The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

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FlickeringWindow
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#276 Post by FlickeringWindow » Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:05 pm

Over the last few months, I've rewatched all of Welles' finished films inclusive of all available cuts on Blu-ray when possible (DVD for Ambersons and Arkadin, obviously) in anticipation of this.

The Other Side of the Wind is in this magical place where it's both a mess and masterpiece. It's pure chaos, but it makes it seem like this feverish dream. Especially the film within the film that becomes more and more surreal. It reminded me how the extreme length of the restaurant scene in Tati's Playtime leaves you almost exhausted, almost like you've been up all night with the patrons. I'll admit that I'm a bit biased since I love pretty much anything Welles made.

I found myself glued to the screen, fascinated with what I'm seeing and hearing. F for Fake is my favorite of Welles' films and also probably my all-time favorite film. It was a gigantic influence when I was studying film in college. Welles takes this further. After watching They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, it's as if Welles was trying to be the first method director. Some scenes left me with a huge smile on my face from how brilliantly they played.

Quality-wise, I'm impressed with how wonderful this looks via the Netflix stream. I watched via my 4K monitor upscaled from 1080p and it looked very close to Blu-ray quality. I admire how they didn't try to make it look "better" by blasting grain away. While I really wish they had opted for a mono track since 5.1 seems a bit unnecessary, the sound mixing really isn't that different from a lot of other Welles films. After all, he had no reservations about post-dubbing, whether it worked perfectly or not. (I didn't see any color banding issues on the B&W portions, but I wasn't watching in 4K).

This does make me wish the rest of Welles' unfinished work got a proper release. According to the Neville doc, The Deep, like Wind, was fully shot and just needed sound work.

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Drucker
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#277 Post by Drucker » Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:43 pm

I saw the workprint of The Deep a few years ago at MOMA and it was quite good! I remember thinking it was a great popcorn flick, and definitely seemed like something that could have been a real hit.

albucat
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#278 Post by albucat » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:26 pm

I thought there was a full reel missing from The Deep, aside from sound issue (or was it that the sound for the reel went missing, something like that)? In any case, I've long wondered about whether someone could put out a sort of odds & ends release for Welles. There are completed things like Portrait of Gina that are unavailable, but also so many miscellaneous longer films that remain incomplete but have fascinating sequences which still exist and I wish were available. It's always seemed like a crazy long shot, but then so did TOSOTW.

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hearthesilence
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#279 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:39 pm

FlickeringWindow wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:05 pm
This does make me wish the rest of Welles' unfinished work got a proper release. According to the Neville doc, The Deep, like Wind, was fully shot and just needed sound work.
Forgot about this, but I was struck by how much of the dialogue in The Other Side of the Wind (particularly Bogdanovich's) sounded like location audio, to the point where it was a little difficult to make out what they were saying. They were doing ADR, even getting John Huston's son Danny to impersonate him, and Bogdanovich doesn't sound that different now, so I wonder if there were mix notes or other reasons for this.

I bring this up because I think ADR was mentioned as being one of the major things needed for The Deep. Unfortunately Moreau is now gone too, but still, may location audio can work?

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bearcuborg
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#280 Post by bearcuborg » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:48 pm

I had wondered if it was Alice Tully Hall that was responsible for the sound difficulties, but I later found out that they left much of the audio alone.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#281 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:49 pm

I couldn't hear much of Inherent Vice's dialogue at Alice Tully Hall, and The Other Side of the Wind sounded fine to me viewed elsewhere entirely, as did Inherent Vice upon revisit elsewhere. Just to provide some data points to you.

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senseabove
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#282 Post by senseabove » Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:00 pm

The "Final Cut for Orson" doc on Netflix, which is buried in the Trailers section of the main OSotW page, goes into some detail about the audio restoration. They didn't have the original tapes for the audio they did have, though I forget how many generations away it was, if they said. It was apparently in rough shape, however far away it was, but they used it where they had it, with some substantial clean-up, and looped what they didn't with sound-alikes. I imagine that would account for the difference in clarity more than any intentional mixing choices.

