At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 25
This prologue is followed by a flashback to the drama, set in the year 1947, when rubble still overwhelmingly dominated the city. The Devil Makes Three’s prologue corroborates Diefendorf’s history of the pace of Munich’s reconstruction. Considering that the Munich sequences of Arkadin were not shot until the spring of 1954, it seems Welles overemphasised material traces of the war, that he made a deliberate decision to ‘berubble’ his mise-en-scène just as deliberately and impressively as he had dressed the springtime streets in fake snow. Although Mr. Arkadin is ostensibly set in the present, the rubble evokes the grimmer condition of the Munich of the mid-to-late 1940s.
Van Stratten in the Munich rubblescape
The Devil Makes Three (1952): Stills from the prologue including documentary footage of the rubble adjacent to the destroyed headquarters of the Nazi Party, the ‘Brown House’, in Munich
In short, Mr. Arkadin is an unreliable representation of the historical Munich of 1954. Welles’s cinematic city is richer than what might have been captured through any realist approach, as it arose from the encounter of found Munich locations with Welles’s political perspective on divided Germany. The palimpsestic rubblescape on screen not only is the bleak and unfriendly final stop for the dying Zouk, but also serves as a microcosm of Cold War Europe. Like Gregory Arkadin, Europe itself seems to be faking a condition of amnesia. Strictly policed national borders have divided politically obsolete cultural unities that nevertheless keep breaking to the surface via artefacts and nostalgic memories. Vehemently anti-nationalist, Welles makes a mockery of the fictions of nationhood.
The film was unfortunately botched by the circumstances of its making. Nevertheless, even in its unsatisfying variant versions, Arkadin is the closest Welles came to dramatising his vision of national identity and the operation of power in the cities and skies of 1950s Europe. The bureaucracy of borders and passports remains the means of controlling and dividing the common people; the wealthy obtain their power through an aerial mobility that circumvents such control.
NOTES
1 Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’; Press Conference (1955), part I.
2 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Welles’s Anguish and Goose Liver’ (DVD notes), Confidential Report (Melbourne: Madman DVD, 2009), reprinted at http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2010/12/22958 (accessed 7 August 2015); Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 190, 191, 196; Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
3 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 226.
4 Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
5 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 193–5.
6 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 155.
7 Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
8 This version has not been seen since 1962. Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
9 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 196–7.
10 On the Comprehensive Version (Issa Clubb, 2006), in The Complete Mr. Arkadin (USA: Criterion Collection DVD, 2006).
11 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 197.
12 On the Comprehensive Version.
13 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 156.
14 The ‘Comprehensive Version’, while making no claims to definitiveness – an impossibility, as Welles never finished the film – nevertheless attempted to assemble as much of the extant material as still existed in a coherent order that followed Welles’s known intentions for the project. In The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
15 Rosenbaum, ‘Welles’s Anguish and Goose Liver’.
16 Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
17 Welles quoted in Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 148.
18 Press Conference (1955), part I.
19 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 169.
20 Welles quoted in Biskind (ed.), My Lunches with Orson, 90.
21 Frank Tavares, ‘Orson Welles, Harry Alan Towers, and the Many Lives of Harry Lime’, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010, 168, 173.
22 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 237.
23 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 189.
24 Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 220.
25 See Luís Nuno Rodrigues, ‘Crossroads of the Atlantic: Portugal, the Azores and the Atlantic Community (1943–57)’, in European Community, Atlantic Community? (Paris: éditions Soleb, 2013), 457–67.
26 ‘Man of Mystery’, The Lives of Harry Lime (Orson Welles, 1952). Original broadcast: 11 April. Included in The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
27 These episodes are also included in The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
28 Denning, Cover Stories, 75.
29 Welles quoted in Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 265.
30 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 238.
31 Chuck Berg and Tom Erskine, The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2003), 434.
32 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 238.
33 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 71.
34 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 160.
35 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 152, 157.
36 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 193.
37 Welles (1982) quoted in Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 148.
38 William C. Simon, ‘Welles: Bakhtin: Parody’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 12, Nos. 1–2, 1990, 26.
39 Jonathan Rosenbaum during his commentary track with James Naremore on the ‘Corinth Version’ in The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
40 J. Hoberman, ‘Welles Amazed: The Lives of Mr. Arkadin’ (essay), The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
41 Simon, ‘Welles: Bakhtin: Parody’, 25.
42 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 196.
43 François Truffaut, ‘Confidential Report [Mr. Arkadin]’, in Morris Beja (ed.), Perspectives on Orson Welles (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 27.
44 ‘St-Germain-des-Prés’, Around the World with Orson Welles (Orson Welles, 1955). Original broadcast: 18 November.
45 This can be inferred because Rosenbaum reports that all of actress Patricia Medina’s sequences were filmed in Madrid. Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 154.
