Dear Orson Welles.
Look where we are.
One of the wonders of the world.
With an eye like yours,
you'll have noticed something missing in this skyline.
The Twin Towers are no more.
All things come to an end, don't they?
People, buildings, cities.
That was one of the big themes in your movies.
You died more than 30 years ago.
Since then, some things haven't changed.
But quite a lot has changed since you died.
Life has become far more visual.
Something called the internet has come along.
Right.
It's hard to explain, but see those two guys at the bottom of this shot?
or order pizza, or book a flight, or watch Citizen Kane.
Phones are televisions and travel agents now.
The internet is like black magic.
The addict in you, the adrenaline junkie, would love it.
What you would have done with the internet?
There've been other big changes since you died.
We've had an African-American President in the Oval Office.
Oh, and a guy who thinks he's Charles Foster Kane.
The world has become more Wellesian, Orson.
The despots that you were fascinated by are gaining ground.
Things seem exaggerated.
But what is Wellesian?
Who were you?
When I told a waitress recently that I was making a film about you,
she said, "Oh, that big creepy actor? He gave me the willies".
You did act creeps, didn't you? And bullies.
In 'The Third Man',
the camera whooshed into Harry Lime, your most famous character.
A monster. A smirker.
In the limelight.
So, the waitress was partly right.
Can we look at you anew, Orson?
Can we tell your story anew?
Can we?
I went to this secure storage unit in New York.
METALLIC CLANK
And found this box.
What's in the box?
An aspect of you, Orson.
You left no autobiography, but you left something else.
I took the box in a taxi.
That's me, 40 years after I saw your film, 'Touch of Evil', on TV as a boy.
I didn't understand it, but I swooned.
I felt the whoosh of love.
You threw a rope to me when I watched it, Orson.
When I'm nervous now, anywhere in the world,
I hum the tune that plays on Touch of Evil's pianola.
It's a sultry lullaby of sorts.
PIANOLA PLAYS
I took the box on a plane and now it's in my flat.
What's in the box, Orson?
Not words or films, but drawings.
Many have never been seen before.
What's in the box, Orson?
Visual thinking.
What's in the box, Orson?
A sketch book of your life.
Look how freely your quill moves across the page
in this BBC tv documentary.
Scratch and scribble, lines faster than you could think,
for the back of the head and the lapel.
PEN SCRATCHES
Then more careful for the nose.
You were obsessed by noses.
Old-school technique, dipping into an inkwell.
Where would you start the story of your drawing life, Orson?
You said that at nine,
"I'd started to paint. That's what I loved the most, always."
And then, later,
"I've never been excited by movies as movies,
as the way I've been excited by magic or bullfighting or painting."
Your guardian, Dadda Bernstein, encouraged you to study art
in the Windy City.
What a transit lounge!
Was it a visual treat?
AMBIENT CITY SOUNDS
Did it affect your looking life?
You could look at Chicago square on, like this.
But, surely, the city of the first great skyscrapers
made you look upwards.
And you became the greatest ever filmmaker of looking upwards.
Whether it's by craning,
shooting below people's feet.
- Mr Arkadin is waiting for you. - Thanks.
REPORTER: 20,000 tonnes of marble...
NARRATOR: To suggest power.
So, you wouldn't have to request...
To miniaturise a character.
Not so loud! You want to bring the officials down on us?
Suppose they ask who you are?
You lived here and had a drawing studio here on Rush Street.
It was just big enough for your bed and a large drawing board.
Your teacher said that you did thousands of sketches here,
but threw most of them away.
But you studied drawing here, didn't you?
The Art Institute of Chicago.
In your early teens.
Do you remember, as a boy, sitting on the tail of its famous lions?
And, inside, what did you see?
Europe?
Myths?
Bodies?
Selfhood?
Pointers to your future?
Translucent ceilings lit from above? A technique you'd use in The Trial.
- Who are you? - My name is Bloch.
Are you employed here?
And Citizen Kane.
You talk about the people as though you own them.
Years later, if you knew someone who was going to the Art Institute,
you told them to go and see these miniature rooms.
Did their look, their wideness,
influence any of the visuals in your films?
You're supposed to train her voice, Signor Matiste. Nothing more.
If you could be here now, your eyes would be darting, Orson.
Chicago's got new ways of seeing.
So, your drawing and painting life had begun.
It continued for 60 years.
You drew everywhere you went.
So, there were at least a thousand of your artworks.
Where are they now?
Many are in Michigan, in Ann Arbor, which was named after its trees.
Here, in the University of Michigan's archive they have your relics.
Your beloved nose putty.
A coat you wore as Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Letters from you. And to you.
This one is from Vivien Leigh.
And then there are your drawings themselves.
Another place where I found your artworks was here.
Can you guess where I am?
And who lives here?
Brace yourself, Orson.
It's Beatrice, your third daughter.
She's in her 60s now, but is still a rocker chick.
And sometimes drives with no hands.
MARK: What am I doing first?
All those should be his paintings, if I remember right.
- That is gorgeous, that, isn't it? - Isn't that fabulous!
That was a Christmas card.
It was a Christmas card.
That's sort of what I saw this morning when I got up.
- That's... I call it Broadway Blues. - Hm-mm.
And that's about a producer saying,
"So sorry, Mr Welles, we haven't got around to reading it yet."
You know, this is just like the usual.
- And he's saying, "How about my play?" - Yes, exactly, that's him.
And see, "Where did the money go to?" See, it's just... It's like my father .
Some... Sign he put here, some Broadway blues.
This was in Munich, when he was travelling with his father around the world.
- This is before he got to Ireland? - Oh, yes.
This is probably when he was about, I think, 12.
And that's in Munich. And then here, he's... I don't know. Our dearest family.
He'd been to Shanghai at this point, hadn't he?
- Yes. - Hence this one.
And then, these look like German caricatures.
He's on his way to Germany, obviously.
A drawing of you painting, Orson,
and look how many kisses you put on this letter.
And I just went, 'Wow, look at this picture', and then I remembered
that this was the painting he drew when they threw him out of "Touch of Evil",
when they said, "You can't come back, and you can't touch your movie".
- Which is this one? - Yeah. And you can see the anger in it.
I mean, you can just...
Can't you?
MARK: Wow!
You took a line for a walk.
Portraits, sketches in letters, costume designs, stage layouts,
backdrop plans, Christmas cards, pictures of your loves and travels.
You drew compulsively, a lifetime of lines.
Were you in the zone when you drew, Orson, like sports people?
Do your sketches show us your unconscious?
PEN SCRATCHES
Can we glimpse in them the story of your life, its politics, love and power?
GUITAR PLAYS
Ordinary people, Orson, the 20th century was theirs.
Many got to vote for the first time, old elites lost power.
Was the extraordinary Welles ever ordinary?
Did you know many working-class people?
My own allegiance is stronger to the idea of citizenship,
and my own loyalty is greater to the idea of myself as a member of the human family
than it is to a... as a member of any profession.
I don't take art as seriously as politics.
The Hotel Meurice, in Paris, 1960.
A TV interview.
How solid you are in the frame.
And then your laugh, and that trademark cigar.
But where did your belief in citizenship start?
With your mother, Beatrice.
She co-founded the Women's Alliance to help Chicago's poor.
Her activism was inspired by this Unitarian church,
which was open to all races and classes.
The Women's Alliance hosted speeches on the persecution of Jews in Russia.
Your mother was the first woman in your hometown of Kenosha
ever to be elected to public office.
