The Eyes of Orson Welles

This is constructed in a different way than most looks at a life, with a focus on art and drawing to see things the way he saw. It mostly works really, really well, with some great attention to tiny details from his life that only a real scholar would know. It stumbles a bit with the part where he has orson talking back, but that's only 10 minutes of a 100 minute movie that really does offer something for even the person who already has read everything there is to read about Welles.

This documentary had potential, but it was ruined by the dull, never ending narration. Very boring, IMO. What a waste.

In his imaginative take on the life of Orson Welles, Mark Cousins looks at Welles's personal sketchbooks - he was an inveterate scribbler, though he rarely went as far as to produce what we might call finished artworks - and sees the connections to his films, and to his life. This is not just a novel but also an interesting approach: film is a visual medium, but the visual side of a movie is the hardest thing to talk about: the sketches provide a key to the way that Welles conceived his tableaux. The other part of the thesis is that Welles's choice of movies tell us something about his private character. This is more contentious: does someone choose to play Falstaff, say, or film Don Quixote, because the character fits their own self-image? Maybe not, but Cousins gives us a credible speculation of how Welles' own character manifested itself in the work he produced, of how his films reveal the man who made them. Instead of a conventional narrative, Cousins prefers to engage in one half of an imaginary dialogue with the auteur: at times this is less successful, as when Cousins seems to impute a connection of Welles with Ireland that seems more important to him than he manages to convince us it was to Welles. Overall, though, it's a worthwhile endeavor: Welles's story is well known, its arc usually presented as tragic; but Cousins succeeds in making us view it through fresh eyes.

A director described by his portraits, his direction discerned from sketches of memories and memories of sketches. Light is explored in painting and set design, all in an effort to paint Orson Welles in a new light, or figure what light he saw himself in as he positioned figures on a stage. I figure this film goes far enough in capturing the expanses allowed us from Welles' mind and how his lines frame future films. However, I'm a little lost in the repetition of the particular picture with sideburns.

I suppose I am led to see it differently in the different "acts" of this exploration. It feel youthful, then classy, then a marketing shape cut out of virgin clay, then fringe, then cool, then something else entirely. Self-obsessed? Not in a selfish way.

The bee will always make honey.

I've found this documentary with its slow paced narration and editing quite apaising and somewhat poetic. I really enjoyed it, it's rather unusual in these times of fast cuts and over-feeding of information to adopt this counterpoint. I must confess I can not say I've seen a lot of Orson Welles' movies but after seeing this documentary I definitively plan to watch more of them. I also was impressed by how good he was at drawing, in summary a great all-around artist.