THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SHADOW: A NEW LOOK AT ORSON WELLES
A 12-WEEK ONLINE COURSE (August-November, 2021)
PRESENTED BY MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR
This original 12-week online course, delivered via the Google Meet platform, is designed for serious Orson Welles fans as well as newcomers. We’re going to have a lot of fun as we dive deeply into the work of one of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers.
The lectures cover the obvious Welles classics — Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight — but will also explore some of the lesser-known films and TV programs, including many works that have appeared posthumously (and many unproduced screenplays that have never been published). I’m also eager to share the discoveries I’ve made in the Orson Welles archives in Turin, Munich, Michigan, and Indiana.
Each week I’ll give an original fifty-minute lecture presentation on a set film and topic and then lead an in-depth group discussion. All students will have a chance to contribute. The only weekly homework will be to watch a film (or two) in preparation for the session. Many of the films are easily available on YouTube or other streaming platforms. There will be no final exam or essay. This course is designed purely for enjoyment and discovery. All are welcome.
I will be running two identical sessions each week to accommodate different international time zones. Choose whichever you prefer. Each group will be limited to a maximum of 12 students.
American session: Saturdays 12pm PT/3pm ET European session: Wednesdays 7:30pm UK time/8:30pm CET
(NB. The lecture portion of the session will be available to download as a video if you are unable to attend a live session and need to catch up.)
August 21 (US) / 25 (EU) Lecture 1: Introduction – The Myths and the Man Movie: MAGICIAN: THE ASTONISHING LIFE AND WORK OF ORSON WELLES (documentary, 2014)
A: WELLES’S STYLE AND METHODS
August 28 (US) / September 1 (EU) Lecture 2: Orson and Film Noir Movie: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947)
** ONE-WEEK BREAK **
September 11 (US) / 15 (EU) Lecture 3: Inventing Independent Film Movies:FILMING OTHELLO (1978); ORSON WELLES: ONE-MAN BAND (documentary, 1995)]
September 18 (US) / 22 (EU) Lecture 4: The Essay Film Movie: F FOR FAKE (1973); THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH (TV pilot, 1958)
September 25 (US) / 29 (EU) Lecture 5: Return to Hollywood Movie: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (1970-76/2018)
B: WELLES’S WORLD
October 2 (US) / 6 (EU) Lecture 6: Orson’s 19th Century: Dinesen, Conrad, and Melville Movie: THE IMMORTAL STORY (1968); Screenplay reading: THE DREAMERS (c. 1979)
October 9 (US) / 13 (EU) Lecture 7: Orson Across Europe Movie: MR. ARKADIN (1955)
October 16 (US) / 20 (EU) Lecture 8: Orson’s Spain Movies: AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES: PAYS BASQUE I (TV episode, 1955); IN THE LAND OF DON QUIXOTE: TEMPO DI FLAMENCO (TV episode, 1964)
C: WELLES AND LITERATURE
October 23 (US) / 27 (EU) Lecture 9: Adaptation Movie: THE TRIAL (1962)
October 30 (US) / November 3 (EU) Lecture 10: Shakespeare Movie: CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)
** ONE-WEEK BREAK **
D: WELLES AND AMERICA
November 13 (US) / 17 (EU) Lecture 11: Power in the Streets Movie: TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)
November 20 (US) / 24 (EU) Lecture 12: The Post-Lincoln Republic Movie: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942) and CITIZEN KANE (1941)
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PAST STUDENT COMMENTS
“The Orson Welles online course The Other Side of the Shadow by Matthew Asprey Gear offers an inspiring overview of the work, inspiration, and drives of a world-class filmmaker whose relevance is often reduced to a few early-career masterpieces. I can only recommend it!”
– Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and Director, European Film Academy
“Matthew is an excellent researcher and lecturer. He put Welles and his films into a fascinating historical context that has greatly enhanced my viewing experience.”
– Charles
“The class was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the lesser known details of Welles’s career and to discourse over his films with like-minded enthusiasts!”