She had a community tree planted -
I think it's this one -
to raise money so that every Kenosha child between two and 14
would receive a Christmas gift.
One of the reasons you painted and drew Christmas trees so often, Orson?
In impasto.
Snow white paint on black card.
A black line helix daubed with green and red.
A gothic black ink tree in the sunshine.
An eight-second felt-tip pine.
A grisaille tree encased.
Magenta and sage.
A pine branch in ink and brush wash.
The helix in white now, reduced to a hieroglyph.
All distant reminders of your mother, perhaps? What a woman she was!
This film should be about her.
She laid the foundation of your political beliefs.
But she died when you were just nine.
And then the Wall Street Crash came.
The Depression brought new realism in American art.
But something more personal happened to you, Orson,
that further shaped your politics.
You took a boat, the SS Baltic, to Ireland
explicitly to draw and paint.
PEN SCRATCHES
We can feel your 16-year-old eyes darting about on the Baltic, Orson.
There are four lookers alone in this small section of one of your drawings.
They're befuddled, suspicious or glowing.
What you saw on the boat was people.
Real people, like you'd seldom seen before.
What about this woman's twisty jawline and pursed lips?
And these two profiles?
Did they know you were drawing them?
PEN SCRATCHES
Did this guy?
Your background was privileged,
but on the Baltic you met migrants and really looked at them.
You later became fascinated by ageing, sagging faces.
Aged just 23, in the play Heartbreak House,
you were like the man you drew on the Baltic.
Were you in a hurry to get old, Orson? Did youth bore you?
Or maybe in the months in Ireland, your youth ended.
And then you set foot on Ireland.
You wrote, "Our very landing was dramatic...
men and women got on their knees, weeping for joy.
"It's almost beyond belief that two days' journeying
from the world's greatest metropolis brings one to a land
where an intelligent and aristocratic people lives in archaic simplicity."
Intelligent, aristocratic, archaic.
The words you used about the Irish were rich indeed.
You wrote, "In 16 short years of living,
nothing comparable with Galway or the West of Ireland
has loomed so unexpectedly or breathtakingly on my horizon".
You bought a donkey - Sidheog - and cart and roughed it.
You wrote, "I curled up under the cart and fell asleep".
"There were nights too, spent in cottages, wakes, weddings and matchmakings.
"My week with the band of gypsies, my mountain climbs,
my night in the quagmire."
You really encountered the old world.
You spoke of, "these people who produced and flourished in Tutankhamun's time".
You painted hundreds of landscapes here, but destroyed them.
It was the people and faces that you preferred.
You went to the Aran Islands
and came across a visual world as exciting as Chicago.
It's here that the documentarist Robert Flaherty had made this film,
which he'd started shooting in the same year that you were there.
His eyes scanned between faces, too. The camera pans between them.
Your mother had taken you to see his early film, Nanook of the North
and you loved it.
Now, you were in the world of his movies.
More profiles.
Pencil and then ink wash.
Same for Mr Costello, a Galway shopkeeper.
"This man has sold himself to the black one", your note says,
and so you've devils winking around the edge of the page.
And ski-slope noses - your most geometric Irish sketches.
It's like you were using a protractor.
And then you were for Dublin...
...where you famously blagged your way into the Gate Theatre.
You claimed to be famous and then in Ireland became so.
You drew make-up sketches
for the performance at the Gate that made headlines, Karl Alexander.
But, again, your eyes darted to new types of faces.
In the three on the right, your hand was getting freer.
Looking at Irish people was training you to look, to draw.
Talk about taking a line for a walk.
So, to your mother's politics and Ireland's,
now let's add a third encounter with working people.
Two years after Ireland, you went here. Morocco.
Another new visual world for you.
A faster place, was it?
No pose in your Irish drawings
is as confidently done as this guy's on the left.
His left elbow and his raised knee.
Less than a dozen pencil lines give us the shape of his body under his jubba.
And this is better still.
The diagonal of the long pipe of the big guy on the left
sets the line for the shadows on his face, jubba and legs
and the wall on the left.
You were seeing real people better than ever, Orson.
And these three women are haunting.
From left to right, a dark face, what looks like glasses
and then that beautiful single eye.
PEN SCRATCHES
And a drawing like this is echoed 22 years later,
in a moment like this, in your film, Mr Arkadin.
You walk towards us, and then one of your frames within frames.
Also, in the summer of 1933, you went here, Spain,
to the gypsy quarter of Seville.
Working people again.
Traditional culture again.
The non-Anglo world, the non-Protestant world.
Catholics and Arabs were more expressive than Protestants. More visual.
In the beginning was NOT the word. Your life experience was broadening.
And also in 1933 of course, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
Italy was a police state by then.
Within a year, you were in New York doing radio,
a pawn medium, intimate and personal.
Dictators and democrats were devoted to it.
It let you get into the minds of the people.
It let you whisper to them, or boom that big voice of yours.
You wanted to be the listeners' griot, their consigliere,
their consciousness-raiser.
And so, you acted as the announcer in a radio play
by Archibald MacLeish.
It's set in a central square in a city.
A conqueror like Hitler is coming.
He's getting closer, and your clipped English-accented voice of the announcer,
describing what he sees.
ORSON ON RADIO: He's coming. He's clear of the shadow.
The sun takes him. They cover their faces with fingers.
They cower before him. They fall. He's alone where he's walking.
He marches with rattle of metal. He tramples his shadow.
He mounts by the pyramid, stamps on the stairway.
Turns. His arm rises.
His visor is opening.
There is no one.
There is no one at all.
No one. The helmet is hollow.
The metal is empty, the armour is empty. I tell you, there's no one at all there.
The people invent their oppressors.
They wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom.
Look, it's his arm!
It is rising. His arm's rising.
They're watching his arm as it rises.
They stir. They cry. CROWD CRY OUT
They cry out! They are shouting!
They're shouting with happiness. Listen!
They're shouting like troops in a victory. Listen!
The city of masterless men has found a master.
You'd say it was they were the conquerors, they that had conquered.
CLAMOUR CONTINUES
The city is fallen.
NARRATOR: Fascism as a beast.
In Ireland, you drew mostly faces,
but quite a few of your later paintings and drawings are faceless,
like the conqueror was faceless, Orson.
PEN SCRATCHES
And in films, you usually tried to hide your face under whiskers, a false nose
or thick make-up.
And look, Orson, at how your wife, Paola, Beatrice's mother, painted you.
We'll come to your love life later. Bet you can't wait for that!
If your mum seeded to your political life, Orson, and your trips abroad peopled it,
the rise of fascism made it ramrod.
So, you came here, to Harlem in New York.
The year was 1936. Your progressive politics were taking on a new dimension.
The Depression had led the US Government to launch, the previous year,
a nationwide theatre project
to give jobs to unemployed theatre and entertainment workers.
This woman, Hallie Flanagan,
as much of an activist as your mother, made it happen.
Did she remind you of her?
The Harlem Renaissance had been a big story in the 1920s,
but a decade later 80 per cent of Harlemites had no work.
And you and your team decided to mount
an African American theatre production of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
You were fascinated by Macbeth.
You built a plasticine model of the stage.
This stylised jungle backcloth was painted.
The production was conceived, visually
as a series of pictures in chromatic ascension.
The setting would be Haiti.
The witches would be Voodoo.
10,000 people showed up at the opening.
Searchlights. Roads were blocked.
The excitement of something new. A new way of seeing and being seen.
Black intellectuals in ermine and jewels.
