Orson Welles: A Lesson in ‘Guerrilla Filmmaking’

In the history of film, there are not many major directors who worked on shoestring budgets and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, managed to produce masterpieces. Well, based on what I have seen and what I have read, there are a few directors of that quality; directors possessing the Midas touch. The first name that springs to my mind is precisely the name of an American director whose first feature film became arguably the best film ever made (Citizen Kane) – Orson Welles. A plethora of things can be said vis-à-vis Welles’s biography, his tumultuous personal life, the films that inspired him, etc. but my aim will be to concentrate on his lesser-known, rustier, unpolished gems whose charm derives from their inherent imperfection.

The first such film which I would like to discuss is Welles’s screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Othello. The story of this production is one of many hardships and sometimes even insurmountable obstacles which were somehow overcome and the end product was in fact successful against all the odds. A clear evidence proving that point is the fact that Welles’s adaptation of Othello won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952 alongside another film directed by Renato Castellani. However, Welles’s achievement is all the more impressive if we look at the film’s troubled shooting history. At first, an Italian producer approached Welles and offered him funding for the film which was to be shot in Italy where the Moor actually lived. Despite all those promises, in the end the Italian producer went into bankruptcy and Welles had to find another way of getting the money needed, so that he could still finish the shooting of the film and pay the actors he employed. Welles decided to shoot the Cyprus sequences (and ultimately most of the scenes in the film), in Morocco, at a coastal city then known as Mogador. The large citadel situated there perfectly suited the director’s vision of how the island of Cyprus would have looked in the 16th century. While staying there, Welles would occasionally run out of money and would thus have to work on other (acting) projects in order to be able to raise the money he needed. Some of his acting crew would need to do the same, which means that they would not be available to him all the time. Furthermore, Welles had to somehow connect the shots he shot in Venice with the shots from Morocco and to make those transitions relatively smooth. With the help of his brilliant editing skills, Welles managed to stitch the pieces together. Obviously, that meant that he would have to be heavily reliant on the editing which made the film seem excessively artificial. Moreover, there were also sonic problems to do with the film’s post synchronised sound. In short, he had to dub the voices of some of the other actors himself due to their unavailability. Some cuts of the film did look quite disjointed too but overall Welles managed to finish the film and to even enter the Cannes Film festival whose main prize, subsequently, to his utter dismay, he won.

The second film which I am examining is another Shakespearean adaptation – Chimes at Midnight. Although its filming process was indeed not as troublesome as that of his Othello, Welles’s adaptation of the Henriad cycle of plays was not particularly well-funded either. With a budget of approximately $800,000 and having to shoot all the film in Spain of all places, Welles did once more encounter some difficulties. Some of his actors such as Jeanne Moreau (playing Doll Tearsheet) and John Gielgud (playing King Henry IV) were available for five and for ten days, respectively.

Due to the insufficient funding, Welles could not rely on a lot of extras for the battle scene, for instance, or for the coronation sequence. Thus, he had to be inventive once again. Using awkward cutting and some quite clunky visual and sonic effects allowed Welles to somehow create the illusion of having a much greater budget than the one he managed to acquire. Sound was also a problem due to the actors’ absences and the nature of the film’s sound synchronisation which was to take place after the shooting ended. Once again Welles had to dub some of the missing actors himself. In the end, however, that was the whole point. Welles did not want to create a technically immaculate movie; he has done that already with Citizen Kane. What he wanted most was creative liberty. In Europe, he more or less managed to find it, although at a certain cost – the lack of technical expertise of a lot of his European cinematographers, etc.

To sum up, Orson Welles is certainly one of the best directors ever not because he made one perfect film. Being able to finish and to distribute his ‘imperfect’ films is actually the greatest feat he ever achieved; their quality despite the setbacks is just the icing of the cake for one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

Words: Caitlin Mathieson