– Tyler, Chicago
“Matthew is very generous in sharing the fruits of the deep archival research he has done on Orson Welles. His expertise about his subject is plain to see and his thorough command of knowledge about Welles reaches well beyond the man’s work as a filmmaker to the many other media he worked in (theatre, television, radio, etc.). Matthew’s lectures are deeply informative and visually interesting. He is particularly good at drawing hidden thematic and historical connections between seemingly disparate projects in Welles’s work, helping to reveal the kernels of new ways to think about Welles as an artist. He is a great facilitator of the conversation portion of the class, helping to keep the conversation lively and guiding us toward stimulating subjects.”
– Jesse
“Matthew Asprey Gear’s 12-week course was an opportunity to have an expert guide lead me through both familiar and obscure corners of Welles’s work. The format was an inviting way for both Welles neophytes and old Wellesians to join in a learning community and explore the unendingly fascinating films and life of a great artist.”
– Josh, Texas
“It’s Terrific! Matthew Asprey Gear brings a wealth of Orson Welles research from firsthand sources and illuminates even the most ardent Welles fans. Come for the informative deep-dive lectures and stay for the lively discussions about Welles’ s many noses, wigs, cheap sets, and bad accents — and of course, the undeniable genius present in most of his films.”
– Christian, Fort Lauderdale
“I highly recommend Matthew’s online Orson Welles course, for both beginners and seasoned Wellesians. The course brings new perspectives and insights to Welles’ extraordinary career.”
– Ronan, Galway
“There was a sense of discovery even for someone who’s been interested in Orson Welles for more than a decade. A carefully planned structure made the course very intriguing.”
–Petri, Finland
“If you are an old Welles fan it is certainly a great opportunity to review and discuss his work and expand your knowledge on unrealized projects, screenplays, literary influences and the diverse facets of his life and work. If you are new to Orson Welles… lucky you! You will be in the right place to have a great overview of his extraordinary work that is certainly not limited to Citizen Kane. In both cases, fun and enjoyment are guaranteed!”
– Elliot, Switzerland
“It was like knocking at the door where Orson is sleeping and wake him up with sweets and going down in the garden with the dog for a walk each Monday. Sometimes we talk sometimes we just walk, and it’s great the same.”
– Emiliano, Rome
“Incomplete projects and hired-gun work in Welles’ filmography have usually worked against his reputation. But Welles scholars and aficionados, Matthew Asprey Gear among them, find in those inexhaustible plans, projects, and versions-of-projects, an artistic strength. If the truism is true that artworks are never completed, only abandoned, then Welles more than most artists gives us a rare chance to engage living projects as something more than a passive viewer. At least this is true of “The Magnificent Ambersons” or “Mr. Arkadin” or “Other Side of the Wind” – and of course Welles has just as many “traditionally completed” films as “Kane”, “Chimes at Midnight”, “The Trial”, etc. (Somewhere in between lay “F For Fake”, a finished film definitively about incompletion and fragmented points of view!) In any case, Matthew Asprey Gear’s class offers a robust survey of the completed and the uncompleted in Welles’ oeuvre, using the former to better understand the latter; and offering details from the archives at Michigan and Indiana and Munich one normally wouldn’t be able to come by (for instance, the weekly “unproduced screenplay of the week” feature). Highly recommended!”
My new research article ‘Three Dangerous Summers: Orson Welles’s Unrealized Hemingway Trilogy’ has been published in the Fall 2020 issue of The Hemingway Review. It examines three Orson Welles film projects left in varying states of incompletion at his death: The Sacred Beasts, The Other Side of the Wind, and Crazy Weather.
The abstract: Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles shared a romantic enthusiasm for Spanish traditions, particularly bullfighting. Nevertheless, Welles rejected Hemingway’s influential interpretation of the corrida as well as the macho archetype the writer had established for the foreign aficionado. This article draws on new archival research to examine three distinct film projects Welles developed in his later years that imaginatively engaged with Hemingway’s personality and his legacy. These projects were left in varying states of incompletion, which has meant that an important theme in Welles’s late work has remained largely invisible until recent years.