Inside, what were they about to see?
Their own people, classicised.
At the centre of culture... and acclaim.
APPLAUSE
Want to see the Lafayette now, Orson, 80 summers after your triumph?
Are you sure? Okay. Look.
It's no more. It's apartments instead.
100,000 people saw your Voodoo Macbeth.
The company and the crew of 110 African Americans
went on tour with it around the country.
The wind of change blew through the 1930s, your 1930s,
the decade when you were in your 20s.
Your activism grew.
Since we're talking about social justice,
I bet you're expecting me to mention The Cradle Will Rock,
the most famous left-wing theatre story of the time.
You directed it, but the Federal Theatre Project's government sponsors
had their guards padlock the theatre.
Are you getting goose bumps thinking about it after all these years?
What did you do? Locked out of your own theatre, you and your team
had the audience march way uptown to an empty theatre.
Your fancy sets were left behind.
Union rules meant that your actors couldn't perform on the new stage,
so all that could happen was that the composer, Marc Blitzstein
could sit at a piano on the empty stage and do the show alone.
Well, guess what, Orson?
They've made a film of it.
Close-up on Blitzstein. On his own and nervous.
♪ ...up to my room
♪ Turn on the light... ♪
But, then, famously, your actors stood up in the stalls and joined in.
♪ I ain't in Steeltown long I work two days... ♪
A spotlight.
♪ The other five My efforts ain't required... ♪
And then a crane shot to help the spirit soar.
♪ Two dollar bills I'm given
♪ So I'm just searchin'
♪ Along the street... ♪
Talk about people's theatre!
And in the same year as this - what a 1937 you had -
you made your anti-fascism more explicit.
You ripped into another Shakespeare play,
the one that stimulated your visual imagination most,
and your political imagination, too.
Julius Caesar.
As a teenager, you drew Mark Anthony's speech to the people like this.
He casts a vast shadow.
Already, you were thinking of Julius Caesar in terms of lighting.
And look what I found in the box, Orson. Drawings from about 1950.
You were planning a film of Julius Caesar.
You imagine a camera above a light.
A pink and black sky,
maybe the stormy night in Rome after the plot to kill Caesar is hatched.
And, look, you planned to shoot it in Rome's EUR,
the chilly monumental district built by Mussolini's fascists.
You saw Caesar as an ancient Mussolini, didn't you?
And the ancient crowd didn't resist
like they didn't resist the conqueror in MacLeish's play.
You wanted to use a hanging miniature in front of the camera,
an old Hollywood technique.
You thought of the Capitol as a kind of beehive.
But back in 1937, your visual ideas were even bolder.
You'd seen images of the Nazi Nuremberg Rallies.
The vertical torchlights made columns like a Roman temple.
So, you had your stage production look the same. And guess what, Orson?
They recreated your production in the film, Me and Orson Welles.
Square-on shot. That graphic white lighting.
The camera glides in as the audience gets engrossed.
MAN: Caesar! Caesar!
FANFARE
Peace! Let every noise be still.
NARRATOR: And all this before Hitler invaded Poland.
We've come a long way from your mother's Unitarian good deeds.
But the story of your social ideas isn't over yet. Far from it.
You were only 22 when you did Caesar on the stage.
After radio and theatre, you found a new medium of the people.
Movies.
Your first feature, of course, was Citizen Kane.
It changed cinema
and it is known for its expressionism and critique of vainglory.
But its most touching moment is related to your mother's ideas
or your time in Ireland.
Why don't you try laughing at me again?
Charles Foster Kane is in the rented room of a working-class woman, Susan Alexander,
who offered him a place to clean up after he got covered in mud by a passing car.
I'm wiggling both my ears at the same time.
And, at the top right, photos of a woman who looks a bit like your mother.
Took me two solid years and the best boys' school in the world to learn that trick.
Fellow who taught it to me is now the President of Venezuela.
THEY LAUGHKANE: That's it!
NARRATOR: They play a kids' shadow game.
He's famous, but she doesn't know it.
She's probably one of the most ordinary people he's met in his life.
The camera drifts in. The look of love, perhaps?
Some of the softest lighting in the film.
Your small tribute to a powerless, but sincere woman.
I'm awful ignorant, but I guess you caught on to that.
I bet it turns out I've heard your name a million times.
Hollywood was more interested in glamorous people in the 1940s,
but you spoke highly of this unpolished B-movie.
A scene like this must have caught your eye.
A white couple's in Harlem, where you did your Macbeth,
and they go into a bar.
No fancy lighting here, no Wellesian angles,
but a social setting not often seen in escapist Hollywood cinema.
MUSIC PLAYS
In It's All True, the film that you shot in Brazil in the early 1940s,
but didn't complete, there's a similar sincerity.
ORSON: It's the sameness I'm talking about now.
Sameness in spite of difference.
Different sounds to the words, but the same idea.
Different colours, but the same spirit. Different churches, but the same faces.
Different liquor, but the same hangover.
Different jokes, but the same laughter. Different nations. The same humanity.
Thank God for the differences,
because it's out of those differences that culture grows
and grows big in all directions at once.
NARRATOR: It's like a Soviet film by Eisenstein.
Brilliant close-ups of un-Hollywoody faces.
And this soundtrack is one of your radio broadcasts
about South and Central America.
ORSON: ...Quieroz of Argentina.
Thank God for Walt Disney, el Gran Otello, Carmen Miranda.
Thank God for Chavez, Villa-Lobos and a thousand unknown troubadours
who improvised the people's thoughts.
Thank God for Mark Twain and Mickey Rooney
and all the others, living and dead.
NARRATOR: And, look, Orson! Low angle, a girl crying,
and is that your hand reaching up to console her?
In 1947, Joseph McCarthy was elected Senator in your home state, Wisconsin.
You made political speeches now.
One said, "In this shrinking world,
adult education must first enlist in the war against provincialism.
"Educators are sworn to the tremendous task of telling people about each other."
You received hate mail. Hundreds of letters.
One asked if you would, "allow your daughters to be touched by Negroes".
Another said, "If you and the other Jews of your class, and the Negroes
want us to love you, why not better yourself?"
J Edgar Hoover had your name added to the security register.
Were you scared, Orson?
If so, you didn't show it, especially in the case of the African American soldier,
Isaac Woodard.
Here's your drawing of him.
In your BBC TV show, Orson Welles' Sketch Book,
you told his story square on, straight to camera, underplaying your rage.
...on a bus. On the way he felt ill and he asked the bus driver to let him off.
The bus driver refused, abusively.
There was an argument
at the end of which a policeman was called in who dragged the boy out of the bus,
took him behind a building and beat him viciously.
Then, when he was unconscious, poured gin over him, put him in jail,
charged him with drunkenness and assault.
When the boy regained consciousness he discovered that he was blind.
The policeman had literally beaten out his eyes.
NARRATOR: A terrible crime in itself, but the fact that Woodard ended up blind
seemed to dig deep into you, such a visual person.
And so, on radio, you tried to hunt down the cop who blinded him.
The policeman's name wasn't known, so you called him Officer X.
You said that he brought the justice of Dachau and Auschwitz to America.
You went on, "Officer X, I'm talking to you.
"Where stands the sun of common fellowship?
"When will it rise on your dark country? I must know, Officer X,
because I must know where the rest of us are going in our American experiment."
You continued, Orson. "We will blast out your name, Officer X.
"I will find means to remove from you all refuge, Officer X.
"You can't get rid of me.
