The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

 Orson Welles’s “The Other Side of the Wind”

Thematic Elements: 

Welles’s final picture, “The Other Side of the Wind” is Welles’s final goodbye to the film industry, to his friends, his colleagues, and even himself. Orson is being known for creating wall of masks with his pictures and hides himself behind that wall. This film is the pinnacle of that idea.  Oja Kodar, Orson Welles’s lover, said, “Orson was the personification of the wind itself, but I knew the other side of this wind.” This film is the bearing of Orson’s soul. Him revealing himself, good and bad, to the world and maybe even himself. 

• It is a film about Hollywood, in all its chaos and contradiction

• It is a film about the betrayal of friendship, specifically his friendship with Peter Bogdonovich. There is even a Cybill Shepherd character in the film, in which the director steals her from Peter. This seems to be a crude sexual power play by Orson. 

• However, Orson is also satirizing himself and satirizing the ‘masculine’ man (men like Ernest Hemingway). And it is even suggested that the director steals the women of all his leading actors because he is substituting the women for the men; in that he actually wants to fuck all of his leading men. Orson seems to imply that over-masculinity is really just latent with homosexuality. 

• Orson, who is known for being very prudent in regard to sexuality, especially in his films. He felt explicit sexuality was “distractive from the art and narrative.” However, he had a sexual awakening when he found his lover Oja.  Oja introduced sex into Orson’s artistry and this is most apparent in the film-within-the-film.

• The film-within-the-film is an exploration of desire. It satirizes European artistic films of 60s. However, it displays a sense of freedom and innocence. Orson perhaps is suggesting that the film the director has made is a vulnerable look at his own desires to push his filmmaking into new territory. This film-within-the -film also seems to display Orson’s real intentions for ‘The Other Side of the Wind’. (Much like The Other Side of the Wind, the film-within-the-film has lost its’s budgeting as well as one of it’s leading men.) Orson is perhaps saying that the film-within-the-film is the type of artistic boundary-pushing ambiguous film that he is trying to make with The Other side of the Wind.

• The crowd of people who made and are watching the film-within-the-film are representative of the people who actually made The Other Side of the Wind. The haze of creatives understanding art and the director himself. 

• The Other Side of the Wind is a film about The Other Side of the Wind, and about Orson himself. His thoughts, feelings, his complicated relationships, all jumbled in a mass of chaos and ambiguity. It is about the disappointing end of a life, the disappointment in broken friendships, and the regrets along the way.

• The movie ends with the director committing suicide, never having completed his movie. Orson’s life ended as well, having his film stolen from him and never fully completed.

• “We’re born into this world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship are the nearest things that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone.” -Orson Welles

Camerawork: 

Orson’s film contains two sets of filming technique. The documentary that is being made about the director on the last day of his. And the film-within-the-film. The documentary was edited by Orson in an intentionally nauseating way. There is constantly shifting film stock, constant cutting, constant switch between black and white and color, and see-saw aspect ratios that construct a very difficult narrative to track. Orson is using this technique to constantly shift meaning and understand as if to illustrate that the nature of meaning is organic and constantly changing. The constant low angles, dolly shots, and uncomfortable close ups suggest a circus act gone mad. This gives the audience a very dizzying feeling. Orson seems to use this kinetic way of shooting to suggest that everything contradicts itself while at the same taking drawing connections between all things. Orson seems to borrow this technique from the French art director, Jon-luc Goddard. Another inspiration he took from 60s European cinema was the artistry, empty spaces, forced perspective, and lack of narrative for his film-within-a-film. His film-within-a-film follows a woman as she wonders a city followed by a man who desires her. The scene in which she has sex with him in the car on the rainy road was of Oja’s creation. According to Oja, she wanted to appear as a praying mantis, sexually overpowering the man. Her sexuality is eventually too much for the man playing the actor, who then leaves the production. (it is suggested in the film that he is a homosexual). The film-within-the-film is the film that Orson could never make, but perhaps wanted to, exploring the liberation and freedom that cinema could provide, and perhaps he accomplished with The Other Side of the Wind. 

Best Shot: 

The best shot in the film is perhaps one of the final shots of the movie. It is the director’s film being shown at a drive in, after everyone has already left. The drive in, being the inverse of the ‘sacredness’ of cinema, as the director’s film is being played to no one. The meaning of this could be interpreted in many ways. But its safe to say that the meaning can be entirely representative of Orson’s contradictory feelings about his life, himself, and his work. After everyone leaves, his work will remain, playing to no one. A painting lost in the blowing of the winds of time, and only a select few were able to see the other side of the wind.