46 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 155.
47 A silent version of this deleted scene is included as a special feature in The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
48 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 152.
49 Welles quoted in Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 230.
50 Welles quoted in Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 229.
51 ‘The Police’, Orson Welles’ Sketchbook.
52 Orson Welles, ‘For a Universal Cinema’, Film Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1955, quoted in Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 153.
53 Welles quoted in Brady, Citizen Welles, 472.
54 Eric Rohmer quoted in André Bazin (translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum), Orson Welles: A Critical View (Venice, CA: Acrobat, 1991), 120.
55 Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 8.
56 Jennifer Fay, ‘Rubble Noir’, in William Rasch and Wilfried Wilms (eds), German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 126–7.
57 Ramona Curry, ‘Rubble Films’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 45, fall 2002, at http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/curry/index.html (accessed 8 August 2015).
58 François Thomas, ‘Chronology’ (essay), The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
59 Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 196.
60 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 240.
61 Robert Arden later recalled his first days on the production in Madrid filming these scenes with Tamiroff, an actor of limited availability whose scenes needed to be completed quickly. Welles prioritised Tamiroff’s close-ups and shot Arden’s later (see the Arden audio interview with Simon Callow i
ncluded in The Complete Mr. Arkadin). However, it does seem Tamiroff was present for some of the Munich filming later in the year, because he is shown descending the stairwell of ‘Sebastianplatz 16’ with Van Stratten.
62 Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities After World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14–15, 29.
CHAPTER 11
LOST IN A LABYRINTH
The Trial (1962)
I move from one kind of architecture to another in my dreams without any difficulty whatsoever.
– Orson Welles, 1981
Continuing to make his living as an actor across Europe, Welles performed a small role in Abel Gance’s Napoleonic epic Austerlitz (1960), produced partly in Yugoslavia by Michael and Alexander Salkind. The Salkinds, father and son, were a Russian dynasty of film producers with a reputation for fly-by-nightism. Sometime during the winter of 1960/61 they approached Welles to write and direct an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1835). Welles later explained that the producers arrived by long-distance taxi to offer him the job while he was vacationing in the Austrian Alps. After securing Welles’s services, they asked to borrow their taxi fare back to Innsbruck. It was a harbinger of the lean season ahead, although Welles later said the Salkinds’ plan to make a movie without any money was “wonderful”.
Welles wrote a Taras Bulba script. When a rival motion picture adaptation went into production in Salta in the north of Argentina, the Salkinds presented Welles with an alternative list of story properties. He decided on Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess (The Trial), which had been published posthumously in 1925.
The Salkinds set up a multi-national co-production – French, Italian, and German – that forced Welles to select actors and technicians from the different participating national film industries. He later said it was no great restriction. As on Arkadin, Welles worked with a limited budget and weathered unstable financial circumstances during shooting. He had to provide emergency funds to the budget himself. He also experienced again the frustrations of trying to work in collaboration with a fledgling state film industry, this time in Yugoslavia.1 Through the 1950s Yugoslavia had gradually opened up its production facilities to international co-productions. For film producers, the Yugoslavian landscape promised “every kind of terrain and weather, from snow-covered Slovenian mountains to lush, blue Adriatic Ocean within hours of each other”.2
Welles’s patchwork methods and ability to improvise saved the project from cancellation. This time he was able to reconcile his editing process to the demands of his independent producers. Although he missed a deadline to finish the film in time for the 1962 Venice Film Festival, the Salkinds did not fire him.3 He finished his final cut immediately before the film’s premiere in Paris that December. As such, The Trial is a fully realised Wellesian creation, the first film he was able to complete to his satisfaction in a decade.
Kafka’s novel provided Welles with another opportunity to explore freedom, the law, and bureaucracy in the context of an invented postwar European city. Like Arkadin’s Munich rubblescape, the city of The Trial contrasts a grim present with the traces of a now divided, politically obsolete culture of Mitteleurope. But rather than reveal traces of the past palimpsestically in a rubblescape, the labyrinthine city of The Trial mashes wildly different built structures: monuments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Modern collectivist urban planning – architectural languages that expressed radically different ideologies.
Unlike Arkadin, The Trial lacks any typical Wellesian expression of saudade for this Mitteleuropean past. Welles’s evocation of that past is limited to the material cityscape itself. This is part of the reason why, despite moments of comedy, The Trial is his bleakest movie, alongside Macbeth.