"God judge me if this isn't the most pressing business I have.
"The blind soldier fought for me during the war.
"I have eyes, he hasn't. I have a voice on radio."
Orson, the research carried out by you and your associates did help find the officer.
He was Chief of Police Lynwood Lanier Shull.
He was tried, found not guilty and returned to his job.
Years later, again in your sketchbook programme,
you drew out the lesson of the Woodard incident.
You're speeded up now and are leaning forward into the lens,
into your passionate theme.
I'm willing to admit that a policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job.
But it's the essence of our society that the policeman's job should be hard.
He's there to protect. Protect the free citizen,
not to chase criminals - that's an incidental part of his job.
The free citizen is more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal.
He knows what to do about the criminal.
It's nice to look out of our window
and see the policeman there, protecting our home.
We should be grateful for the policeman, but I think we should be grateful too
for the laws which protect us against the policeman.
NARRATOR: Which brings us to here, Orson, and another story about the law.
Do you recognise this place?
One of your favourite cities - the City of Light.
You drew and painted it.
You've seen the Eiffel Tower a hundred times, of course,
but wait 'til you see this.
From the year 2000, it has... sparkled.
We're here, Orson, to end the story of your political evolution.
You made a film mostly here. The Trial, from the novel by Kafka.
In the box, I found this.
I think it's one of your early drawings for the film.
Joseph K, who's accused of an unspecified crime, is in the middle, casting a shadow.
On either side are the two agents who arrest him on his 30th birthday.
In the novel, K is helped by a painter, hence the paintings on the wall.
Is that right?
And above, a light exactly like the one you sketched
for your abandoned film on Julius Caesar.
You have such lights in The Trial. They're totalitarian for you.
Who are they?
I can't expect you to know where the Interrogation Commission is sitting.
That's right, I don't.
NARRATOR: But, then, in Paris, you decided to film in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay.
TYPEWRITERS CLACK
Low angle. Plunging perspective. And your drawing comes to life.
And one of your crane shots - a rise, like an airplane taking off.
The drawing has that facelessness again.
The Trial is about facelessness.
The law has no name. Officer X.
Very well, then. Just go ahead with your work, my boy.
NARRATOR: The Trial was your portrait of the 20th century,
its desk-bound armies of salarymen.
You can't talk business to him now.
It was a Rene Magritte painting in which the law, played by you,
is faceless at times.
MAN: We can discuss anything.
Mummified and steaming like a racehorse.
And you famously changed the ending of the novel.
Kafka had Joseph K lead the henchmen to the place of his execution. He acquiesces.
JOSEPH K: You.
You.
Anthony Perkins whispers at first.
You.
And then yells the yell of the century.
YOU! YOU!
YOU! YOU DUMMY!
YOU'LL HAVE TO DO IT.
YOU'LL HAVE TO KILL ME. COME ON! COME ON!
NARRATOR: A salaryman and the final solution.
K was a pawn in the game of the century.
HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER
In this unedited handheld shot, which captures the atmosphere of a Q and A
after a screening of The Trial, you explain your change.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the changes you made in the story was at the end
when Joseph K is killed.
He's killed in a very alarmingly different way than in the book,
and I was really curious as to why you changed both the way he was killed
and the way he was acting when he died.
Because the book was written before the Holocaust.
And I couldn't bear the defeat of K in the book, after the Holocaust.
I'm not Jewish, but we are all Jewish since the Holocaust.
And I couldn't bear for him to submit to death as he does in Kafka,
masochistically submit to death.
It stank of the old Prague ghetto to me.
NARRATOR: Your politics had come a long way from Kenosha
and the community tree of your mother.
You'd travelled the world, fallen for Irish islanders and Moroccan merchants
and been outraged by racism.
You'd felt at home in Harlem, become an idealist
and used three art forms - radio, theatre and film -
to dramatize and visualise your ideas.
But the Europe you so admired disgraced itself in the 1930s and '40s,
and it's hard not to see that disgrace in some of your drawings.
PEN SCRATCHES
Even in a scribble on a menu in Rio de Janeiro.
What political smoke signals you sent.
What a trail you left.
We've tried to follow that trail, Orson, to see where it leads.
Eight years after you died, there was a movie called Groundhog Day
in which the same elements were relived over and over.
It's sometimes good to rewind the clock, isn't it?
It's good to look at a life again, through another lens.
MUSIC PLAYS
What's the story of your love life, Orson?
You'd probably prefer me to talk about politics than love,
but you're not here to stop me.
You travelled the world and fell in love everywhere.
What and who and how did you love?
I think there are five answers.
You loved places, you loved visually, you believed in the chivalry of love,
as if it was a waltz.
You were an omnivorous lover and you felt the guilt and end of love.
Let's start with your love of places. And this place, Arizona.
When you lived here you didn't go for walks,
but you seemed to have loved the sunshine.
Crayon on watercolour paper.
The opposite of that totalitarian spotlight.
Chalk and paint and felt-tip pen to conjure a storm over the red rocks.
The first place you loved was Grand Detour, Illinois.
Your father, Dick, who took you travelling, owned this hotel there.
Dick built a ballroom on the first floor
and you recalled sneaking up there at night, in the moonlight and dancing.
And you had a hut across from it that was your art studio when you were a boy.
Is that it in the bottom left of this picture, Orson?
As you know, the hotel burnt down. Look what's there now.
You called Grand Detour, "one of those lost worlds,
one of those Edens that you get thrown out of".
Look, Orson! It's still a kind of Eden.
Your first love.
For the rest of your life, you talked about places of pre-industrial innocence.
Merrie Englands, you often called them.
Timeless places of joy, unspoilt nature and love.
I hate to do this to you, Orson,
but here's another Eden, a snowy Eden in Citizen Kane.
A building like the Sheffield Hotel.
Come on, boys!
Be careful, Charles. Pull your muffler around your neck, Charles.
I think we shall have to tell him, now.
Yes. I'll sign those papers now, Mr Thatcher.
You people seem to forget that I'm the boy's father.
NARRATOR: Parents arguing, as yours did in the Sheffield.
I don't see why we can't raise our own son.
Just because we come into some money.
NARRATOR: Your film, Chimes at Midnight, was part-set in such an Eden.
The Boar's Head Tavern.
You loved to have actors swirl. Women and laughter.
It was a labyrinth, this pleasure dome, this playpen.
And you designed and oversaw the painting of it yourself.
A place from your unconscious, in which you wake up as Falstaff.
Here's where you shot some of the Boar's Head Tavern scenes,
in Spain, another one of your beloved places.
This guy was in the film, and still lives here.
What other places did you love?
319 West 14th Street, Manhattan, where you lived with your first wife, Virginia.
It's Gothic in your drawing, but guess what, Orson? It's still here.
You said that it had "space, charm, electric icebox, garden
and all for $55 a month.
"Virginia's having the time of her life here. A real home and all the rest of it."
With Virginia, you had your first daughter, Chris.
And in The Magnificent Ambersons, there's another paradise.
A Christmas card scene with bells on the soundtrack.
The snow as a blanket, and a clarinet.
CLARINET MUSIC PLAYS
- Are you all right?- WOMAN: Georgie!
They're all right, Isobel. The snow bank's a feather bed!
NARRATOR: Only in a studio could such an idealised scene be shot.
And that's what you used, the biggest icebox in Los Angeles.
It was on this corner, but it's gone now.
This part of downtown LA is now one of the most deprived in the US.
Paradises don't last.
The second aspect of your love life is how visual it was.
