Storia immortale

The more I watch this movie, the more I love it. It's a gift of a genius who proves how easily Literature and Cinema can be mixed in a powerful way. Although is short and barely commercial, is a gem, a masterpiece of colour, rythm, music and words. The lasts shots, are simply magic.

Obscure even in Welles' obscure filmography and hardly available anywhere, "The Immortal Story" (1968) is his shortest feature film and would be followed only by "F for Fake" (1974) and "Filming 'Othello'" (1978).

Even Borgesian in its treatment of life and fiction, mirrors become important metaphors right away: the looking glasses brought from France, the mirrors as witnesses to the long- vanished happiness of the Ducrot family, Clay having a mirror in his dining room, him sitting face to face with his portrait; and then, the film becomes a kind of a mirror, which then takes a life of its own when he devices the brilliant fiction in his own life. Quite soon the film and its life become a game of cards, a grand trick of the cosmos. The scene where they bathe in the light is pure magic.

Satie's piano pieces are powerful. Also, I wonder how and whether at all this would have anticipated something in "The Other Side of the Wind"?

I just saw The Immortal story for the first time today thanks to TCM. I was impressed by the otherworldly quality of the film. Reading through the IMDb reviews I was surprised that no one speculated as to why Wells chose this story. To me the answer seems obvious. The film is about a lonely old man who wants to bring a story he has heard to life. He knows that he cannot accomplish the task alone so he turns to a minion in his employ to arrange the set piece and hire the players. Ironically even when he succeeds, it becomes clear that no one will ever hear the recounting of the story.

This is how Wells probably viewed his own life. ​Throughout his film career he struggled unhappily with his dependence on the help of producers and his need to control actors in order to bring his artistic visions to life. Sadly, even on the few occasions when he successfully got films completed, to him it seemed as if he never really had an audience.

Welles continues to amaze me. I've made an effort to track down some of his less available movies, such as F For Fake, and this one. This is closer in style to the Magnificent Ambersons than anything else I've seen. Welles seems to have a love for the people of this world he creates and frames them in vibrant colors with golden lighting. The pace, unlike the majority of his works, is slow and deliberate without the trademarked quick editing. The story, too, is not rushed and the ironic twists are revealed with a sense of sadness, no one's "comeuppance" seemed justified but rather a tragic outcome of each character's personal flaws. I really recommend this for fans of the master. I think many will find this odd and I imagine that many younger viewers (the ones who find black & white dull or Hitchcock overrated) will find this unwatchable.

Orson Welles directs based on a novel by Isak Dinesen a story about an Ebenezer Scrooge type, the miserly rich old man who doesn't believe in stories and prophecies, who hears a story about a sailor picked up by an old man in a harbor to sleep with a beautiful woman and decides to make the story happen in real life, "so that at least one sailor can tell it from beginning to end, like it happened". This is like an essay on fiction, or like a charcoal sketch, except the charcoal in Welles' hand leaves smudges and we get those smudges as handprints on the canvas because The Immortal Story seems to talk about the anxieties of a storyteller and a magician but also of an aging man and an exile. In parts of the static, dour, style, he channels Bergman, old Dreyer, Beckett, his own work, there's a beautiful piano accompaniment and Jeanne Moreau, in her Pierre Cardin attires, looks ravished and ravishing at the same time. In the end the story is reenacted for the old man's benefit and to his satisfaction, but the sailor leaving the mansion refuses to tell it to anyone because who would believe him anyway. Perhaps Welles is telling us that some things, the important ones in life, we tell as stories because no one would believe us otherwise, so that in the world of imagination they can become as real and so communicate their truth, and inversely that perhaps all stories in the world happened somewhere to someone in some form, and we only hear their echo through the centuries. Or even that we're all as characters in a story, moving at the bidding of a higher authority that pulls the strings, but it's our right and choice to tell our story or not. Food for thought.