A new film by Orson Welles? Even in a vintage year like Venice 2018, that has to be something special. This is Welles’s experimental found-footage-style autobiographical movie about an unfinished movie which was ironically unfinished in Welles’s own lifetime, abandoned in financial chaos in the mid-1970s. Or perhaps this was not at all ironic. 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.



Now, under the auspices of Netflix, a 122-minute film has been retrieved from more than 100 hours of raw footage by editor Bob Murawski in association with the project’s executive producers, Peter Bogdanovich and Beatrice Welles, Orson’s daughter. The resulting work is as every bit as brilliant and chaotic and exasperating as you would expect, garrulous and madly disputatious, with plenty of tragicomic lechery and crassly dated wisecracks about Native Americans and gays. It’s a fascinating image of Welles’s own fierce self-questioning yet self-affirming state of mind, and the state of American cinema itself as the Hollywood golden age was about to give way to the New Wave.

This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium. I sometimes felt I was watching the 100-hour version. What an act of cinephile ancestor worship this represents. Figuring out what Welles had in mind must have felt like piecing together the fragments of Prospero’s staff, so that the great man can break it on screen all over again.

Jake Hannaford, played by John Huston, is a veteran film director and hard-drinking Hollywood legend, whose career is looked back on after his death as a Rosebudless mystery. Jake is shown struggling to find completion money for his latest indie venture, entitled The Other Side of the Wind, which in its incomplete state is screened at a fundraising party: a beautiful, naked young woman (played by Welles’s partner Oja Kodar) wordlessly pursues a beautiful, naked man. Welles has created something satirically preposterous, like a Russ Meyer remake of Zabriskie Point.

Hannaford himself is lionised by younger generations of cineastes and critics, but paralysed by a growing legendary status which inhibits his ability to get any new creative work done, taking refuge in bleary and boorish cynicism. His friends compare him to Ernest Hemingway (a bad omen) and he actually resembles John Huston, a bit. But of course, in every important sense, he is Welles himself.

The film is the story of a party thrown in Hannaford’s honour by his friend Zarah Valeska, played by Lilli Palmer. She has invited all the cool young dudes of the New Wave generation, who all bring their cameras, and the idea is that this film is a documentary record patched together from all their verite footage. Not a single second of Jake’s final, unhappy hours has been left unrecorded by these voracious, parasitic, predatory movie brats — a clever mosaic of colour and black-and-white footage. Zarah’s plan is to give her old friend a morale-boosting infusion of fan love from the younger generation, chief among whom is his protege, younger film-maker Brooks Otterlake, played by Peter Bogdanovich.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Hopper, John Ford and John Huston during filming. Photograph: Snap/Rex/Shutterstock

The hope is also that it will create a spectacle of popularity and success which will impress possible backers, also on the invite list. But the spectacle is of something else: the electricity fails, the lights cut out, the projector packs up, the drunken ill-humour escalates. Also, Hannaford’s being goaded by an obnoxious critic there, Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg), transparently based on Welles’s old enemy, Pauline Kael. Gradually, in all the melee and boozy disorder, an awful thought creeps up: Hannaford’s never getting his production money. This party isn’t a relaunch. It’s a wake.

There are references to Fellini here, with the surreal appearance of dwarves, but the comparison is misleading. The Other Side of the Wind really looks more like an experimental American movie of that time. It resembles The Last Movie by Dennis Hopper (who has a cameo here) or the early, scrappy pictures of Brian De Palma: Hi Mom! and Greetings. It is a vivid snapshot of a turbulent zeitgeist, the ordeal of making a film independently, the agony of feeling oneself obsolete. Watching The Other Side of the Wind, I found myself thinking of the final scene in David Niven’s Hollywood memoir, The Moon’s A Balloon, in which he remembers turning up to a trendy Hollywood party and being harangued by a aggressive hippy-ish guy for being irrelevant, but then told he could atone for his sins by coming up with some “heavy bread” for this man’s new film company. Niven seraphically accepts that his time is up. But Welles is angry: rage and frustration punch holes in this film.

Whatever its flaws, it is an enthralling portrait and a study of work destined always to be in progress.

