake, who has attended Harvard, cites The Tempest -- there are valedictory lines about "abjuring this rough magic" and "all our revels" being ended.  Comes the dawn:  John Dale shows up in the ruins of the party.  Hannaford, who is driving the sports car, calls him "chicken", again accuses him of being unmanly (someone has earlier said "he looks like a girl") and, then, squeals away in the car in which he will die.  In the film-within-a-film projected on the screen over the vacant parking lot, we see Oja Kodar slashing apart a great blow-up phallus.  Cars are roaring by to their workaday destinations on the dawn-lit freeway behind the screen.  The film-within-the-film ends apocalyptically (although this is not really the movie's ending -- the reels are being projected out of order):  a tremendous wind roars across the desert, ripping down the film sets, and one of the John Dale dummies, caught in the vortex, has its head fall off. 

The Other Side of the Wind looks fantastic.  Welles fragments the action into thousands of shots.  The cutting is so fast that sometimes it's hard to tell what's happening.  And, yet, also true to form the movie's individual images are beautifully composed and, often, dauntingly complex, layers of reflections, mirrors, false perspectives.  The movie has a distinct musical rhythm -- it flows in a way that is inescapably powerful.  The dialogue is bitter, aphoristic, often memorable -- Welles has his actors lean in to the camera and deliver their lines in very tight, short shots:  it's like a 30's screwball comedy shot by a Cubist:  clever dialogue that is fragmented into a prismatic series of images:  one riposte per shot, then, that shot framed with reaction shots to which there are other reaction shots.  Some sequences are impenetrably complex:  an orgy in a weird psychedelic toilet is fantastically intricate -- there are 500 shots in the course of a four-minute sequence that took Welles nine-months to edit.  (This frenzied editing, of course, is partially camouflage -- Welles has to conceal that the footage was often shot at times separated by months if not years.  For much of the film's production, Otterlake was played by Rich Little -- Little couldn't act and fled the set, a bit like John Dale, causing Welles to recruit Bogdanovich for the part.  Welles didn't get Huston on-board until the very end:  this means that he shot all of the people reacting to Hannaford's character without the leading man:  Welles played that role and people were reacting to him.  When Huston became available -- it was just before he shot The Man Who Would Be King -- Welles filmed him without most of the other actors present, shooting his dialogue scenes in the course of about a week.  The fractured cutting conceals the fact that most of the principals in the film were never on-set together.  The film is exceedingly bitter and savagely cruel.  Whether the movie belongs to the highest order of Welles' work, some of which is the best in all world cinema, is disputable -- the film is too acerbic and its hard to make a successful movie about a main character who is an unmitigated louse or "prick" as Welles says in an interview.  But there is no doubt that the movie is successful on its own terms, fantastically brilliant in its mise-en-scene, and not the work of an old and tired director -- rather, the film emits a sort of wild youthful energy.  Whether the film represents Orson Welles at his best is unclear to me.  But the movie provides Welles' most intense and troubling vision of movies and how they are made and the awful price that genius imposes:  the Baron says at one point:  Hannaford displays a truth of physics -- no machine can produce as much as it must destroy in the name of that production.

(A couple of anecdotes and additional  observations:  Gary Graver, Welles' cameraman, is the only DP in Hollywood who worked both with Ed Wood and Orson Welles -- he specialized in porno films and slasher movies.  Les Moonves, the disgraced chief of NBC, is one of the participants at the party.  The baroque sex scene in which Oja Kodar mounts John Dale in the front seat of a car that another man, possibly her previous boyfriend, is driving through a rainstorm was shot over a period of three years at different locations in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Paris.  The "end money" for the film was provided by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law -- when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the film was locked in a vault and kept there for years.  Orson Welles used to say this:  Every story has a sad ending.  If it doesn't, that's because it's not the end yet.  These anecdotes comes from a Netflix documentary accompanying The Other Side of the Wind, a picture called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, mostly about Welles desperate attempts to get the film completed.  This is a superb documentary and anyone planning to watch The Other Side of the Wind should also make time for the documentary which is indispensable in some respects.)