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hearthesilence
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#283 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:00 pm

bearcuborg wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:48 pm
I had wondered if it was Alice Tully Hall that was responsible for the sound difficulties, but I later found out that they left much of the audio alone.
I never had a problem with Alice Tully Hall's sound system before. Apparently it was terrible before the 2007 renovation because when I saw Mike Leigh present Another Year, he mentioned how everything was massively improved, particularly the sound (which he said was indeed awful).

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Big Ben
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#284 Post by Big Ben » Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:14 pm

hearthesilence wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:39 pm
I bring this up because I think ADR was mentioned as being one of the major things needed for The Deep. Unfortunately Moreau is now gone too, but still, may location audio can work?
Imdb states that the film is missing an explosion near the end of the film and the audio issues you mentioned. A workprint exists as mentioned previously. I'm no expert but I imagine something could be made of it.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#285 Post by Roger Ryan » Thu Nov 08, 2018 5:40 pm

Big Ben wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:14 pm
hearthesilence wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:39 pm
I bring this up because I think ADR was mentioned as being one of the major things needed for The Deep. Unfortunately Moreau is now gone too, but still, may location audio can work?
Imdb states that the film is missing an explosion near the end of the film and the audio issues you mentioned. A workprint exists as mentioned previously. I'm no expert but I imagine something could be made of it.
The Deep only has some on-location audio and dubbing by Welles (doing a very bizarre accent for the Laurence Harvey character); it amounts to about 20% of the film; 80% is silent. Basically, the entire audio track would need to be recreated from scratch...and I just don't think the film has enough potential to warrant a multi-million dollar clean-up/reconstruction (my opinion, of course).

On the other hand, Welles' 1956 30-min. short for Desilu, The Fountain of Youth, is one of the most interestingly-directed things he ever did and should really be available in high quality. I'm also hoping the Munich Filmmuseum's reconstruction/completion of The Merchant of Venice (1969) gets some kind of release - it is now the only Welles film I haven't seen.

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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#286 Post by nolanoe » Sun Nov 11, 2018 7:10 pm

Yes, this is exactly what I had hope it would be: an amazing, wild, nocturnal, dreamlike experience. Having seen the "car scene" before, the highlight of the "fake film" was the "toilet sequence". Aside of that... my god, is Huston good in this!! It really, really works. And comes together perfectly.

As an aside... the "fake film" really did remind me of early 80s era Jess Franco, who aimed at a similarly hallucinatory style with titles like Macumba Sexual. Noteworthy due to the Welles connection, I suppose. It feels like a puzzle piece finally clicks into place.
hearthesilence wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 1:11 pm
Yikes, I've only seen the 35mm print that was premiered at the NYFF (and presumably shown at IFC this past week), and not surprisingly I didn't see anything like that.
I also did not see such a thing.

but what I saw was an occasional box of frame-counts in the lower left corner and something similar in the top-border of the frame. Has anybody had that?

As for The Deep - at this point, I am sure a good editor (or a bit of dynamite/CGI) could help out with the explosion. I wouldn't be against ADR by other actors, if done tastefully and "with a tinge of original sound". I too want to see The Deep, no matter if good or not, that's left for history to decide and his catalogue to see completion.

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Thornycroft
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#287 Post by Thornycroft » Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:31 pm

nolanoe wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 7:10 pm
but what I saw was an occasional box of frame-counts in the lower left corner and something similar in the top-border of the frame. Has anybody had that?
Nick Wrigley documented this on his twitter feed. It appears Nexflix initially streamed an ungraded timecoded file by accident.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#288 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:25 am

Thornycroft wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:31 pm
nolanoe wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 7:10 pm
but what I saw was an occasional box of frame-counts in the lower left corner and something similar in the top-border of the frame. Has anybody had that?
Nick Wrigley documented this on his twitter feed. It appears Nexflix initially streamed an ungraded timecoded file by accident.
Ah-ha, that would also explain why so many viewers were complaining about the sound mix (all dialog isolated on the left channel while music/sound effects were isolated on the right). Could it also be the reason for the weird chroma banding "david hare" mentioned upthread? By the time I viewed the Netflix stream (Nov. 2nd, 7:30 p.m. EST), the correct file was in place.

