The indelible signature of Orson Welles's films

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

His intelligence was a natural wisdom which the disciplines of intellect might rationalise without enlightening. He possessed an artist's intuition and a fluency with articulate meanings. He never quite came to terms with the world, for Welles was devoid of cunning. Perhaps that is an American quality. It is a legacy of the frontier where survival depends on honesty and trust. That may be the meaning behind Scott Fitzgerald's curious dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. It is true of all those who know how to fight but not how to win. Ahab may be, therefore, the quintessential American. His pursuit is of a chimera, a savage enemy more cunning than he, and stronger, who must be defeated. Welles's own play Moby Dick Rehearsed is not only a powerful commentary on its sources (Melville of course, and King Lear). Welles recreated the whale hunt as an event in the mind of Ahab who is himself an impersonation by an actor in search of an heroic role. It stands as a literary work of merit in its own terms, as well as a hint of the elusive essay in American hubris which Welles promised throughout his life. Significantly another play by Welles's own hand, Time Runs, was a version of Faust.

We should not think of Orson Welles as a failure. There is too much enriching work in a number of forms. We might think of him as misplaced, a tragedian performing in cabaret perhaps. That would be to deny Welles his place in the world as he found it. He was socially conscious in every sense, alive to the possibilities of celebrating what he found. There are brilliant fragments of an early, unfinished film on the carnival at Rio. The jazz documentary with Duke Ellington proved stillborn at the studio's refusal. These absences intrigue. They lead us closer to the spirit of the man by evoking our imaginative sympathy. They make more real what we can see in its finished state.

Two works seem to reveal Orson Welles more assuredly than anything. The first is a private sketchbook, posthumously made public at a time when attention was turning again to this American maverick. The artwork contained in Les Bravades is a narrative series of the festival by that name in St. Tropez. Though it may be art in a minor key, it has the fluid energy and the vibrant contours of an inspired response to its subject. The mid-century modernism of style identifies an artist in debt to his contemporaries, but the feeling is personal and fresh in the way of a genuine art. Therefore it wouldn't be true to say that Les Bravades is a rehearsal for work in another form. It lives as itself, and testifies by its existence to the range of abilities within Welles's reach.

F for Fake may prove to be the most complete, and the most satisfying of all his works. Innovative in form, this late film is an enquiry, serious without succumbing to the sombre, into the meaning of the authentic in art. It relates documentary fact in a narrative montage which artfully and delightfully conceals the truth it claims to reveal. It is the true story of the forger, de Houry. It is also the true story of his biographers who having written the truth about him proceed to write a fictitious account of a man who has not been seen in decades, Howard Hughes, the excessively rich recluse. Here Welles finds a personal involvement, for that first film, American, was derived from the curious character of Hughes. The question for Welles must be whether his own intended fiction was the more authentic than the hoax biography? Is there a truth accessible to the artist, but not to the objective realist? How can we distinguish the real from the fantastic? Or is all art, in its artifice a lie? And is truth also a lie?