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Through his radio and film works, such as The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Orson Welles became a household name in the United States. Yet Welles's multifaceted career went beyond these classic titles and included lesser-known but nonetheless important contributions to television, theater, newspaper columns, and political activism. Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts examines neglected areas of Welles's work, shedding light on aspects of his art that have been eclipsed by a narrow focus on his films. By positioning Welles's work during a critical period of his activity (the mid-1930s through the 1950s) in its larger cultural, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts, the contributors to this volume examine how he participated in and helped to shape modern media. This exploration of Welles in his totality illuminates and expands our perception of his contributions that continue to resonate today.


Foreword / James Naremore
Introduction: The Totality of Orson Welles / Sidney Gottlieb and James N. Gilmore
1. The Death of the Auteur: Orson Welles, Asadata Dafora, and the 1936 Macbeth / Marguerite Rippy
2. Revisiting "War of the Worlds": First-Person Narration in Golden Age Radio Drama / Shawn VanCour
3. Old-Time Movies: Welles and Silent Pictures / Matthew Solomon
4. Orson Welles's Itineraries in It's All True: From "Lived Topography" to Pan-American Transculturation / Catherine L. Benamou
5. Orson Welles as Journalist: The New York Post Columns / Sidney Gottlieb
6. Progressivism and the Struggles Against Racism and Anti-Semitism: Welles's Correspondences in 1946 / James N. Gilmore
7. Multimedia Magic in Around the World, Orson Welles's Film-and-Theater Hybrid / Vincent Longo
8. "The Worst Possible Partners for Movie Production": Orson Welles, Louis Dolivet, and the Filmorsa Years (1953-56) / François Thomas
9. Presenting Orson Welles: An Exhibition Challenge / Craig S. Simpson
Index

