Awesome Welles
Suppose you’d seen everything Orson Welles ever made. And suppose you were watching one of his films, late one night, smoking your hookah and reclining upon your ottoman. Unconsciousness creeps upon you, and you dream.
And what you dream might look something like B. Kite’s work-in-progress film essay-poem AMERICAN, playing now in a limited run at the Auteur’s Notebook. Link. With film editing software within the financial range of critics at last, I hope to be seeing a lot more interesting essays on film, in film form. So far, this is among the very best I’ve seen.
On a note of lesser import, the latest edition of my column, The Forgotten, is up too. Read all about the lost Antonioni. And the lost Bolognini. And the lost Indovini. Who? And yes, it’s all one film.
shadowplay 
June 4, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Is that B. Kite’s voice? He sounds like a cross between Steven Wright and a gentle but disapproving God.
June 4, 2009 at 7:32 pm
The video essay is excellent, I should add.
June 4, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I thought he should voice it himself but he didn’t feel like listening to himself for that long, I think, so he got an actor to do it. Quite a challenge to do a VO about someone who was, amongst much more, the King of the VO.
June 4, 2009 at 9:22 pm
hee hee
June 4, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Aw, that just makes me kind of sad. I quite like the audio one of him swearing at the fish fingers people though. I’m on his side.
June 5, 2009 at 2:13 am
Thanks for the link to that terrific video essay.
Speaking of short Antonioni, did you ever see his episode “Suicide Attempt” from the 1953 compilation film, L’amore in città/Love in the City? It’s a quasi-documentary about people who have attempted suicide, a bit more like his later stuff than his other films from that period. Fellini did an episode, too, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen this film, I don’t even remember what his was about.
June 5, 2009 at 2:20 am
The Fellini is great! A reporter wants to write up a matrimonial agency, so he goes along and says he’s looking for a wife for his brother, who unfortunately suffers from “a form of werewolfism”. The agency find a willing spouse. There’s brilliant stuff in the big apartment building where the agency is based: camera moves Fellini recycled years later in Satyricon.
Fellini said he passed this story off as true to the producer, who then refused to believe him when he admitted making it all up.
The Antonioni struck me as curiously unilluminating about the suicide attempters, who all had the same story to tell, but it does have some of the bleakness and starkness of his later work.
June 5, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I found the Antonioni fascinating! It’s a parody of neorealism by way of excess. All the actresses are supposedly actual failed suicides and the interviewees have them walking to the places where they failed killing themselves and the way their interactions with their surroundings which bore witness to their failures make them feel like performers in their own real life stories. The failed suicides telling the same story is of course…the POINT.
The Fellini film is one of his most sincere films though decidedly minor.
June 5, 2009 at 11:37 pm
I find it fascinating the way the Fellini changes from silly to serious and even heartbreaking, despite its absurd premise.
I guess my problem with the Antonioni was I didn’t find it terribly illuminating about its ostensible subject. The way documentary got bent into drama and around again was kind of intriguing, and could be seen to some extent in other episodes of the film.
June 6, 2009 at 12:01 am
I just glimpsed at the Welles image and saw Brian Butterfield from The Peter Serafinowicz show.
Have you read Peter Bradshaw’s amusing article about innappropriate cultural flashes?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/mar/24/two-lovers-joaquin-phoenix-benny-hill
can you think of any others? Rigsby/Reggie Perrin in 2001 does it for me every time especially when Rossitor puts his hand to his back and begins to nod his head as he rises from the chair in the revolvng space station (“Miss Jones…”). And Serafinowicz does a tremendous take on Ralph Feinnes morphing into Rossitor in Schindler’s List (“Oh my God”).
Rambling off topic. I’ll stop now.
June 6, 2009 at 12:43 am
I love it particularly when US films cast a British actor without regard for the cultural associations they may have. Robin Askwith in U-571, or Scots funnyman Rikki Fulton as a sinister KGB agent in Gorky Park.
Americans will mainly know Rossiter from 2001 and Barry Lyndon (the officer Barry shoots at the start). His sitcoms don’t seem to have impacted on the rest of the world. here’s Serafiniwicz (the voice of Darth Maul) as Rossiter as Fiennes as Nazi: