The Eyes of Orson Welles

source: The Eyes of Orson Welles

Moviecut—The Eyes of Orson Welles

This is constructed in a different way than most looks at a life, with a focus on art and drawing to see things the way he saw. It mostly works really, really well, with some great attention to tiny details from his life that only a real scholar would know. It stumbles a bit with the part where he has orson talking back, but that's only 10 minutes of a 100 minute movie that really does offer something for even the person who already has read everything there is to read about Welles.

A British documentary film; This is a compelling analysis of the creative output, sketches and paintings of the American actor, director, writer and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in radio, theatre and film. The film critic Mark Cousins regales us with a colourful and insightful account of his motivations. It is gushing as a tribute, but it is heartfelt. It dovetails image and voiceover very well.

This Irish hack compared Donald Trump to Citizen Kane after praising Obama, but Obama was much more of a False-Messianic character in the media, giving him Nobel prizes before he even sat down in the oval office... then again, Obama was also more Being There than Citizen Kane, and this movie was just horrible either way... Too modern to have anything connected to Welles. The director talks about the Internet and cell phones and suggests Orson would have a field day creating new movies with these devices. Meanwhile, truth be told, Welles couldn't get arrested as a filmmaker for twenty entire years before his death. He'd grown too old and flaky to finish anything for any studio, and if he were alive he'd probably have a hard time finishing a single YouTube clip. Welles was a master but his movemaking genius ended in the 1960's... He was too scatterbrained to center on just one thing, and that happens with a lot of mad geniuses... As for this documentary, it's more liberal trash out there that innocent movie fans get stuck with and told it's mainstream.

Could have been interesting if the director wasn't so focused on priveledged Welles low rising with the lower classes. It goes on and on with the politics of Welles and the sketches are few and far between. Becomes quite a bore real quick. Further, 90% of it is speculation. Using movie clips! And a fake Orson who isn't even good at impersonating him!!!!!!!!

Commendable in the sense that Cousins tries an original take on the documentary structure but it just doesn't work on any level. Imagining an intimacy with Welles which puts him (Cousins) at the centre of the story rather than the subject feels profoundly, unforgivably pretentious in my view. His relentless, monotone questioning is a huge distraction, making this almost completely unwatchable. I persevered and persevered but had to give up after forty minutes. Welles' story is fascinating without all the unbearable and distracting drawl and he and his story deserves better than this pompous guff. You have been warned.

Orson Welles made what is arguably the finest film ever made and followed it up with a few good films and a lot of films that have flashes of brilliance but are marred by serious flaws. That being said, even his worst films are worth watching, as are the many documentaries about his life and craft. This film, "The Eyes of Orson Welles" has some marvelous material about Welles' life and his craft, and it's material you've never seen before. But like most of Welles' own films, this documentary has some serious flaws that detract from what might have been a major contribution. It's well worth watching, but could have been so much better.

Pretentious, Malick induced Irish whispering masquerading as art, self indulgent, moot content, and more about the documentary's love of self, then love and insight into a truly great artist. One word keeps popping up in my head to describe this monstrous waste of so called cinematic space - pathetic.

In his imaginative take on the life of Orson Welles, Mark Cousins looks at Welles's personal sketchbooks - he was an inveterate scribbler, though he rarely went as far as to produce what we might call finished artworks - and sees the connections to his films, and to his life. This is not just a novel but also an interesting approach: film is a visual medium, but the visual side of a movie is the hardest thing to talk about: the sketches provide a key to the way that Welles conceived his tableaux. The other part of the thesis is that Welles's choice of movies tell us something about his private character. This is more contentious: does someone choose to play Falstaff, say, or film Don Quixote, because the character fits their own self-image? Maybe not, but Cousins gives us a credible speculation of how Welles' own character manifested itself in the work he produced, of how his films reveal the man who made them. Instead of a conventional narrative, Cousins prefers to engage in one half of an imaginary dialogue with the auteur: at times this is less successful, as when Cousins seems to impute a connection of Welles with Ireland that seems more important to him than he manages to convince us it was to Welles. Overall, though, it's a worthwhile endeavor: Welles's story is well known, its arc usually presented as tragic; but Cousins succeeds in making us view it through fresh eyes.