The Other Side of the Wind

What I'm about to say, I say admitting first that I have not seen every Orson Welles movie. In fact, this makes one the fifth I've seen, the other four being Citizen Kane, Touch Of Evil (one of my top 10 movies of all time), The Stranger, and F For Fake. So, knowing my sample size, here it goes: I don't think Orson Welles was capable of making a bad movie. That's not to say some of movies aren't more challenging than others to appreciate. As Welles' career as a director continued, he did his best to not only challenge audiences, but challenge the concept of cinema and how its constructed. One could see traces of it as early as Touch Of Evil, with the long tracking shot where the person who planted the bomb can be briefly seen; the party scene where Quinlan and his partner confront Sanchez at his apartment, where there are a number of overlapping conversations that you can't tell if they're pertinent to the plot or not (which mask a punch thrown by Quinlan at Sanchez); and the end, when, after Quinlan has been exposed as a dirty cop that framed a number of suspects by Vargas, who has increasingly been resorting to Quinlan-like tactics, it turns out Quinlan was right and Sanchez WAS guilty. Written down, they seem simple, but the way Welles pulled them off, you hardly noticed you were being tricked. It was the stage magician in him. You're too busy being mesmerized by the act that you miss the trick buried within. The Other Side Of The Wind, his final project that went unfinished in his lifetime, is without a doubt the culmination of cinematic trickery, deceit, and envelope-pushing, to the breaking point. The story within the movie is that an old director, Jake Hannaford, has returned from Europe and a long layoff from making movies, and is attempting a comeback, by making an edgy European art-house movie filled to the brim with nudity and sex to shock people. The film (called The Other Side Of The Wind, in a perfectly Wellesian touch), however, is unfinished, because his leading man walked off the set during filming, and Hannaford needs money to complete it. He throws a lavish screening party, which coincides with his 70th birthday, to screen what he's filmed so far for friends and associates, in the hopes of stirring up capital. To give the party some extra fun, he gives video cameras, microphones and recorders to a number of people, who proceed to film the party. What we watch is what the partygoers filmed, intercut with the movie-within-the-movie. It's a fantastic joke of Welles, to both thumb his nose at the burgeoning European art movie scene and embrace it at the same time. Making it more complicated is that the movie we're watching is mostly improvised. Welles pretty much threw a party, told everyone to stay in character, handed out cameras, and let them go. Over 100 hours of footage was filmed. This results in the film jumping from black and white to color, different perspectives -- sometimes cinematic, sometimes amateurish, sometimes paparazzi-esque invasive -- and film quality. It's a weird mishmash of found footage, mockumentary, and cinema verite, with a few potential touches of typical Wellesian editing trickery (but I can't prove it). The issue with TOSOTW is that, really, this isn't a movie, not in the strictest sense. Dialogue overlaps. The "narrative" jumps all over the place, both in space and perspective. And because there is no one main character, there is no one true narrative, so everybody -- even the movie itself -- is an unreliable narrator. You never get to know anybody well enough, because the movie is constructed in such a way that you're not supposed to. You, the viewer, are, in essence, a partygoer too, only getting partial conversations and bits of information here and there, assembling it into the picture you find makes the most sense. TOSOTW doesn't just challenge the viewer; it challenges the concept of movies themselves. These are supposed to be lives, and life has no narrative ... does it? If life contains no narrative threads, and you capture that on film, can it be forced into a cohesive narrative? Should it? If a movie has no true narrative, what is it? Can it be enjoyed? Can it be entertaining? I don't know the answer to any of these questions, and if you think the movie is going to answer them for you, brother, you best just turn around now and go to bed. TOSOTW couldn't give a damn if you spotted it two. It's not here to provide answers, and it's not even interested if answers exist. It exists, perhaps, to see how far the classical structure of a movie can be expanded upon and pushed until it hits the breaking point. Perhaps its about going past that breaking point and seeing what's beyond, like going beyond the edges of the universe. Was I entertained? Somewhat, but I don't think that's the point of this movie. It's very structure impedes entertainment. I give this a 7/10, not because it's a enjoyable, engrossing piece of cinema, but because Welles set out to do something with this movie, and by God, he did it. He set out to make magic one more time, a magic trick the likes of which movies had never seen. A movie that was not, by any known definition, a movie. And he succeeded. And I applaud the audacity of it. I just wish we could've seen what would've come next.