The Lost Welles

Unfinished Works (Welles Rarities)
December 1, @ 7PM
The Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy St., Cambrdige
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Tonight, the HFA winds down its look at the Unknown Orson Welles with two hours of rough footage from some of his never completed projects. While footage from The Deep makes up the bulk of tonight's program, the HFA is also screening scenes from Welles' version of Don Quixote, the dream project that received a new vitality when Terry Gilliam tried and failed to film his own version of the story, brilliantly documented in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. There's no way of knowing what to expect from tonight's program, whether the footage justifies Welles' uncompromising vision, or whether it was all folly. But it's likely that tonight's screening may be the only chance you will have to find out.

That Orson Welles is one of the greatest directors of all time is not in question. Few directors have had the same influence on the visual language of cinema as the boy wonder. What is surprising is how much of this esteem rests upon movies never made, or movies only partially completed. The Magnificent Ambersons was famously re-edited by RKO, eliminating much of Welles's stylistic and storytelling originality; so too Touch of Evil and The Lady of Shanghai. Without understanding his studio patrons, Welles became a cinematic nomad, wallowing around Europe and South America, filming fragments here and there.