The Eyes of Orson Welles

Orson Welles, as a filmmaker and as a man, defied easy categorization. He loved drawing, magic, acting, writing, and directing, and one often influenced another. His art told stories. His film making contained touches of magic. His direction took inspiration from art. He took distinct pride in being this way, defiant to the point of contrarian, but not without purpose. It stands to reason, then, that a documentary about him would equally refuse to follow well-trodden paths. Welles would be proud of The Eyes Of Orson Welles for, if nothing else, its undaunted commitment to its course, even when it falls into hero worship and egomania. The Eyes Of Orson Welles endeavors not to be a standard biography of the man, with historians and family members tracing his life story while modern directors and actors wax poetic just because. There are, in fact, no talking heads in this movie. Outside of clips from Welles' movies and radio broadcasts, there is only one other voice that isn't the director, that of one of Welles' daughters, and only for a few moments as she and the director look over some of Welles' drawings. Instead, the director narrates the movie, not as some Ken Burnsian, dry recitation of facts and dates, but in the form of a letter to Welles himself. Asking rhetorical questions about what he might have been thinking about this or that, how he would perceive the modern world, and so on. This, combined with clips from movies and shots of his drawings (and plenty of mood-inducing B-roll) are meant to weave a narrative of Welles' life that more functions as a theoretical psychoanalysis running into, through, and up against his life. His obsession with flawed men of power in his movies, his many loves, both romantically and artistically, how the style of one of his art forms bled into the other, how his upbringing influenced his politics and how that influenced his art, and whether all of this can be seen in his artwork. The term "love letter" gets used a lot when discussing movies that bear an influence so obvious, so unavoidable, that it crosses from homage into tribute. I don't know that I've seen a more literal interpretation of that phrase than The Eyes Of Orson Welles. I mean, the narration literally is reading a letter, but the exploration of him and his psyche through his artwork is also a love letter in a metaphorical sense. Director Mark Cousins acknowledges that Welles had flaws in the same way one might acknowledge that a basketball is round or a chicken is a bird; it is a description that lacks definition. The Orson Welles of this documentary is a multi-faceted artist, but not a complex man, which straddles the line between disingenuous and insulting. The tale of Citizen Kane's making, William Randolph Hearst's smear campaign against it, and Welles' troubles with Hollywood in the aftermath, are exhaustively documented, so while it is refreshing to not dig up that corpse for unnecessary flogging, not even mentioning it in passing when a full twentyish minutes are spent on the formation of Welles' progressive politics and dislike of dictators and kings is a puzzling omission. It's like talking about Henry VIII's many failed marriages, but not how ending the first one brought about England's schism from the Catholic Church. And how does one make a documentary about the overlap between his art, his movies, and his mind, and not go into greater detail about the movie that embodies this the most, F For Fake, which is literally a hybrid documentary and mockumentary about forgery and if there is a difference between real and fake art? And then there's the ten minutes of chapter five (because it's broken up into chapters, which uses a chess theme for three of the six chapter titles for no discernible reason) in which a broadly okay Welles impersonator reads to read a "response" Welles might've had for the director's letter. Chapter six, then, is dedicated to a response to THAT. Is that the kind of self-indulgent narcissism Welles would detest, or the kind of off-kilter humor he would love? I genuinely don't know. There is a certain hypnotic elegance to Eyes, and I can appreciate that it is, without a doubt, the director's singular vision executed to its fullest. I can appreciate that it disposes of every trope and trend to be seen in a documentary, re-inventing the purpose of a documentary. It investigates without interrogation, an attempt by someone who reveres and admires an artist and wants to get to know them better through what they've left behind. But it also sometimes threatens to lapse into self-indulgent prostration, and sometimes cheap imitation. And its singular purpose -- Cousins' quest to gain deeper understanding through Welles' art -- is so subjective and personal (there's a point where a piece of art is shown and it is said Welles painted it in anger, and it just looked like some non-descript semi-rectangular shapes to me), it comes off as more of a deeply personal YouTube video essay than a documentary meant for public consumption. There is love in The Eyes Of Orson Welles, and it was an interesting watch, but I'm not sure I learned anything new or gained a deeper understanding of Welles, and I have serious doubts this would interest anybody outside of Welles fanatics.