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 Orson Welles shot "The Other Side of the Wind" in the early
1970s but gave up on it, leaving behind 100 hours of footage
when he died in 1985.
Five decades on from its conception, after years of financial
and legal wrangling, the film has been completed, a gift to
movie buffs who will probably spend the next 50 years decoding
it.
"The Other Side of the Wind", which The Hollywood Reporter
called "the Holy Grail for zealous film buffs, the long-awaited
bookend for 'Citizen Kane'," is art imitating life imitating
art: itself the story of an unfinished film left behind by a
great director and reconstructed after his death.
John Huston - a famous director in real life - plays Jake
Hannaford who, hours before his death in a car crash, shows his
unfinished movie to guests at his 70th birthday party.
That film-within-a-film is self-consciously arty, with plenty of
female nudity, reminiscent of late 1960s movies such as
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" or some of Jean-Luc Godard’s
films of the time.
"The old guy's trying to get 'with it'," says one viewer. "Is
that what this movie is about?"
The party is populated by a host of filmmakers, journalists and
hangers-on, all commenting on the art of movie-making and many
shooting their own footage as the story unfolds - film clips
that make up much of the movie we are watching, in a pioneering
version of the "found footage" technique often used in modern
horror films.
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"People talk about these reality shows and found footage movies but
I think it’s very interesting that Orson Welles was there first,"
Bob Murawski, the film editor who had the task of reconstructing
"The Other Side of the Wind", told reporters.
"The conceit of the movie is that it’s shot by many documentary
filmmakers, camera people, all shooting with different film stock
and cameras. I think it’s why it seems so contemporary because years
later people picked up on that technique and that’s the style that
Orson invented in the 70s."
The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called "The Other Side of
the Wind" a "hurricane of anger and wit".
"Perhaps leaving it unfinished was Welles’s ultimate, secret tribute
to the central truth of 'The Other Side of the Wind': how the agony
and the ecstasy of creative art lies in the process not the product,
and how the finished work will never measure up to the ideal version
in your head."
"The Other Side of the Wind" had its world premiere at the Venice
Film Festival, which runs from Aug. 29 to Sept 8.
(Reporting by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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