The unfinished projects to which Welles devoted his energies began in July 1961. This was exactly twenty-five years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the year in which[…]
Directors · Drama · Production History
For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point.[…]
Biopic · Drama · Gothic · Mystery · Myth and Archetype · Psychology
“The opus begins in dying.” – James Hillman “Just as each Gothic tale is itself a dream and also a mirror showing the reader his mind, everything within these symbolic[…]
Directors · Literature and Film · Production History · Writers & Critics
Conrad was more than a mere influence. He was also a direct source of story material. Welles considered himself “made for Conrad” and frequently returned to Conrad’s original stories. Adaptation[…]
Books · Directors · Interviews · Writers & Critics
I could begin to see how the movie was art imitating life and then morphed into life imitating art, with such a palpable sense of the greatest director who ever lived[…]
Directors · Production History
Part I of this article told the story of how Orson Welles, while directing his legendary and never-finished Other Side of the Wind, took time out in early 1975 to[…]
Directors · Production History
2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles. Despite numerous biographies and critical studies, we are still piecing together the full story of his wild and complicated[…]
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Composers · Directors · Music & Musicals · Noir
“Welles familiarizes us with the geography of the town largely through source music. Los Robles is presented as a labyrinth, an inter-place where physical and moral borders are erased.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2009. Hardcover. $24.95. 304pp. ISBN 978-1565125995. Orson Welles, as Walter Kerr wrote[…]
In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness and transcends them
Kane as Welles, also America
Hitchcock has always been considered a director sui generis. John W. Hall looks at Psycho and Touch of Evil to show that even Hitch couldn’t resist the charms — and stylistic strategies — of Orson Welles.[…]
The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity (nightclubs, movie theatres, beatniks, and loose women) is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past. Rather[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
Experimental & Underground · Mystery · New Media
Apichatpong’s film is the bang in the night that has the power to shock us out of convention, to help us open our eyes and ears to the rich and[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Directors · Historical & Epic · Horror · Politics
I have been a fan of writer/director Larry Cohen ever since viewing his 1970s classics The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) and It Lives Again (1978). Cohen was[…]
Biopic · Drama · Writers & Critics
In both texts, these strategies suggest similar attempts to represent the present moment’s relationship to the American past. Faulkner’s devastating analysis of race and Welles’s meditations on wealth and worth[…]