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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#289 Post by MongooseCmr » Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:43 am

Oh, I thought the audio panning was intentional. I really liked it.

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dda1996a
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#290 Post by dda1996a » Mon Nov 12, 2018 10:02 am

Just saw the documentary before I watch the actual film, and found it rather great. It's the usual histographic documentary but just hearing Welles speak, seeing parts from all his films and the insanity behind Wind is good enough for me.
Wondering if any of the two will get any Oscar noms (not that I care, but it'd great to see Wind get belated nominations)

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Mothravka
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#291 Post by Mothravka » Wed Nov 14, 2018 5:47 am

I'm not quite enthusiastic as some others here, it was at most an okay film for me, even if I had high expectations.

Some of the satire is pretty funny and striking together with the metafilm execution, but I think the whole product gets buried in it's own messy and hectic outcome. It works for a while, but not really for two hours. A lot of this is of course understandable if one looks at the absurdly problematic production history. It would be interesting to see the exact version of how Orson Welles wanted it, but I guess this is close enough.

What I liked best was the film within the film, that Blue Cheer song makes it even more effective and better. Those parts echo a little bit of 60s/70s psychedelia, surrealism, experimental and exploitation cinema. It's almost something you would see in a Jesús Franco or Alain Robbe-Grillet picture.

Too bad they tried to pass Oja Kodar as a Native American and painting her skin. All in all, it's far from being one of Welles' major works in my opinion. Nonetheless, it's still an important piece of curiosity that is worth to see for its relevant history and reference. I'll also try to check out that new documentary about it when the time is right.


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filmyfan
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#293 Post by filmyfan » Sat Dec 29, 2018 3:53 pm

Got my free digital download delivered today..after giving some money to complete the project over 3 years ago..

I have to admit I forgot about it!

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MichaelB
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#294 Post by MichaelB » Sun Dec 30, 2018 11:01 am

That reminds me: I’m still owed a set of Jan Švankmajer Blu-rays for investing in his last film way back when. But I assumed at the time that “late 2018” translated to “any time in 2019”, as that’s usually the case.

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The Elegant Dandy Fop
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#295 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Sun Dec 30, 2018 3:17 pm

How does the digital download look? Netflix has real shitty encoding (understandably for speed reasons), and seeing a film shot in various film formats and colors, I'd occasionally encounter incredibly annoying macroblocking. I've also been secretly holding off on re-watching this film as I'm holding out hope that it plays on 35mm in Los Angeles soon.

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filmyfan
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#296 Post by filmyfan » Sun Dec 30, 2018 4:00 pm

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:
Sun Dec 30, 2018 3:17 pm
How does the digital download look? Netflix has real shitty encoding (understandably for speed reasons), and seeing a film shot in various film formats and colors, I'd occasionally encounter incredibly annoying macroblocking. I've also been secretly holding off on re-watching this film as I'm holding out hope that it plays on 35mm in Los Angeles soon.
I will let you know when I have downloaded it..may be a few days/week or so yet (due to work commitments!).

I was hoping to catch the screening in London as well..but again due to work the screening times didn't suit.

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JPJ
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#297 Post by JPJ » Wed Feb 06, 2019 12:35 am

If anyone is still interested in cd's,La-La Land records just released Michel Legrand's score.

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Red Screamer
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#298 Post by Red Screamer » Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:25 pm

Alex Ross Perry on Hopper/Welles. I hadn't heard this take on the footage before:
Alex Ross Perry wrote:If anybody ought to be credited as the author of this newly resurfaced footage, aside from Filip Jan Rymsza and Bob Murawski, who assembled it in the present, it might as well be Jake Hannaford, the character played on camera by John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind (2018), and off camera here by Welles.

