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The Complete Citizen Kane

The Orson Welles centenary approaches so the posts this week will be devoted to one of my favourite film directors. The Complete Citizen Kane was an especially generous BBC documentary—comprehensive, authoritative and 90 minutes in length—screened in 1991 for the 50th anniversary of Welles’ most celebrated film. Christopher Swayne and Charles Cabot were the producers, and the narration is by Leslie Megahey, producer and interviewer of The Orson Welles Story (1982), a two-part documentary for the BBC’s Arena that ran for 165 minutes. Megahey’s Welles film was a definitive work for persuading Welles and his collaborators to discuss the director’s entire career at length. Clips of the long Welles interview turn up in The Complete Citizen Kane, as do clips from a later BBC series, The RKO Story (1987), which devoted a whole programme to Welles’ time at the studio.

The Complete Citizen Kane captures the attention at the outset by showing you a film that never existed, Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness, the film that would have been Welles’ first project for RKO before it was cancelled due to expense. Helping narrate the evolution of Citizen Kane is William Alland, the actor who played the investigative reporter in the film, and also the voice of the News on the March sequence. Despite obvious sympathies, the documentary devotes some time to Pauline Kael’s controversial Raising Kane essay, and the fraught question of who contributed what to the finished screenplay. The Complete Citizen Kane ends with an extract from a radio show featuring Orson Welles talking to HG Wells shortly after Welles had shocked America with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. All arts documentaries should be this good.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Glennascaul, a film by Hilton Edwards
• Screening Kafka
• The Panic Broadcast

How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels, a film by Craig Welch

Craig Welch’s 11-minute film was made in 1996. It’s a beautifully drawn and conceived piece of work, vaguely surreal as animated films often are but also with some Symbolist qualities:

Welch has stated that one of the original influences for the film was Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead as well as Norman McLaren’s 1946 NFB animated short A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting, which incorporates the Böcklin work.

A pity, then, that Welch doesn’t appear to have made anything since. Watch How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels here. (And thanks to Jescie for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Secret Joy of Falling Angels, a film by Simon Pummell
• Les Jeux des Anges by Walerian Borowczyk
• L’Ange by Patrick Bokanowski

Weekend links 256

Of a Neophyte, and How the Black Art Was Revealed unto Him by the Fiend Asomuel. Aubrey Beardsley for the Pall Mall Magazine, 1893.

• The occult preoccupations of the 1970s appear to be in the ascendant just now. Whether this is mere nostalgia or something in the zeitgeist remains to be seen but BBC Radio 4 aired an hour-long documentary on the subject this weekend entitled Black Aquarius. The guest list implies an inevitable focus on film and television but Matthew Sweet covered a lot of ground, taking in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, The Process Church, and Alex Sanders, the public face of British witchcraft in the 1960s and 70s. Earlier this week at AnOther the focus was on Maxine Sanders, High Priestess of the Alexandrian coven and putative fashion icon even though she was generally photographed naked. Maxine and husband Alex are unavoidable when reading about UK occultism in the 1970s; among other things they were occult advisors to Satanic rock band Black Widow, and also released an album of their own in 1970, A Witch Is Born. Of more interest is Sacrifice by Black Widow, a 55-minute concert for German TV’s Beat Club.

• Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 (1971) is a film more talked about than seen, in part because of a running time that exceeds 12 hours. So news of a Blu-ray release later this year is very welcome.

• “Bruce LaBruce: taking zombie porn and gay homophobic skinheads to MoMA”. The director goes through his filmography with Nadja Sayej.

• “Art is anarchistic, and when it becomes categorized, it loses impact.” RIP Bernard Stollman, founder of the amazing ESP-Disk record label.

• Magickal (and pseudonymous) synth music by Mort Garson: Black Mass (1971) by Lucifer, and The Unexplained (1975) by Ataraxia.

• Kevin Titterton on Angelo Badalamenti and the soundtrack that made Twin Peaks.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 149 by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.

• Rare Decay, a free bonus track from Aurora by Ben Frost.

• Alan Garner is celebrated in a new collection, First Light.

• At Dangerous Minds: The Residents’ radio special, 1977.

• Black Sabbath (1969) by Coven | Black Sabbath (1970) by Black Sabbath | Her Lips Were Wet With Venom (Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas 1 & 2) (2006) by Boris & Sunn O)))

Phantom, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

Yet another short film by Matsumoto, Phantom (1975) differs from the previous examples by being less abstract but thoroughly inexplicable. Disconnected sequences—a naked woman on a beach; a man performing yoga asanas outdoors; an eyeball floating over a city; two people walking round a flickering statue—are intercut with close-ups of a woman’s face. As with Atman, most of the footage looks like it was shot on infra-red film. Once again, a Japanese composer provides the score that hold the piece together, this one being the work of Jo Kondo. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Hole, a film by Toshio Matsumoto
• Atman, a film by Toshio Matsumoto
• Metastasis, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

Temptations

Exhibition catalogue.

In one of the many recent features about Leonora Carrington I noticed a mention of her Temptation of St Anthony painting from 1945 (see below). This was one of eleven works on the theme submitted by different artists for a competition staged to promote Albert Lewin’s The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), a film adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant novel. Carrington is often mentioned when this competition is discussed, along with the other big names, Max Ernst (the winner) and Salvador Dalí. But you seldom see mention of any of the other competitors, hence this post, an attempt to find all of the competition entries.

Leonora Carrington. St. Anthony is often shown with a pig companion but only Carrington depicted the animal for this competition. When asked why the saint had three heads, she replied “Why not?”

Albert Lewin didn’t make many films but he had a predilection for arty subjects, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami being preceded by adaptations of The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). All three films star George Sanders, and all feature special colour sequences when a painting is revealed. 1945 was the peak of America’s brief infatuation with Surrealism (Hitchcock had Dalí working on Spellbound at this time) so Lewin asked a number of Surrealists to take up the challenge. I was surprised to find that Stanley Spencer was one of the entrants, a name you almost never see in this company; less surprising was Ivan Albright whose painting of the decayed Dorian Gray is one of the highlights of Lewin’s earlier film. Leonor Fini was also asked to take part but she didn’t produce anything. The judges were Marcel Duchamp, Alfred J. Barr, Jr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and art dealer Sidney Janis. Ernst won a cash prize variously reported as $2500–3000, while the other entrants received smaller sums. The paintings toured the USA and Britain during 1946–7.

As to the film, I can’t say what this is like because it’s one I’ve yet to see but Self-Styled Siren’s witty review goes into some detail. Hollywood apparently had problems with the adult subject matter (Sanders’ character is described as a sexually predatory social climber), and Lewin was forced to tone things down.

Ivan Albright.

Albright’s contribution is so frenzied and detailed it approaches psychedelia. Best seen in this large view at Flickr.

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