Here is a link to the article (access required) at Project Muse
Marching Song: A Play by Orson Welles with Roger Hill; edited by Todd Tarbox. 178 pp. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Like a few other American giants—Mark Twain and Duke Ellington come to mind—Orson Welles left behind vast archives of unreleased work in varying states of completion. He’s been dead for thirty-five years but we’re still catching up with his oceanically ambitious—albeit frequently frustrated—creative life.
The latest rediscovered Welles work is Marching Song. This play about the radical abolitionist John Brown was written in 1932 with some help from Welles’s teacher and lifelong friend Roger Hill. It was only staged twice in 1950 by the amateur drama club at Welles’s alma mater, the Todd School for Boys. Its publication caps a decade’s worth of posthumous treats including the Too Much Johnson workprint (amusing silent comedy sequences filmed in 1938), the half-hour Merchant of Venice intended for TV (1969), and, most prominently, the Netflix reconstruction and completion of his feature The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76). Meanwhile, paintings and drawings from Beatrice Welles’s personal collection have been exhibited and published by Titan Books as Orson Welles Portfolio, and two books of transcribed conversations remind us that Welles was one of the world’s great talkers. Not a bad haul for Welles fans—and more pieces to fit into an unfinishable jigsaw puzzle.
One of those books of conversation, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts (2013), was edited by Hill’s grandson Todd Tarbox. Now returning with his edition of Marching Song, Tarbox argues for a better recognition of Welles the writer, and wishes that Welles’s “newspaper and magazine articles, radio and print essays, movie scripts, speeches, and letters were bound between the covers of a book.” Welles certainly deserves a Heminges and Condell to compile this notional Orsonian First Folio, although it’s certain to be thick as a telephone book. In the meantime Tarbox has made a laudable gesture towards that ambition with this slim volume, a very good quarto indeed.
Writing was an essential first step of the creative process for almost everything Welles made for film, television, radio, or stage, but he only occasionally wrote specifically for publication. This is why despite a scattering of published books in various languages—plays, screenplays, dubiously-credited novelizations—Welles’s writing exists in relative obscurity. Perhaps inspired by Shakespeare’s example, he seemed not very concerned with his writerly legacy. Only a few of his plays were actually published, namely Moby Dick–Rehearsed in 1956 and a volume bundling two short plays (The Unthinking Lobster and Fair Warning) in French translation in 1952. Others, such as Time Runs… (1950), were performed but never published. A number of additional plays await both premiere staging and publication, an opportunity for enterprising theatre directors. (I examined the late 1950s cold war comedy Brittle Glory at the Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin a few summers ago.)
Written by a seventeen-year-old, Marching Song is by definition juvenilia, although that might not mean very much when speaking of the precocious Orson Welles. Tarbox’s volume contains the complete play accompanied by reproductions of Welles’s set sketches and photographs from the 1950 Todd Troupers production (directed by Tarbox’s father, Hascy). There is also a long and engaging introduction by Tarbox that explores Welles’s crucial relationship with Hill. It quotes in full poems Welles wrote for school publications as well as generous passages from the Highland Park News column he wrote as a teenager—including a lively dispatch from Japan. Most valuable of all are the letters Welles wrote to both Hill and his guardian Maurice Bernstein on a painting tour of Ireland in 1931. We encounter the boy in thrall to Irish culture and on the verge of his first professional experience on the stage (“Scores” of additional letters from Welles’s youth, once in the collection of Beatrice Welles, are now archived at the University of Michigan.)
Marching Song‘s 1857-59 setting predates the action of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles’s back-to-back recreations of post-Lincoln America. The play is unsurprisingly ambitious. Welles’s sketches illustrate his plans for innovative sets and lighting. Keeping in mind the preliminary condition of all of Welles’s scripts, certain to be transformed by the happy “accidents” of production, this extant draft is a tad talky and expositional, with a swollen dramatis personae. It is no apparent lost masterpiece, although with its speculations by journalists on the true nature of John Brown, a charismatic and dangerous ‘great man’, it certainly seems like a model for future Welles dramas.
