Based on the clips that are included on One Man Band and information from the original production, what is the basic plot and style of the film?
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
it's about a director who can't get funding to make a picture... John Houston (a celebrated actor and director... as well as friend of Orson Welles) plays the director...
apparently the film is edited using different aspect ratios to give a (supposedly) collage like effect... the editing is finished for half of the film... and Oja Kodar (Welles' one time wife... who is also in the film) is trying to raise the funding to edit the last half...
But everyone involved says that the first half (edited by Welles before his death) is amazing and that no-one could edit with Welles' envisioned style...
it sounds pretty cool...
it sounds as if Welles' most radical filmmaking was near the end of his career (with this one and F for Fake)...........
hopefully someday this will be finished and released
supposedly Welles film uses a startling advanced and future-looking style of editing on this movie. Certain scenes are elliptical (jumping back in forth from a few days to a few years) and he fuses his traditional baroque, deep-focus long-take mise-en-scene mixed with brilliant montage and Eisenstein-ian temporal shifts in space. The fact that this movie was made by the same guy who did "Citizen Kane" in his mid-20's completely blows my mind. Welles is one of the 2-3 filmmakers who can truly be called a genius.
shareNot just aspect ratios. Different film stock, different film format, different lens, stills, video and all his usual sound wizardry. In other words, the same basic thing Oliver Stone did ~20 years later first tentatively with JFK and then full force with Natural Born Killers [heh, maybe this is why he has dubbed Other Side of the Wind "too experimental"].
BTW, Welles and Kodar were never married, just together during his last two decades.
Joseph McBride (Mr. Pister) taught one of my film classes last year... He showed several scenes of the film and talked about his relationship with Welles constantly...
I have to say I wasn't very impressed with what I saw, especially the softcore threesome scene in the car. But again, I only saw small sections of the film.
"When we felt the heat, couldn't turn it into fire"