...The realization that Hopper is being, at times, aggressively forced to address his beliefs in the power of movies, by a fictional character, comes slowly; you can watch it begin to wear off when, after about an hour, Hopper no longer treats this as an interview and starts referring to Hannaford by name, knowing full well that arguing with the film’s main character would provide better material than continuing to parse The Last Movie in highly specific detail.
At the time, I don't remember any reviews mentioning that, in The Other Side of the Wind you can hear Welles' voice offscreen, doing one of the faux-interviews. That always struck me as a wonderfully weird moment.

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The Elegant Dandy Fop
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#299 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Fri Oct 23, 2020 2:55 pm

Is it possible to give Hopper/Welles its own individual thread?

One of the simultaneously frustrating and exciting parts of Orson Welles' career as an independent filmmaker is all the odds and ends of his career. There's The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock's monologue is missing, The Deep, with its incomplete ending, and even The Other Side of the Wind, which in its current state exists as a version of the film and even in all its brilliance, will never be Welles vision as Welles' use and understanding of editing was unlike anything of his era.

Existing as sort of a companion to The Other Side of the Wind, Hopper/Welles might only exist for the Venn diagram that has Welles fanatics on one side and Dennis Hopper (but specifically The Last Movie) fans on the other. And I happen to love both. For the Welles obsessives, it's very different than The Orson Welles Show where Welles and his tremendous physique and personality carry the entire program while playing into the silliness of the talk show format. He casually slips between Orson Welles the real person with his occasionally bawdy humor, brilliant observations, and love of art. He's also filling in for TOSOTW's Jack Hannaford, with philosophical and political beliefs that are absolutely contradictory to Welles himself. And Welles seems to have trouble sometimes defining which character he as he gets absorbed into the conversation with Hopper.

If Welles is playing Jack Hannaford, then Dennis Hopper is playing "Dennis Hopper", partially the artist stuck between the enormous success of Easy Rider and the soon to be tremendous flop of The Last Movie. If The American Dreamer plays into Hopper as a sort of symbol and end of the sixties as he dissolves into hedonism (lots of drugs, lots of sex), this sort of pre-sages it as Hopper is far more subdued here and even expresses skepticism about his importance as a symbol of youth and the new Hollywood. But Hopper is always playing the part of Dennis Hopper, probably in part due to the circumstances of the production and that this was never meant to be released as a film, but was meant to be excerpted in a larger picture. Welles wants the personality of Hopper on screen and asks the questions to encourage it.

If Welles as a director and editor in F for Fake proved his brilliance as a filmmaker that embraced chance and a sort of improvisational quality behind his Movieola and the curious camera of Gary Graver, then this gives him a moment to show off as a brilliant improvisatory actor too. Maybe it's connected to the fact that Welles was a marvelous raconteur, but the quickness of his retorts and the sorts of questions he asks really props and pokes Hopper into giving some pretty brilliant insight.

I always had an appreciation for Gary Graver being so quick on his feet to keep up with the demands and last minute inspirations of Welles' late-period, that I've even gone through some of his filmography as a b-movie cinematographer (a frequent collaborator to Curtis Harrington) and even his pornographic work (Indencent Exposure being recently released by Vinegar Syndrome). But this sort of gave me an appreciation for the beauty of his compositions that I never considered before. No wonder Welles fell in love with Graver! He manages to make a two-plus-hour conversation constantly interesting to look at as he plays with limited lights, placement, and a real documentary sense of filming.

I'm not sure if Welles can be considered the "director" here as it seems to maybe be closer to the recent phenomenon of documentaries made completely around found footage, but there's no denying that as the voice of God off screen, his fingerprint and presence is all over every single moment.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

#300 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Oct 26, 2020 12:31 pm

Red Screamer wrote:
Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:25 pm
… At the time, I don't remember any reviews mentioning that, in The Other Side of the Wind you can hear Welles' voice offscreen, doing one of the faux-interviews. That always struck me as a wonderfully weird moment.
I believe there may have been a review or two that offer the caveat that, while Welles did not visibly appear in the film, his voice is heard as an interviewer (the one asking Lili Palmer's character Zarah Valeska questions before Jake Hannaford enters the room). While it's possible Welles would have replaced his own voice here in post-production, he's definitely asking the questions as a character so it works fine.

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