* * *
Kafka’s novel recounts the trial of Joseph K., a bank clerk, who is arrested for unexplained reasons one morning. He is left at liberty for a time, and is determined to denounce the illegitimacy of the whole legal process to which he is subject. The nature of the charges against him are never revealed. Following a long series of unsuccessful attempts to resolve his case, K. is led to a quarry outside the city and executed in such a way “as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him”.4
Although in most cases faithful to the source text, at least as the unfinished novel had been published and translated, Welles departed from Kafka and personalised the material. He rearranged the chapters and changed the ending of K. submitting meekly to execution, because it “stank of the old Prague ghetto” and was untenable to Welles after the Holocaust. He also instructed Anthony Perkins to play K. as a socially ambitious schemer.5
The parable ‘Before the Law’, which originally appeared during Kafka’s lifetime in his collection Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor, 1919), is also told to K. by a priest towards the end of The Trial, as part of “the writings which preface the Law”. A man from the country comes begging “for admittance” to the law, which is patrolled by a guard. After making the man wait until he is near death, the guard finally admits: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”6 Welles narrates this haunting, fatalistic parable as the prologue to his film, illustrating it with a series of ‘pinscreen’ illustrations by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker that follow Kafka’s hints by visualising the abstract law as a closed city or fortress.
“Before the Law”
Following the prologue, K. attempts to navigate a labyrinthine city which is almost reduced to the spaces of his nonsensical trial – its courts, law offices, and, finally, execution site. Kafka’s setting is a non-specific Mitteleuropean city in which time and space are vague. The unfinished nature of the manuscript only enhances its vagueness. K.’s search for a resolution to his case has been described as “an exploratory journey through the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the modern city, a space defined by surfaces, theatrical scenarios, and unreadable representations”. He is an alienated individual in the modernist tradition, unable to contain a total vision of the city.7
Welles reinvents Kafka’s city setting for the screen. The Trial’s frequent spatial absurdity is licensed by Welles’s explanation at the outset that the film follows the “logic of a dream… a nightmare”. His screenplay contained a longer, more explicit narration that did not make the final cut: “Do you feel lost in a labyrinth? Do not look for a way out, you will not be able to find it. There is no way out.”8
The unnavigable labyrinth, implicit in the source material, happily chimed with Welles’s Pan-European patchwork method. He filmed through the first half of 1962 in at least three different European countries and, as with Othello, sometimes cut together shots acquired from disparate locations. The illogical spaces of the city are flaunted in the dialogue. When K. exits through a tiny door in the studio of the court painter Titorelli, he finds himself back in an uncomfortable place he’d only recently escaped: “This is the law court office,” he says in bewilderment. It forces him to admit his surprise at the extent of his ignorance of “everything concerning this court of yours”. Moreover, spatial relationships between the characters and objects are sometimes malleable from shot to shot. In another scene K. exits the Interrogation Commission Hall; in the counter-shot from outside the door looms absurdly large over K.’s tiny figure:
This is not to imply that Welles was indifferent to visual continuity; in fact, Welles’s meticulous work with cinematographer Edmond Richard ensured an aesthetically consistent image of extremely deep contrast so as to allow Welles flexibility in editing.9 The film’s expressionist aesthetic – its deep focus and abysmal darkness – is a major triumph in a body of work that always demanded the best of cinematographers.
* * *
Welles did not make a period film set in Kafka’s late 1910s. He freely blended nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings with the unmistakably contemporary architecture of Europe. The wild internationalism of Mr. Arkadin was succeeded by a
single imagined urban setting that was intended to evoke the flavour of Kafka’s Prague but that follows the author’s example in blurring its exact location. The cast again provided a smattering of accents – American, French, English, German, Italian, and Akim Tamiroff’s Akim Tamiroff. Welles shot the film by combining footage from Zagreb, Paris, and Rome. In Zagreb he sought the “flavor of a modern European city, yet with its roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire”. At the time he said, “I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia”:
It seems to me that the story we’re dealing with is said to take place ‘anywhere.’ But of course there is no ‘anywhere.’ When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn’t go to Czechoslovakia because his books aren’t even printed there. His writing is still banished there.10
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, politically united in 1867, had collapsed with the end of World War I, around the time Kafka wrote The Trial. Vienna and Budapest had been the joint political and cultural capitals of the dual monarchy. Welles knew both cities intimately as a boy in the 1920s and had soaked up the surviving ambience of a recently vanished age. He later recalled old Vienna with idealistic affection in two short television documentaries, and had a particular fondness for Hungarians of the period such as art forger Elmyr de Hory and producer Alexander Korda; eccentric, self-inventing exiles born in the dying days of the dual monarchy.
But Kafka’s Prague had been overshadowed by the cultural centrality of the dual capitals – and Zagreb even more so. By the 1940s the territory of the former dual monarchy had been bisected by the Iron Curtain. Croatia was now contained within the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. It has been said that for much of its history Zagreb had the character of a capital city that lacked an enveloping nation; its complicated history was representative of a long-term disjunction between the spaces of political power and the spaces to which people attached their identity.11 As one historian writes: