Orson Welles; The Genius Who Wept

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles, the prominent filmmaker in cinema history. In honor of this occasion, the largest film institutions in the world, namely the British Film Institute and the Cinémathèque Française, have organized a comprehensive program to celebrate him: from screening all his films to efforts to gather unfinished works and any recorded images of him, including programs and television films. In fact, everything that remains of this genius of cinema. At the age of twenty-three, Welles caused panic in America with a radio program titled 'War of the Worlds,' which narrated a fictional attack by aliens on Earth, leading many people to take to the streets in fear. This paved the way for him to create an ambitious film that is undoubtedly the most acclaimed film in cinema history and remained at the top of the list of the best films for decades: 'Citizen Kane.' However, the control and power Welles had in making 'Citizen Kane'—stemming from his fame and popularity from that radio program—quickly faded: when, after finishing 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' he went to Brazil to film the Rio Carnival, the production company (RKO), dissatisfied with the intellectual and personal nature of the film, asked the film editor (Robert Wise) to re-edit the film according to their wishes, resulting in the cutting of an hour from the film and changing its ending. The result left one of the great regrets in cinema history: a film that many believe could have been Welles' masterpiece and one of the peaks of cinema history was butchered, and the removed sections of the film were lost, making any possibility of restoration forever impossible. Robert Wise states that Welles never spoke to him again for the rest of his life. This issue remained like an old wound with Welles. In a new documentary about him titled 'The Magician,' which is being screened at the British Film Institute, a woman who lived with Welles in Spain during his later years recounts: 'One day we passed by a cinema that was showing 'The Magnificent Ambersons.' Welles stopped and then entered the cinema hallway. A few minutes later, I went inside to see what he was doing, as he did not want to watch this film at all. I saw him standing outside the screening room, listening to the film and crying.' Hollywood's betrayal of one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the twentieth century did not end there. In his struggle with studios and producers, Welles preferred to leave Hollywood early and go to Europe. For years, he sought funding and producers in various countries (which also brought him to Iran, where Ashraf Pahlavi's husband, Mehdi Bushehri, was the investor for his last unfinished film titled 'The Other Side of the Wind') to make the films he desired: films that carry the signature of a highly praised auteur; intensely personal films—without compromising on audience taste and opinion—about human loneliness (something that was his own issue: despite the surrounding noise, with a great interest in women and a love for eating and enjoying, he appeared to be extremely lonely) with astonishing visual style, featuring tilted and distorted shots and strange angles—from overhead shots to ground-level camera work—with remarkable depth of field, which gives an exceptional quality to his films—spiral staircases that continue as motifs from 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Magnificent Ambersons' to 'The Trial,' and the bitter and dark world that imposes its inevitable fate upon us (in his undisputed masterpiece—and in my opinion, his best film—'Touch of Evil' to his astonishing film 'The Trial,' which if Kafka were alive and wanted to make a film, he would likely recreate this atmosphere for his novel; just as surreal, bitter, dark, and apocalyptic, with a brilliant scene at the end of the film where Mr. K faces two key characters representing power, wealth, and religion, and his final word in response to the priest who calls him 'my son' is a shocking 'no' to wealth and power: 'I am not your son'). In another recent documentary that premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival, we witness one of his last interviews. Welles states: 'Cinema betrayed me. Cinema was a mistress who betrayed me, but I still loved her. I wasted ninety percent of my life on cinema; ninety percent of my life was spent finding money to make films.' He controlled himself to prevent tears from overflowing from the corners of his eyes, but I believe every true lover of cinema cries with him in this scene.