When you were 17, you saw this film. Dolores del Rio swims naked.
You fell in love with her visually and later became her lover in real life.
The man in this scene is Joel McCrea, but the imagery sums up YOUR love life.
Staring, obsessive, love at first glance.
Moonlit and flickering to capture the look of love.
What looking feels like.
You and Dolores. Beatrice says that she was the true love of your life.
In The Lady from Shanghai,
your camera glided towards another of your loves - Rita Hayworth.
It was your eyes, Orson.
You saw her on the cover of Life magazine and immediately pledged to marry her.
MAN: Good evening.
"Dearest little loved one", you wrote,
"I love you more tonight than ever - really, really - even more!"
And how's this for the look of love?
You move in again. The point of view of a kiss?
♪ Don't take your arms
♪ Away
♪ Comes a change in weather... ♪
NARRATOR: And then closer still on Rita.
Framed along one of your famed diagonals.
♪ ...the rain will start... ♪
Then you seem summoned from below, drawn by her tractor beam.
♪ Don't love me... ♪
Your make-up artist wanted to put beads of sweat on her brow,
but you said, "Horses sweat; Rita glows".
♪ Then don't take your lips
♪ Or your arms
♪ Or your love... ♪
She kept your love letters and notes in her make-up box for years.
♪ ...away ♪
NARRATOR: With Rita, of course, you had your second daughter, Rebecca.
You cast your third wife, Paola, as your daughter in Mr Arkadin, Orson.
A film about a powerful man with a mysterious past
MAN: I want to speak to my daughter!
- Yes, Father.- Have you seen...?
NARRATOR: And you gave Paola these concerned close-ups
when she hears that her father was less than he seemed.
- Tell him it's too late! - It's too late.
INTERVIEWER: This relationship with your mother, did he woo her?
BEATRICE: Oh, yes. I mean, how they met.
They were in Fregenae and she was walking on the beach
and he was with Visconti, and then he saw her, and he said, "Oh, I gotta meet her".
She was a young starlet and the next day, she got a phone call.
It was Visconti's assistant and he said,
"Mr Visconti would like for you to do a trial", and she was so excited.
And she went rushing over there and instead, she met Orson Welles.
PEN SCRATCHES
NARRATOR: In 1961, while filming The Trial, you met Oja Kodar.
She became your long-term lover and companion.
Look how you introduced her in F for Fake.
Glimpsed, glanced, ogled, long-lens, the centre of a network of men's looks.
A head-turner.
An eye-opener.
No scene in your films is more about looking, its splinters and seductions.
The look of love as a mosaic.
So, you loved places, Orson, and you loved visually.
The third aspect of your love life is its attraction to chivalry.
MUSIC PLAYS
The millennium-old idea of the chivalrous knight in love
is so archaic now, so like a faded pencil line.
Lancelot and Guinevere. Arthurian legend. The Middle Ages.
But more than most artists of the 20th century, you filled in the line drawings.
You believed in these samurai, these courtiers who behaved with honour,
who played by the rules of love and courtship from the era of the Magna Carta.
The myths held true for centuries.
One of the best interviews you gave to Bernard Levin takes this further.
You're leaning forward again, close-up, and in profile at first
And I'm rather fond of chivalry and honour and I, er...
to use a hackneyed drugstore psychiatry word
I identify with Quixote to the extent that I'm interested in outmoded virtues.
The virtues of chivalry?
Yes. Honour, personal honour and courage, and things like that.
LEVIN: Well, you're clearly a romantic.
Well, I suppose so.
But aren't you a romantic in a very unromantic time?
Yes.
- Do you feel out of your time? - Oh, yes.
I think every self-respecting artist ought to.
NARRATOR: Which brings us, Orson, to the most out-of-time knight in your art.
An absurd but glorious man, who rails against everything
and doesn't seem to realise that chivalry is long dead.
He was one of your obsessions, this man.
You made what you called a home movie about Don Quixote
and his sidekick squire, Sancho Panza.
...and others will cheer you.
You filmed the Don against the sky, his head in the clouds.
Someone, squire, has kidnapped the princess!
But I shall free her, thank you!
Wait, sir. Don't let the devil deceive you. It's only a Vespa.
NARRATOR: And here's a moment which tells us something about the Don and love.
He thinks the woman - look, it's Paola - had been kidnapped by the Vespa.
- Who is this lunatic? - Don Quixote de La Mancha. Knight...
Ever the gallant knight, he wants to rescue her.
This isn't your editing, of course. You never finished the film.
But does the moment capture some of the energy you wanted, the absurdity?
But also the Don's desire to do the right thing?
DON: How can you treat your liberator like this?
Now, promise you'll go to El Toboso and inform my Dulcinea,
or I'll run you through!
NARRATOR: And in your painting, the Don's head is against the sun.
Like Icarus.
Such a delicate man in your painting. He'll be burnt.
The Don doesn't look at Sancho Panza and in the book and film they bicker,
but you have them joined at the hip.
They're on the road of life together.
Opposites, but indivisible. Yin and yang.
Your Sancho Panza is thick smears at the Don's elbow.
A blur to him in some ways.
In love in other ways.
You relished this.
The thickness of their story.
Their themes, their history.
The novel's author, Cervantes, set out to mock chivalry,
but ended up celebrating it.
Maybe Laurel and Hardy were the knights of your time.
And your one painting of a bullfighter is knight-like.
He's a slayer in a swirl of light, like your St George with his dragon,
against the sun, like Don Quixote,
his head lowered as if in prayer at his own violence.
The figure in your art that you loved most was another knight,
but a penniless one who lived in The Boar's Head, one of your Edens.
On the Dean Martin Show, you painted him in a way,
but the canvas was your own face.
It was what you might call a swinger.
MUSIC: GREENSLEEVES
In the 15th century, they didn't call them swingers, but they swung.
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
And nobody more so than Sir John.
NARRATOR: Your intensity.
You forget to speak, as if you're lost in the transformation.
GREENSLEEVES CONTINUES
He was a funny man. He was a fat man... but he was a great man.
NARRATOR: Then, Shakespearean language.
He was a wit
and as he said himself, he was not only witty in himself...
but the cause that wit was in other men.
This huge hill of fat,
this ton of man...
this reverend vice,
this grey inequity.
NARRATOR: Then, Eden again.
He was a spokesman, you might say, for Merrie England,
the old Merrie England of May mornings and Midsummer eves.
GREENSLEEVES CONTINUES TO PLAY
When even villainy was innocent.
NARRATOR: And, of course, you filmed Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight.
Your drawings for the Battle of Shrewsbury sequence
are a gallery of horsemen, of chevaliers.
In pen.
PEN SCRATCHES
Coloured brush and pen.
And this, the swiftest and the best, in brush only.
In pose and concision, it's as good as this.
This bed scene in Chimes at Midnight with you, Doll Tearsheet, Prince Hal
and his friend, Ned Poins, is remarkable.
You get up and move left, and then a swirl of movement like a '60s love-in.
I owe her money. Whether she be damned for that, I don't know.
Am I not fallen away...?
NARRATOR: Like a Tintoretto painting.
Like you, he liked to have people almost roll in the foreground.
He looked up at the world.
Everybody in bed, the camaraderie of love.
The bed scene is another Eden.
...the doctor to my water.NARRATOR: There's Beatrice.
The water itself is a good water, but for the party who owned it.
NARRATOR: And it brings us to the fourth aspect of your love life,
after place, visuality and chivalry.
How omnivorous you were.
Your relationships with the men you loved weren't sexual,
but it sounds as if they were as intense as those with women.
Your letters are full of ardent love for male friends.
You adored Joseph Cotten, didn't you?
And can I mention John Houseman?
Here in New York, in December 1934, aged 19,
you were playing Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.
A British-Romanian grain merchant turned theatre producer came to see the show.
It was Houseman.
He called your performance
obscene, terrible and "driven by some irresistible interior violence".
He visited your dressing room and found you half-naked.
The two of you went outside to a nearby bar.
Your dedicated biographer, Simon Callow, says you wooed Houseman.
You said that he fell in love with you.
It was part of a pattern.
You seemed to become addicted to Jack Carter,
the actor who played the lead in your Voodoo Macbeth.
You threw your arms around him, crying with gratitude, according to Houseman.
You wooed him and went carousing with him in the bars of Harlem.
You loved as passionately as a bullfighter fights.
But, of course, the bullfight ends in death.
Which brings us to the last aspect of your love life.
Guilt, and the death of love.
Do you believe in love at all, Mrs Bannister?
Give me the wheel.
NARRATOR: The Lady from Shanghai again.
You and Rita look purposefully ahead, but she steers.
I was taught to think about love in Chinese.
The way a Frenchman thinks about laughter in French?
The Chinese say it is difficult for love to last long
therefore, one who loves passionately is cured of love in the end.
Well, that's a hard way of thinking.
NARRATOR: But it seems borne out by your love life, Orson.
It was full of guilt and sadness.
Your relationship with Hayworth quickly waned.
You'd draw yourself crying.
And, in one of your most surprising images, also for Hayworth,
you have a devil visit you in her absence.
You had affairs. Is the devil your guilt,
or your guilt and sadness combined?
You called this pencil and watercolour sketch, with its miserable sun,
"Another Self Portrait of Self Pity."
And how about this?
You're far from Eden here. The smoke from the factories gathers to show your mood.
And then there's this drawing of Paola.
BEATRICE: Very pregnant,
and she had a horrible pregnancy, she must have been a bitch.
- INTERVIEWER: Pregnant with you? - Yeah.
NARRATOR: "I feel lousy" is one of your most ambiguous drawings, Orson.
Are you just recording Paola's feeling bad, or empathising with it,
or mirroring it?
Is it you that feels bad?
PEN SCRATCHES
You showed the death of love, the perversion of love, most visually, Orson,
in Morocco and Venice.
You know what I'm going to say, don't you? Othello.
Strumpet! Weep'st thou for him to my face?
- Banish me, my lord, but kill me not! - Down, strumpet!
Kill me tomorrow. Let me live tonight!
NARRATOR: Othello kills Desdemona. Facelessness now is murder.
He's blinded by jealousy. Another Magritte painting.
DRAMATIC CHORAL MUSIC
And when she's dead...
This.
This circle in the ceiling was inspired by this Mantegna painting in Mantua,
wasn't it?
You had a ceiling built to echo it, visually.
And, before James Bond films, you liked a circular ceiling.
Your camera's low enough to show it well, to halo him, to anti-halo him.
- Sophie. What was her last name? - WOMAN: She married years ago.
What's her married name?
Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.
NARRATOR: Love as hell, not Eden. You had the camera on a scaffold here.
Not... wisely, but... too well.
NARRATOR: Is that how you loved? Not wisely, but too well?
THUNDERBOLT
But love doesn't just perish naturally in Shakespeare's play,
it's poisoned by Iago whispering gossip in the Moor Othello's ear.
You talked well in Filming "Othello", like an art critic.
The film was more an illustrated lecture than a documentary.
ORSON: The visual style of the film
mirrors the marriage at the centre of the play,
which is not that of Othello and Desdemona,
but the perverse marriage of Othello and Iago.
NARRATOR: Filming "Othello" had a late-night feel.
And you were both cautious and bold
in how you discussed your film and used clips.
ORSON: Now, the grandeur and simplicity are the Moor's.
The dizzying camera movements, the tortured compositions,
the grotesque shadows and insane distortions.
They are Iago, for he is the agent of chaos.
NARRATOR: Iago torpedoes the marriage with gossip. You did it with style.
The death of love, the back of love.
They're not much fun to talk about, are they, Orson?
I wonder, am I losing you here?
We're getting onto kingship in a moment,
but before we do, one more chord about passion dying.
It's in Chimes at Midnight again, and you know what's coming, don't you?
The most resonant line in your art.
Here it is in your screenplay in Michigan.
Are you ready to be heartbroken?
"I know thee not, old man."
The prince, the boy, says to the man that the dream is over.
Their friendship is over.
Vertical spears like the Nuremberg searchlights.
Then you break through.
And the back of the new king, your old drinking and cavorting pal.
My King!
My Jove!
I speak to thee, my heart.
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man.
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane.
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
NARRATOR: Despise? Wouldn't reject have been enough?
Shakespeare's pen was a dagger here.
Not only an end of love, but a rewrite of its history.
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
as I have done the rest of my misleaders
not to come near our person by ten mile.
NARRATOR: And Falstaff falls to his knees, like John Houseman did,
as he realises who has the power and who can control the love.
Hal's exclusion order.
You wanted to be Falstaff, Orson, but let's face it, you were Hal.
PEN SCRATCHES
The prince, the knight.
Loving a lot, but, in your exhilaration
moving on to other loves, other worlds.
So, we move on to our next world.
PIANO MUSIC
DRAMATIC MUSIC
NARRATOR: All the decent people in your life and work, Orson -
your mother, your headteacher, Michael O'Hara in The Lady from Shanghai,
Joseph Cotten's character Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane,
Don Quixote, Charlton Heston's character in Touch of Evil,
Sir John Falstaff - these knights and pawns are often exemplary and right.
But there's another type of person who excited you more.
Dive deeper into your unconscious and you find him there.
This creature from the black lagoon. He is, of course, the king.
You mocked the king in Chimes at Midnight.
He can't even get up onto his throne.
He has a pot for a crown and speaks like John Gielgud.
Harry,
I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time,
but also how thou art accompanied.
WOMAN LAUGHS
NARRATOR: But you were attracted to the grandeur of kingship.
PEN SCRATCHES
Admit it, Orson, your tastes were regal.
Is it true that the director Richard Fleischer
once accused you of treating a lowly photographer as if you were royalty?
"I am royalty", you barked back.
You used to say that you're a king actor.
And you were fascinated by a Latvian gunrunner
and friend of Nazis Himmler and Goering.
His name was Michael Olian. You visited him in this mansion designed by Raphael.
You should have played Napoleon, Orson, or Henry VIII.
Actor Geraldine Fitzgerald said that you were like a lighthouse.
"When you were caught in his beam, he was utterly dazzling.
"When the beam moves on, you're plunged into darkness."
Kingship in your work is visual, about law-making, suffocating, isolating.
And about ambition, totalitarianism, corruption and madness.
Let's take visual first, Orson.
Most aspects of your visual style were extravagant.
As we saw in the pawn section, you had moments of realism in your work,
but you mostly rejected them.
You famously walked out of this film,
Luchino Visconti's neo-realist La Terra Trema.
It's hard to imagine you doing a simple pan like this.
Shoulder height to show a fisherman scene naturally.
This was more your style: Macbeth. A distant castle, a misty middle ground.
It's like Charles Foster Kane's isolated castle.
Castles fired your imagination, especially if they were crumbling.
This etching of yours looks like there's been a fire.
