The Other Side of the Wind Parent Review
In Jean-Luc Godard'due south 1968 film "La Chinoise," one of the characters, Kirilov, announces, "L'fine art ne pas le reflet du réel, mais le reel de ce reflet." Which translates as "Fine art is not the reflection of reality, information technology's the reality of the reflection." In "The Other Side of the Current of air," a motion picture shot in the years between 1970 and 1976 and subsequently (simply partially) edited by Orson Welles, a graphic symbol named Mr. Pister, a very young, whippet thin and presumably callow square of a film critic—played, not coincidentally, by Joseph McBride, who would go along to go, besides a fine critic and scholar in general, one of the key voices keeping Welles' often misunderstood legacy alive—asks its bete noire-legendary director figure, Jake Hannaford, "Is the photographic camera eye a reflection of reality or is reality a reflection of the camera eye?"
This commendation of Godard sounds more than like a piss-take when Pister continues "or is the camera merely a phallus?" This is meant to audio ridiculous, and information technology does, and yet the more yous reflect on what's actually in "The Other Side of the Wind," the more than the idea of that camera every bit phallus—or at least equally impotent phallus desperate to attain tumescence and usurp the passive voyeur status of the eye/lens—gains currency. Amid other things, this motion picture from the manager of "Citizen Kane," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Affect of Evil" and several other masterpieces both mainstream and hermetic, increases the sex-and-nudity quotient of the Welles filmography not past a per centum but by a power.
The story, such as it is, concerns the 70thursday altogether party of Jake Hannaford, portrayed with vanity-gratis abandon and lemon-sucking bitterness by John Huston, who looks like he's been dragged through hell and spat back up onto earth because hell found him likewise hard to digest. To this party take been invited dozens of friends, enemies, well-wishers, and chroniclers. Journalists, academics, TMZ-avant-la-lettre footage collectors, documentarians, and out-and-out spies. The other thread of the story is of the picture Hannaford is trying to consummate, a trippy, arty, uncomfortable, virtually dialogue-free relate of a woman (Oja Kodar, Welles' lover and a credited co-author of the movie) walking nearly naked through the earth and happening on all way of orgiastic activity while pursuing a male biker whom she seduces in a moving car in a sequence that'south virtuosic, dreamlike, and squirm-inducing all at in one case.
The Hannaford party is an assemblage of the footage shot by the invitees. In a narrated prologue, conceived and executed well exterior of Welles' purview, Peter Bogdanovich'south character explains the rationale behind the document. An extra-diegetic text before the motion-picture show proper begins explains that this cut of Welles' unfinished film is an effort to "honor and complete" Welles' vision.
What vision it finally presents is a continually paradoxical one. It is a curse on cinema and a blessing of it. Its explorations of sexuality near explicitness, but its musings on the bailiwick have to do with nothing but secrets. A sniping critic/historian played by Susan Strasberg harps on Hannaford'south camera fixating on his movies' leading men. She recalls that Hannaford had diplomacy with all the wives of his movies' lead males, and theorizes that this was his way of sublimating his desire for the men. Certainly Hannaford's fixation on John Dale (Bob Random), the hippie-curled leading man of the new project, is not healthy. Dale came into Hannaford'south life while the latter was vacationing. The older man believes he saved the younger when he was trying to drown himself. A drama teacher brought to Jake'south party has a different story about Dale's ain ambition. Repressed homosexuality is not especially emphasized here every bit a betrayal of one'south self, but "Wind" is a movie in which everyone is selling anybody out, or at least is susceptible to doing so. Its web of relationships is vertigo-inducing, and the breakneck cutting, constantly shifting motion picture stock, and seesawing aspect ratios don't construct the easiest through-line by which to runway them.
"The Other Side of the Wind" is a very rich film and a very difficult ane. I've seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of information technology that "work," and those where the seams just show also nakedly shift all the fourth dimension. Cameron Mitchell's fired makeup artist, with his ridiculous straw chapeau and bathetic vaudevillian bearing, seems to take dropped in from an entirely different film, and I withal tin can't be certain that's not entirely the signal. Some of the compositions—an early shot on the studio lot, a low-angle into which move Mercedes McCambridge and a couple of other figures to make a squeamish Eisenstein-like three-figure limerick that Welles expanded upon with just the right dolly-in camera motility—are vintage Welles, including uncomfortable closeups like those of Glenn Anders in "The Lady From Shanghai," all of the tricks and trills pushed to their limits like a circus act gone mad. While the film-within-a-pic, with its empty spaces and forced-perspective winks, is parodying Antonioni and other art-movie directors, in that location'south also a cocky-critique or homage in the visual references to Welles' own "The Trial." In "They'll Honey Me When I'm Expressionless," the fascinating documentary about the making of this moving-picture show that's also an excellent companion piece to information technology, Simon Callow, the actor, director, and Welles biographer says "I take a feeling, for which I accept no evidence, that Welles didn't want to cease 'The Other Side of the Wind.'" This is followed by denials, some indignant, of the idea that Welles would non WANT to finish a film. Of grade he wanted to finish; he was just denied the opportunity.
Equally information technology happens, I concur with Callow, and I remember there is evidence: it's the picture show itself. As a vessel for Welles' cocky-loathing, which by this point in his life was arguably bottomless, "Wind" itself needed to have no bottom. The hundred hours of footage from which Welles worked on the feature was packed with self-inflicted wounds upon which he could pour common salt, especially with respect to his tortured human relationship to the moving picture culture he helped create, and more specifically his personal relationship with Bogdanovich. Down to the pettiest picayune affair. When Bogdanovich'southward Brook calls Hannaford a "rough magician," later on a speech in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," and Hannaford "confesses" to Brook that he knows not the meaning of the discussion "abstain," those who have read Bogdanovich's interview volume with Welles, "This Is Orson Welles," should be able to hear Welles himself pretending he doesn't know who Mizoguchi is.
In that volume Welles says of Godard, "What'south near admirable nigh him is his marvelous antipathy for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic antipathy for the medium—which, when he's at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting." It's not for nothing that Welles sets the catastrophe of "Wind" at a drive-in theater, the inverse of a sacred movie palace, a place for the desecration of movie theatre and a pretext for sex activity, and shoots it like it'southward a touchstone site of the romance of the American W, which of class it is. Everything contradicts everything else in this film, while at the same fourth dimension drawing perfect circular connections. What Godard had to say about Welles, in 1963, was this: "[K]ay we be accursed if we forget for one second that he alone with Griffith, one in silent days, 1 sound, managed to start upward that marvelous little electric train in which Lumiere did not believe. All of u.s. volition e'er owe him everything." Fun fact: on the slates for "Wind," the cameraman was written in as "Bitzer." If yous become that joke—for "Current of air" is a movie all-time appreciated just by individuals as enriched and as damaged by movie theater as Welles was himself—y'all will get this movie.
Glenn Kenny
Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here.
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The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
122 minutes
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