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Date de parution

08 février 2018

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1

EAN13

9780253032980

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

ORSON WELLES
IN FOCUS

ORSON WELLES
IN FOCUS
Texts and Contexts
EDITED BY
James N. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb
FOREWORD BY
James Naremore
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gilmore, James, 1989- editor. | Gottlieb, Sidney editor.
Title: Orson Welles in focus : texts and contexts / edited by James N. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb ; foreword by James Naremore.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039080 (print) | LCCN 2017043173 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253032966 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253032942 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253032959 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Welles, Orson, 1915-1985-Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.W45 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.W45 O77 2018 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039080
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
CONTENTS
Foreword / James Naremore
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Totality of Orson Welles / Sidney Gottlieb and James N. Gilmore
1 The Death of the Auteur : Orson Welles, Asadata Dafora, and the 1936 Macbeth / Marguerite Rippy
2 Revisiting War of the Worlds : First-Person Narration in Golden Age Radio Drama / Shawn VanCour
3 Old-Time Movies: Welles and Silent Pictures / Matthew Solomon
4 Orson Welles s Itineraries in It s All True : From Lived Topography to Pan-American Transculturation / Catherine L. Benamou
5 Orson Welles as Journalist: The New York Post Columns / Sidney Gottlieb
6 Progressivism and the Struggles against Racism and Antisemitism: Welles s Correspondences in 1946 / James N. Gilmore
7 Multimedia Magic in Around the World : Orson Welles s Film-and-Theater Hybrid / Vincent Longo
8 The Worst Possible Partners for Movie Production : Orson Welles, Louis Dolivet, and the Filmorsa Years (1953-56) / Fran ois Thomas
9 Presenting Orson Welles: An Exhibition Challenge / Craig S. Simpson
Index
FOREWORD
JAMES NAREMORE
Except for Alfred Hitchcock, more has been written about Orson Welles than about any other US filmmaker. This is perhaps not surprising, because the two men were at least arguably the most significant Hollywood directors of the 1940s, the peak decade of the classic studio era, and they have interesting things in common: the burning R at the end of Rebecca and the burning Rosebud at the end of Citizen Kane ; the madmen at the family dinner tables in Shadow of a Doubt and The Stranger ; the crazed clerks who rent motel rooms to Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil and Psycho . They also make fascinating contrasts with one another: Welles the exhibitionist versus Hitchcock the voyeur, Welles the baroque stylist versus Hitchcock the lucid exponent of suspense, Welles the critic of plutocracy versus Hitchcock the artist of anxiety, Welles the Midwesterner who became un-bankable in Hollywood versus Hitchcock the British expatriate who was one of Hollywood s most successful figures. The comparisons resurfaced in 2012, when the international Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers and critics announced that Citizen Kane , which for sixty years had been considered the best film ever made, had fallen to second place, just below Vertigo .
But Welles was a man of more varied talents than Hitchcock, and because his career had so many aspects, the literature on him continues to grow, to the point where it may soon outdistance any of his possible competitors. He was not only an innovative director of theater, radio, film, and television but also an actor, magician, painter, cartoonist, musician, costume designer, writer, journalist, educator, political activist, orator, and raconteur. He was chiefly responsible for War of the Worlds, the most socially significant radio broadcast of all time, and he created some of the most legendary radio dramas and theatrical productions of US, British, and European history.
One of the twentieth-century s leading exponents of Shakespeare, Welles gave us three remarkable Shakespeare films, each in a different style, and a fourth (a color version of The Merchant of Venice ) that has yet to be restored and distributed. Because of his unusual education at the Todd School for Boys in Illinois, he became not only a famous Bardolator but also a lifelong pedagogue. In 1934, at age nineteen, he and his tutor Roger Hill collaborated on Everybody s Shakespeare , a series of abridged acting texts of Shakespeare plays with suggestions for how high school students might stage them; and these charming, unpretentious classroom books still have educational value. In 1939, following the huge success of his modern-dress, antifascist Julius Caesar in New York, Welles supervised the Mercury Text Records, the first full-length recordings of Shakespeare performances ever produced; with Roger Hill, he wrote an article about the recordings for the National Council of Teachers of English, and they were recommended as teaching aids in the first issue of College English . In 1947, when movies were beginning to be widely used in classrooms, Welles made ambitious plans for producing and directing 16mm educational films, but unfortunately, his American career was nearing an end and nothing came of the project.
At the outset of World War II, Welles produced and, through no fault of his own, tragically lost one of cinema s most ambitious educational experiments-a film about Latin America combining documentary and fiction, playfully entitled It s All True , about which we re given new information in this volume. One reason his producers scuttled the film was political. Throughout the 1930s, Welles was deeply involved in Popular Front activities, and after the war, he became increasingly outspoken, publishing his views on American racism and renascent fascism in a syndicated newspaper column and in other venues-matters discussed in full by two essayists in this book. He had become the target of an FBI investigation that was begun at the time of Citizen Kane , almost certainly prompted by J. Edgar Hoover s friend William Randolph Hearst, and had he remained in the United States after 1947, when a congressional witch hunt for un-American filmmakers began, he would no doubt have fallen victim to the blacklist. Instead he went to Europe for a decade, where he directed theater and transformed himself into a pioneer of the international art film-this last in a period before a strong distribution network for such things existed. New details about one of his most complex ventures in Europe, Mr. Arkadin , is found in another essay collected here.
In late life, Welles also pioneered what came to be known as the essay film and made original experiments with found footage and voiceover. No wonder that writings and films about him keep increasing in number. Interesting data about his prodigious career keeps surfacing, largely because repositories such as the one at Indiana University s Lilly Library have given a home to his vast archive. As another contributor to this volume points out, Welles presents both a challenge and an exciting opportunity for librarians and archivists. Because of their work, and because of continuing curiosity about Welles s career, the scholars represented in this collection have made new discoveries about such things as Welles s interest in the history of silent film, his legendary WPA production of the Voodoo Macbeth , and his elaborate stage extravaganza Around the World , which Bertolt Brecht regarded as a landmark of American theater.
George Orson Welles died in Los Angeles in 1985 with his typewriter in his lap, working, as always, on a new project. In 2015, the centennial year of his birth, important books, journalistic tributes, and an excellent documentary appeared. 1 There were also film retrospectives and public tributes across the United States and around the world. One of the largest, perhaps the largest, was at Indiana University, where Welles was the subject of an academic conference, a museum exhibit, and a comprehensive showing of his films. 2 Scholars, filmmakers, and visitors from the United States and seven foreign counties attended and participated in a discussion of Welles s last, unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind , which at this writing is being edited posthumously for release. Because of those events, critics and researchers went to work on the essays you find here, all of them previously unpublished, and all dedicated to the idea that Welles was a multimedia artist.
Is there anything else to say about Welles? Yes, and the proof is in these pages. All great artists are sources of reinterpretation and new critical approaches, and many of the items Welles left behind-especially his journalistic writings, his unfilmed screenplays, his prolific radio broadcasts, and some of his more complex stage productions-remain incompletely explored. Anyone interested in him should welcome the information and insights

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