You had an eye on Piranesi's Imaginary Prison sketches of the 1700s.
PEN SCRATCHES
The lens you liked to use most, the 18.5, was a king lens, you could say.
It made the world bulge.
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock.
NARRATOR: You slung it low, of course, to make foreground people look massive.
Cribb'd, confined,
bound in to saucy doubts and fears.
NARRATOR: To make patterns between near and far.
It was expressionist, this lens.
It was good at abstraction.
Beyond visual things, your king men are lawmakers and lawbreakers.
That lens again.
A seated king, an insolent press baron.
Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war.
- That's fine, Mr Kane. - Yes, I rather like it myself.
NARRATOR: And here in your late film, The Immortal Story, you're a king of sorts,
in a carriage.
The running man is a sailor you've just picked up.
You'll pay him to have sex with a woman.
You're a pimp king,
making the rules, setting down the law,
treating others like pawns.
CARRIAGE CLATTERS
You arrive at where the sex is to happen - your own home in Madrid, Orson.
And here's your Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil.
Belly first, then looming above the camera,
then a Wellesian body twist.
He's a king in his own mind, a detective who thinks the law is for little people,
for pawns, not for him.
He's above the law and bends it to his will.
Beyond their visual and legal lives,
your kings are often suffocated or imprisoned.
They're trapped inside their castles.
They can't escape their own power, their own thoughts.
Their echo chambers.
Beatrice tells us this was painted in frustration
at the Universal film studio stopping you completing Touch of Evil.
It's an isolation picture, too, isn't it?
A Piranesi in the desert. You were the king forced to abdicate.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
NARRATOR: Intense visuals, a man above the law, isolation.
You know where this is leading, I'm sure. To Scotland, and your film, Macbeth.
You'd first imagined Macbeth in your teens,
in this drawing in your Everybody's Shakespeare book.
And we've seen your Voodoo Macbeth of 1936.
Just nine years later - what a long nine years they must have seemed -
two marriages, war, radio stardom, Hollywood fame, four films.
You were filming it on the cheap for a B-movie studio.
You imagined the film's landscape with angular trees against the sky.
The film would be shot quickly in a studio,
so you came up with this main set.
PEN SCRATCHES
Scotland can sometimes look like a production designer has had a hand in it.
The characters were to be horned, like cattle or rams.
It was your most graphic film. The witches' pagan symbols.
That set - it looked like something you'd see in a fish tank.
An underwater Macbeth, perhaps.
Your contrasts were violent.
Slo-mo mist, then dissolve to this close-up.
One of the most contrasty images in American film.
Then we're behind the head of Macbeth, this king whose ambition is detestable.
This Hank Quinlan. This Stalin. This Faust.
Say, sir.
As I did stand my watch upon the hill, I look'd toward Birnam.
NARRATOR: The real world seemed to enter the film as a nightmare.
Macbeth is so in the shadow of himself
that he doesn't even realise that he's free.
He feels railroaded by the witches' prophecy.
He's a slave to his own lust for power.
You've dived so deep now that you're in the land of the surreal.
The colonnade.
It's like a Di Chirico nightmare painting, Orson.
The least categorizable image in Macbeth,
and in all your art, I think, is this shot, Orson.
It looks like clouds seen from an airplane,
or an archipelago with a colossus standing in it.
Satan!
BELL TOLLS
NARRATOR: Macbeth's one of the few films I've wanted to draw as I watched.
BRUSH STROKES
The fourth aspect of your kingship is its totalitarianism and corruption.
These themes are in Caesar, of course.
And in your Cesare Borgia in the film, Prince of Foxes.
A map of all he conquers.
The king actor's big shoulders and flowing gown.
...ultimate goal. One Italy. One kingdom.
One king. Cesare Borgia.
NARRATOR: You made Prince of Foxes
in the same year that you played your most corrupt character, Harry Lime,
who profiteers from penicillin stolen from hospitals.
He famously talks of the Borgias
as you casually put on gloves and the camera glides in.
Remember what the fella said: In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed,
but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace
and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
NARRATOR: A scene you wrote, of course.
Cinema's most famous strike of the authoritarian bell.
In the late 1930s, before Citizen Kane,
you were to make a film about an even more dangerous man.
Ivory trader, Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness.
PEN SCRATCHES
Here's your sketch of the compound where he lives.
In 1938, you adapted Heart of Darkness for radio.
You played Kurtz, of course
and tried to capture his genius, his panic, his tyranny.
MAN: How are you tonight, Mr Kurtz?
KURTZ: Well enough to be back at my station.
That place is mine. They've no right to take me away.
That manager, that stupid scoundrel! He wants my ivory.
He's blocked me at every turn.
MAN: Don't excite yourself, Mr Kurtz. You're sick, you know.
KURTZ: Sick! Sick?
Not so sick as you'd like to believe.
NARRATOR: Heart of Darkness is set during one of the worst human atrocities, Orson,
Belgium's colonisation of the Congo.
Kurtz was, for you, a fascist king.
That's the end of the king line, in a way, except for one more thing.
The madness of kingship.
In 1953, you played King Lear live on TV.
That low king angle, that roaring king voice.
Here I stand, your slave.
A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.
NARRATOR: He says, "O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!"
... two pernicious daughters...
But he's driven by the burdens of power and family.
...and white as this.
The camera pulls out and lightning and that expressionism again.
THUNDERBOLTS, SCREAMING
Did you intend this to be Lear, Orson?
It's like it's raining here, or it's a lightning storm.
You did Christopher Marlowe's Faust on stage in 1937.
You had him say, "I refuse to be insane.
"I do not claim the sanctuary of the madhouse.
"Do not think I stumbled into the pit.
"Pray for the free man who damned himself."
Did you damn yourself, Orson?
And if so, for what?
Politics?
Love? Power?
Glory? Excitement?
Loneliness?
Decline?
Fury?
MUSIC PLAYS, PEN SCRATCHES
ORSON VOICE: Dear Mark, I pray in your letters
when you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am.
Nothing extenuate.
So, the world kept turning after I died.
Who'd have guessed?
It sounds as if I'd have taken to the 21st century.
I wasn't tired of living, I wasn't tired of art.
In your letter, Mark, you split my politics from my love,
but they're the same thing - or at least have the same root.
You missed how funny I found it all.
You do know that life is a circus, don't you?
Beatrice still seems to.
Was this not in your box? HE LAUGHS
My ending of The Lady from Shanghai.
That crane shot as I walk into the empty funfair.
MAN: Everybody is somebody's fool.
The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old,
so I guess I'll concentrate on that.
Maybe I'll live so long that... I forget her.
Maybe I'll die trying.
ORSON VOICE: That's more important than the ending of The Trial.
And as you're so taken by my drawings, how about this one?
PEN SCRATCHES
ORSON VOICE She's Lady Would-be from Jonson's Volpone.
A broad, bumbling and inept. Those pursed lips. I adore her.
The toffs with their drinkers' noses and eyes closed.
Amidst all the power and politics of which you speak,
my line ran naturally to doodles like this.
Does he remind you of anyone?
And several lifetimes ago, before Kane,
I made a lark of a film called Too Much Johnson.
There was a scene where a well-dressed young man and police officers
had their hats removed.
It was absurd, like a Mack Sennett comedy.
That's cluelessness again, like so much of life.
And since you mentioned Mr Arkadin, recall if you can its climax.
I stalk through the film like a shadow, but the world of my story is absurd.
Akim's character, Zouk, has lost his pants.
Think if he catches me out here, dancing around in my underdrawers!
ORSON VOICE: Does it remind you of anything?
Laurel and Hardy, perhaps?
My camera was usually lower, of course,
but the humanity in Stan and Olly is the same.
The childishness, the circus, the commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella.
What you in the UK call Punch and Judy.
I did scores of pictures of St Nick.
BRUSH STROKES
There were conventional ones in red and white.
He'd come down the chimney or be by the fire.
But I remember that as I drew,
he started to look like he was on the stage,
taking a bow perchance, or a curtain call.
Those with a keen eye might say I painted him more and more
so he merged with some of the things that I admire.
And he morphed.
His colours changed.
The red disappeared.
Or rather it shrunk to his nose, because you see,
Santa was becoming a drinker in my Christmas world.
A drunk.
Sir John Falstaff.
The more cards, I did, the more rapid I became.
The colours leached out.
Day became night in this Christmas carol of mine.
And the bottle grew.
And then even the nose was no longer red.
They took on the tone of a lot of my work.
Call it dark exuberance if you like.
That's what The Lady from Shanghai was. And Macbeth.
Tenebrous and excessive.
I've often said that Kane has the same tension.
Kane himself is close to farce, close to parody, close to burlesque.
That rollercoaster you showed was like the great imperium,
the United States.
PEN SCRATCHES
I was a satirist.
Didn't you see that?
The stick was straining.
What happens when it breaks?
Absurdity becomes the norm.
PEN SCRATCHES
The sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
How is Ireland these days? Yours, Orson.
MUSIC PLAYS
NARRATOR: Dear Orson, I just imagined that you wrote back to me. I wish you had.
How do I finish a letter like this?
Should I mention that there's been another financial crash?
The wolves of Wall Street screwed up like they did in 1929.
This is Kenosha, where you were born, now.
Parts of it look like a deserted Hollywood studio backlot,
or images from the 1930s.
The Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash
helped form you, didn't it, Orson?
Will our new Depression make a new Orson Welles?
Beatrice had an unopened letter from you to your guardian, Dadda Bernstein.
This letter was written on the 14th of October, in 1931.
When Dadda was still living in Chicago. And it is unopened.
Nothing in it! LAUGHS
This is too funny. He forgot to put something... This is insane.
NARRATOR: We were hoping that there'd be some secret in that envelope, Orson,
some new way of seeing you.
Isn't that wild!
NARRATOR: But maybe what was in the box
and what's in the University of Michigan archive
is a bit of a new way of seeing you.
Your art has made me look again at your life and work.
This scene in Mr Arkadin, for example.
What's with all these crazy Frankensteins?
MAN: You don't understand. These people are supposed to represent the paintings.
Some of us have come as the visions and monsters of Goya.
- Who? - You know Goya.
Glad to meet you!
NARRATOR: It's a Goya painting, with an added pinch of Josef Von Sternberg.
In the same film, this scene near the start is, what?
Graphic, certainly. It's a murder-and-chase moment,
but who's being shot or why doesn't seem to be your main concern.
You're more taken by the steam of the train,
the shapes within the frame, the angles, the cubism.
TRAIN CHUGS AND BRAKES
And in The Lady from Shanghai,
you painted these sets yourself, didn't you?
You walked through a lattice, shards, a constructivist design.
MAN: And if the cops traced it to Grisby...
NARRATOR: Like this one by Aleksandra Ekster.
And a few scenes later, in your hall of mirrors
we're in the land of Muybridge.
Panel imagery.
Erotic.
In love with lenses.
And then The Lady from Shanghai is like a drawing.
MAN: I knew about her. She planned to kill Bannister.
She and Grisby.
NARRATOR: Is that it? Is that what's been on the tip of my tongue in this letter?
Many of your films are like charcoal drawings.
Their nets and grills are hatchings, shadings.
PEN SCRATCHES
In Mr Arkadin, you used the Segovia Aqueduct like an architectural drawing.
- I knew it. - What do I win?
This.
NARRATOR: As I'm thinking this, I see this scene in The Lady from Shanghai.
Rita wants her cigarette lit.
Your shot sweeps left with it, mano a mano.
There's no story need to do this,
but there's a graphic need, a drawing need.
MAN: ...she'll never be too old to earn the salary...
NARRATOR: And then the shot comes back again, following the cigarette again.
Two simple moments, but they're like this drawing of yours.
Or this drawing.
That's it! That's my lightbulb moment, Orson.
That's what's been on the tip of my tongue. Your visual thinking.
You thought with lines and shapes.
Your films are sketchbooks. Calligraphy.
That's why people who love
Laurence Olivier's literary and psychological Shakespeare films
don't like yours.
Yours were rougher and more to do with space and graphics and power.
Once I realise this, I discover that you'd sort of said it already.
You told one of your biographers
that Macbeth was a violent charcoal sketch of the play.
And the Nazi Party's filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, of all people,
wasn't far off when she said that,
"Welles draws marvellous pictures in the margins of Shakespeare".
F for Fake was a sketchbook on folded paper.
Touch of Evil's a fresco.
The Trial is like a linocut.
Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai, Othello and Mr Arkadin
scratch at their characters
like your quill and ink scratched in the TV sketches.
Approximately, excitingly, but in a way that many found too sharp.
They make you seem mad for contact with the world,
taking its fragments roughly and absorbing them into yourself
to make art that's jagged and fractured.
In 1953, you went here, Edinburgh in Scotland,
and made a speech about the future of the movies.
You said that a Hollywood film needs an audience of 60 million people
to break even, but you dreamt of smaller, more distinctive films
that could speak to two million people.
Guess what, Orson?
From the future, I can tell you that your dream has sort of come true.
Film technology has changed massively since you died.
If many of your films were like sketches,
if you dreamt of a camera being more like a pencil,
your dream is coming true.
More than ever, you can draw with a camera now.
Studio cinema was like history painting.
Now, film is more like oil painting.
And look at this. An oil painting of you?
No, it's an accident.
Our computer didn't copy some footage of you properly, and so it pixelated it.
And it looks like Manet or Rembrandt.
Way back in the 1940s, when you were making Citizen Kane,
you and cinematographer Gregg Toland
dreamt of a time when there would be no film
and the camera would be an electronic eye.
That dream has come true, too.
On the morning of October 10th, 1985, you died.
It was said that you were at your typewriter when it happened.
This typewriter?
But your life probably ended in your bathroom.
But still, is this one of the last things in the world
those great eyes of yours saw, Orson?
If you were alive now, if you were still seeing,
you could be making so many films.
Your archetypes - pawns, knights, kings and jesters -
are as relevant as ever.
Your friend, Kenneth Tynan said, when writing about you,
"The bee will always make honey".
What honey you made.
MUSIC PLAYS
What honey you could have made.
In an interview in 1962, you said,
"Being alive means not killing the tensions one carries within oneself.
"On the contrary, a poet must seek out and cultivate his contradictions."
You buzzed with contradictions, Orson.
You loved pawns, knights and kings.
ORSON VOICE: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
I too am not a bit tamed.
I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
MUSIC PLAYS
We can still hear your sound, Orson.
And, most of all, we can still look through your eyes.
Thank you.
TURBINES BEAT RHYTHMICALLY
"Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend,
and see those 30 or so wild giants
with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms."
"Now, look, Your Grace", said Sancho,
"What you see over there aren't giants, but windmills."
"Obviously", replied Don Quixote, "you don't know much about adventures."