This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account. Maybe this was inevitable. The Other Side of the Wind was its own (mad) documentary. But Morgan Neville could have given us a plainer and more helpful story and he could have used title cards to tell us who all his interviewees were, on and off camera. The voice of that great Welles scholar Simon Callow is often to be heard, uncredited.
The Other Side of the Wind was Welles’s fascinatingly quasi-autobiographical and quasi-documentary study of an ageing and totemic film-maker in whose honour a chaotic party is thrown, attended by all his young admirers, critics, hangers-on and possible backers in a desperate attempt to raise completion cash for his latest picture. John Huston played the Wellesian director, and Welles’s own great protege Peter Bogdanovich played an acolyte. Life imitated art imitating life: Welles spent about five bizarre and exhausting years of part-time shooting, from 1970 to 1975, before funding collapsed and the Paris-based Iranian production company impounded the footage, which became almost impossible to recover after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The film (or one possible version) was finally shown at this year’s Venice film festival.
A brilliantly plausible and imaginative 122-minute cut taken from more than 100 hours of raw material, this labour of cinephile love was heroically undertaken by editor Bob Murawski. The result is anarchic and weird: intimidating, boring, dazzling, audaciously experimental, a vivid snapshot of Welles’s own mind and the cinema scene as the new wave was itself beginning to unravel, along with the fortunes of its great independent ancestor.
The edit told us much more about its own genesis and disaster than this misconceived documentary which presumes to imitate the raggedness and discontinuity without the spark of inspiration. Bogdanovich is interviewed, in bits and pieces. The better moments come from TV footage, when Welles and his comrades appear, and Welles’s own bitterness and caprice emerge. This documentary is an oddity. Better to seek out the film itself.