Tarbox’s epilogue, ‘The Social Conscience of Orson Welles,’ helps contextualize Marching Song as an early entry in Welles’s long agitation for racial justice. He includes fifteen pages of transcripts from Welles’s 1946 radio commentaries on the scandal surrounding Isaac Woodard, a black World War II veteran brutally blinded by a policeman in South Carolina. It is valuable to have these stirring texts in book form for the first time. The epilogue makes a helpful supplement to Michael Denning’s study of Welles as a radical political artist in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996).
“A few weeks ago I visited Italy’s Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin on a research project under the sponsorship of the Ernest Hemingway Society. While there I not only made significant discoveries to aid my project, but also had the chance to survey the highlights of a largely unexplored archive that should excite all Wellesians….”
“A previously unknown English-language novel credited to Orson Welles has been discovered in the archives of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin.
“The bound hardcover typescript of V.I.P. ― mistakenly cataloged at one point by the museum as a treatment for the movie The V.I.P.’s or V.I.P ― is an English version of Welles’ French novel Une Grosse Legume (A Big Shot), translated by Maurice Bessy and published by Gallimard Editions of Paris in 1953, according to Matthew Asprey Gear, author of At The End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City.”
I have made two contributions to a beautifully illustrated book edited by Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre called Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (Oakland: PM Press, 2017).
The first is a long essay on Evan Hunter’s contributions to the juvenile deliquency genre including The Blackboard Jungle (1954), A Matter of Conviction (1959) and The Jungle Kids (1956).
The other is an interview with the fascinating and under-appreciated American writer Floyd Salas, conducted in collaboration with Andrew Nette: ‘Whoever Was In Control Was The One To Watch‘.
ORSON WELLES’S THE TRIAL
A study of Orson Welles’s screen adaptation of The Trial in Jim Craddock (ed.), Books to Film: Cinematic Adaptations of Literary Works, Volume 1 (Boston: Gale Cengage Learning, 2017).
ANTHONY BURGESS AND ORSON WELLES: HACKWORK AND BRICOLAGE
A paper presented at the Anthony Burgess: Life, Work, Reputation conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester (3-5 July 2017).
Publication forthcoming.
ADRIAN MARTIN looks at CONTRAPPASSO: WRITERS AT THE MOVIES
Adrian Martin’s article ‘What is Literary Cinephilia?’, which discusses the special ‘Writers at the Movies’ issue of Contrappasso Magazine (2015) edited by Noel King and Matthew Asprey Gear, appeared in the May 2017 issue of Sight and Sound, pp. 56-57.
As a writer of fiction, the act of filling the blank page gives me an exhilarating sense of imaginative freedom. The horizons seem endless. The same must be true for composers and painters.
Yet sometimes I envy the interpretive artist.
Maybe these thoughts have been prompted by listening to András Schiff’s humane and amusing lectures on each of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, an open invitation into a great musician’s workshop. They reveal the mad ambition necessary to record the whole cycle. Beyond mere technical virtuosity and interpretive artistry, the task requires total immersion in the works, years of study and research. But what could be a higher calling than anchoring your creativity to a master?
I think that’s why writers are frequently drawn to the supposedly subservient roles of translator, adaptor, or critic. The impulse to interpret an existing text — in another language, in another medium, or in an essay — represents the desire to be the best kind of reader, to grasp the intimacies of a book’s structure, to know the contours of its sentences. Ray Bradbury showed that impulse at a fantastical extreme in Fahrenheit 451 — the reader who memorises and in essence becomes a book in order to preserve it.
Of course, the Fahrenheit 451 approach is too selfless and too much like religious worship for any kind of creative, critical reader. It is not enough merely to absorb a work of art. The ultimate homage is to re-express the work by filtering it through the self — personalised, recontextualised, embellished, contested. See, for example, Picasso’s obsessive studies of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. This week I visited the Museu Picasso in Barcelona to look again at his forty-five canvases from 1957 that comprehensively analyse, break apart, and remake the forms, motifs, and characters of the original in his own style. Picasso wound up with what he acknowledged would be “a detestable Meninas for a traditional painter.” Nevertheless, it had become Picasso’s Meninas.
