Despite a sort of torpid illness over Christmas, I watched a lot of films — perhaps because of it. This week’s newsletter is the fruit of all that. I feel like I’ll return to Welles — again — later in the year. With Ralph, I’m also building a head of steam to properly grapple with Hou Hsiao-hsien. Not only an episode of the podcast, but one or two pieces here. Now the snow has retreated, long, damp days and low skies. I’ll try and keep the momentum this month.
— Released in 1942, the surviving architecture of The Magnificent Ambersons — Welles’ second film; infamously re-edited (read: mauled) by the studio nabobs at RKO — must have been one of the ‘earliest’ films to consciously ape the anachronistic visual stylings of an already receded past. Static, shallow tableaux; milky vignetting; the cloying, soupy narration (everything is good, everything is right). An elegy for a passing way of life — and the waning fortunes of an upper class American family; signalled by the replacement of horse-drawn carriages with automobiles — it is unparalleled. You can only guess at Welles’ larger, more fully-fledged intentions for the mutilated entity we’ve been handed down. Forty minutes are missing. Wiped out.
— Ironies. I like to think of it as existing on several registers — of composition, rhythm, style — jostling together, in a furiously subdued tension. Ideologically, the passing we witness is a passing — slow, drawn-out; a death rattle — from the Europeanized ‘gentry’ of the 19th century and their replacement by a bawdy fin-de-siecle bourgeoisie (the rise of the American bihs-nears-man). Much of the tension flows around stern imaginings of a (ruined) future heralded by the dumb machinery of the automobile. The old world is passing. Gone with it? Something like: refinement, manners, beauty. We should be suspicious of this.
— But we don’t need to imagine it — we can see it, in the tattered obliteration of the Amberson family. This is where Welles’ evocative use of visual styling sallies forth. The genteel sexual politics of the first large ensemble scene — a society ball — is shot with all the merry, evenly-lit candoor of a classic ‘studio’ shoot, giving licks of Lubitsch and Mamoulian. But, already, the hint of impropriety is creeping in — and of righteous indignation. Eugene — an early automobile baron — acts (according to the bullish George) with shocking indecency (courting not only his aunt, but his mother). He’s really our antagonist, but is never really decked out as a kind of despot. Rather, he is a vaguely sympathetic vehicle (ho ho) for the historical process (automation — cars) that he is ushering in — a credulous instrument. If not him, somebody else. Inevitability. The executives at RKO reshot an audience-appeasing ‘happy ending’ in which both Eugene and George get their way (which is, love — or something like it). It’s a very stupid and cornball way to end the film; softening the very angular impression we can sense of Welles’ true ending (catastrophe for the Ambersons — crushed, literally, beneath the wheels of a car). Run your eye up and down these images — the stark, elongated shadows; the silhouetted profiles, which amounts to a kind of sundowned haunting. Dust sheets, collapsed bodies (Fanny, her legs collapsed on the floor). How the shimmering grey-white of the film’s first act is replaced by the ink-black pools of its finale. Welles tells his story through negation — what is deepened, charcoaled.
— Back. Earlier, in the film’s opening moments — the establishing — we’re treated to an extended montage on the wayward youth of young George Amberson Minafer. Playful wipes, brassy dissolves, and – most importantly of all – the visual texture of a Daguerreotype: a shimmering silver that blisters beneath a tar of tarnished edging. Scene for scene, it’s as if Welles is flipping — rapidly — through the formal history of cinematic production, advancing the actual texture of the film – its look and feel — from the late 1880s to the 1930s, and beyond. It’s why, later in the film, as the fate of the Amberson family is slowly sealed, that he draws on the expressionistic use of deep shadow and jarringly angular framing (i.e., it becomes modern). He also begins to lock us in the house itself – gone are the sparkling landscapes (widely framed) of trees and snow, the streets of the town. It is more claustrophobic, more entombed. A different film slowly takes over — the horse and cart obliterated by the Ford model T. Here, Welles drives both.
— Its crowning satire is particularly pointed — a ‘flat’ composition in which young George stands, proud and defiant, against a painted background: evoking not only the glacial motionlessness of the early photograph, but the halcyon superficiality of John Singer Sargant. Too fragile to survive.
— Eventually, more and more characters are picked off — and the house (remember: it began very full, literally chock full of people) begins to take on a sort of declined Dickensian pathology. There is much less light, and deeper pools of shadow — more clutter. George eats a lone lunch at a darkened kitchen table — no grand dining room — while his increasingly erratic aunt berates him at his side. Bowls and objects and bits of material culture clutter the scene, so we can barely see his hand; except for how it plunges down into a plate of food, lifting it again. Hungrily animalistic. Here — taken as a whole, within ninety minutes – we’re treated to a kind of tensile, visual anthology of film itself. Decline, fall.
— There’s always a sense of rueful resentment that comes with watching any film by Welles. You feel very bad for him — how difficult he found it to really articulate his vision, how knocked about he was by studio executives. As a kind of hero out of time — and this is quite a pseudish take, but whatever — you feel that were he alive today, we’d see a very different Welles, but I don’t know if that’s even remotely true. I just end up feeling very disappointed that we won’t ever see The Magnificent Ambersons as Welles intended it, but he also managed to make a furious amount of films over his life, and I always find his avuncular, olde-world affectations very charming. He’s basically very easy to like, as a person — as a filmmaker. But again, this is really irrelevant and probably a very stupid thing to say.
— Earlier in the film, we get a sense for what Welles thinks about these clashing elites — in the form of close shots of squarely framed faces, those of the ‘ordinary’ townspeople, who give us their twopence on young George and his (actually really irritating) antics. They’re shot with a slight low angle, framing the face against the grisaille of the sky. Just prior, we’re treated to a frolicsome essay on the changing styles of the time — how they change (five inches of cloth, tight trousers exchanged for those like “great bags”). It is flooded with nostalgia, of summer nights and “pretty girls”. Here, I think we’re supposed to be treating all this with an edge of irony — a self-consciously too-pristine accounting of these departed years. Its lightness — knowingly — betrays itself, a contrivance. The story of the Ambersons is a kind of auto-mythology: a self-myth that — we know — can bear only the lightest of relationships to the truth; a “lost” America that was only ever trembling and temporary, and whose inheritor — George — was far from blameless in his behaviour. Early on, Welles — narrator — refers pointedly to George’s come-uppance. Take note.
— As I mentioned above, this lightness — however sardonic — later unravels: as if offering a subtle nod to James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s ecstatically experimental The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) which, like The Magnificent Ambersons, articulates its aura of social (and moral) decline with jagged, expressionist interiority. In both films, we see how light — and shadow — can transfigure a space, a house. Welles’ film seems as if it’s in a close dialogue with its ‘barely departed’ predecessors. Fitting, then, that writers like Jonathan Lethem describe Welles’ film as “ruined” and “neglected” cinema. Blasted columns buried in a desert; here stood something and something. But that’s — perhaps — to romanticise too much of its erasure. There is still the heavy meat of a film here – and one that bears its author’s marks, cut very deeply into the stone. There is simply too much of Welles here to really, fully disfigure the film — whatever mealy-mouthed endings are spliced on.
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