Fortunately Velázquez was by then safely in the public domain and available to Picasso’s appropriation and sacrilege. Pablo Katchadjian, a contemporary Argentinean author, has not been so lucky. He has been weighed down with outrageous legal problems since he self-published a chapbook called El Aleph engordado in 2009. He had taken Borges’ classic 1945 story ‘El Aleph’ and, as an experiment, “fattened” it to twice its original length. Borges’s widow, exercising her powers as heir to the copyright, has unrelentingly pursued Katchadjian for his supposed criminal “plagiarism.” Apart from the basic wrongness of the charge and staggering disproportion — the chapbook was published in a mere 200 copies — the legal action ironically demonstrates an indifference to Borges’s influence on successive generations of authors. In effect it advocates banning certain types of critical and creative reading.
It is as absurd to prohibit writers from creatively wrestling with great books as to silence pianists exploring Beethoven. Most writers discover a few crucial books early on that help them understand aspects of worldly experience, furnish them with powerful myths and metaphors, introduce them to characters they come to know as intimately as friends. Consider Orson Welles as a reader. Throughout his career, he returned repeatedly to the same books and, perhaps more importantly, to the same characters as source material for his films, theatre, and radio dramas. He never seemed to want to give up reinterpreting Don Quixote and Falstaff, Moby Dick and The Merchant of Venice, Joseph Conrad and Isak Dinesen.
As a film critic and historian, I’ve come to specialise in adaptation studies. I’ve spent a lot of time analysing the hand-annotated manuscripts of Welles’s screenplays, many of which were never produced. It has been intimately illuminating hanging out with Welles at the point of his pen, being able to relive his thought processes as a writer. Comparing an original novel or play to its adapted screenplay, I attempt to fathom the reasons behind Welles’s choices. Why this specific change? Why this cut? Why this new and original scene?
Most of Welles’s interpretative choices were designed to re-tell a story cinematically rather than with words. On this point, Welles was a formidable translator. Sometimes Welles argued against the original author’s worldview, as in his 1962 version of Kafka’s Trial. He refused to allow Josef K. to submit meekly to execution “like a dog” because he found it unbearable after the Holocaust. Welles also personalised his source material, incorporated autobiographical elements, and even synthesised different literary touchstones. Welles’s and Oja Kodar’s late 1970s screenplay The Dreamers, for example, adapts two stories by Isak Dinesen about an opera singer named Pellegrina Leoni. Several settings are relocated to places of autobiographical significance to Welles. This includes the Triana neighbourhood of Seville, where Welles had lived as a teenager amid the brothels and the bars. In Triana, Pellegrina briefly becomes an unacknowledged incarnation of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, another of Welles’s favourite books which he had attempted to adapt directly for screen and which fed into The Lady From Shanghai (1947).
Radically reinventing his beloved books, Welles’s adaptations wound up more personally expressive than his own original stories. Certain books become part of a writer’s inner life. Heirs may own the copyright, but these books belong to us. In turn, we belong to these books. They call for our interpretation.
Sarah Jilani’s review of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City appeared in the March 10, 2017 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. She writes that the book “offers enjoyable revelations for anyone familiar with Welles’s work.”
Tony William’s long review of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, appeared in Film International (vol. 14, no. 2).
He writes:
Amazingly, the author has not only brought a new positive slant to those frequent academic cityscape studies that now flood the critical landscape, but has also added some relevant aesthetic, cultural and political innovations to the field of Welles studies that distinguish this treatment in its own right as well as provoke insightful readings of neglected films, such as The Trial (1962)…. Far more modest in scope in comparison to recent mega-page studies of Welles, it nevertheless supplies some very important innovations to understanding the director’s work that will make it yet another additional ‘essential reading’ in the critical canon….the book provides both a wealth of new information and fascinating evaluations and
interpretations… a work that is both innovative and original.
Matthew Moore’s review of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the Cityappeared in the latest issue of the US journal Afterimage (issue 44.3, 2016). Moore writes:
“If one beholds Welles’s oeuvre as one of the most multifaceted sets of modern artistic expressions, then surely one will find this newest book an enjoyable and stimulating read…. A generous number of stills, some diagrams, and a short dialogue excerpt enhance the study, fleshing out the idea that Welles’s modern cinematic vision was urban and cosmopolitan par excellence.”
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR 
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