All language subtitles for The.Eyes.Of.Orson.Welles.

Dear Orson Welles.

Look where we are.

One of the wonders of the world.

With an eye like yours,

you'll have noticed something missing
in this skyline.

The Twin Towers are no more.

All things come to an end,
don't they?

People, buildings, cities.

That was one of the big themes
in your movies.

You died more than 30 years ago.

Since then,
some things haven't changed.

But quite a lot has changed
since you died.

Life has become far more visual.

Something called the internet
has come along.

Right.

It's hard to explain, but see those
two guys at the bottom of this shot?

or order pizza, or book a flight,
or watch Citizen Kane.

Phones are televisions
and travel agents now.

The internet is like black magic.

The addict in you, the adrenaline
junkie, would love it.

What you would have done
with the internet?

There've been other big changes
since you died.

We've had an African-American
President in the Oval Office.

Oh, and a guy
who thinks he's Charles Foster Kane.

The world has become
more Wellesian, Orson.

The despots that you were
fascinated by are gaining ground.

Things seem exaggerated.

But what is Wellesian?

Who were you?

When I told a waitress recently
that I was making a film about you,

she said, "Oh, that big creepy actor?
He gave me the willies".

You did act creeps, didn't you?
And bullies.

In 'The Third Man',

the camera whooshed into Harry Lime,
your most famous character.

A monster. A smirker.

In the limelight.

So, the waitress was partly right.

Can we look at you anew, Orson?

Can we tell your story anew?

Can we?

I went to this secure storage unit
in New York.

METALLIC CLANK

And found this box.

What's in the box?

An aspect of you, Orson.

You left no autobiography,
but you left something else.

I took the box in a taxi.

That's me, 40 years after I saw your
film, 'Touch of Evil', on TV as a boy.

I didn't understand it,
but I swooned.

I felt the whoosh of love.

You threw a rope to me
when I watched it, Orson.

When I'm nervous now,
anywhere in the world,

I hum the tune that plays
on Touch of Evil's pianola.

It's a sultry lullaby of sorts.

PIANOLA PLAYS

I took the box on a plane
and now it's in my flat.

What's in the box, Orson?

Not words or films, but drawings.

Many have never been seen before.

What's in the box, Orson?

Visual thinking.

What's in the box, Orson?

A sketch book of your life.

Look how freely your quill
moves across the page

in this BBC tv documentary.

Scratch and scribble,
lines faster than you could think,

for the back of the head
and the lapel.

PEN SCRATCHES

Then more careful for the nose.

You were obsessed by noses.

Old-school technique,
dipping into an inkwell.

Where would you start the story
of your drawing life, Orson?

You said that at nine,

"I'd started to paint.
That's what I loved the most, always."

And then, later,

"I've never been excited by movies
as movies,

as the way I've been excited by magic
or bullfighting or painting."

Your guardian, Dadda Bernstein,
encouraged you to study art

in the Windy City.

What a transit lounge!

Was it a visual treat?

AMBIENT CITY SOUNDS

Did it affect your looking life?

You could look at Chicago square on,
like this.

But, surely, the city
of the first great skyscrapers

made you look upwards.

And you became the greatest ever
filmmaker of looking upwards.

Whether it's by craning,

shooting below people's feet.

- Mr Arkadin is waiting for you.
- Thanks.

REPORTER: 20,000 tonnes of marble...

NARRATOR: To suggest power.

So, you wouldn't have to request...

To miniaturise a character.

Not so loud! You want to bring
the officials down on us?

Suppose they ask who you are?

You lived here and had a drawing studio
here on Rush Street.

It was just big enough for your bed
and a large drawing board.

Your teacher said that you did
thousands of sketches here,

but threw most of them away.

But you studied drawing here,
didn't you?

The Art Institute of Chicago.

In your early teens.

Do you remember, as a boy,
sitting on the tail of its famous lions?

And, inside, what did you see?

Europe?

Myths?

Bodies?

Selfhood?

Pointers to your future?

Translucent ceilings lit from above?
A technique you'd use in The Trial.

- Who are you?
- My name is Bloch.

Are you employed here?

And Citizen Kane.

You talk about the people
as though you own them.

Years later, if you knew someone
who was going to the Art Institute,

you told them to go and see
these miniature rooms.

Did their look, their wideness,

influence any of the visuals
in your films?

You're supposed to train her voice,
Signor Matiste. Nothing more.

If you could be here now,
your eyes would be darting, Orson.

Chicago's got new ways of seeing.

So, your drawing and painting life
had begun.

It continued for 60 years.

You drew everywhere you went.

So, there were at least a thousand
of your artworks.

Where are they now?

Many are in Michigan, in Ann Arbor,
which was named after its trees.

Here, in the University of Michigan's
archive they have your relics.

Your beloved nose putty.

A coat you wore as Rochester
in Jane Eyre.

Letters from you. And to you.

This one is from Vivien Leigh.

And then there are your drawings
themselves.

Another place where I found
your artworks was here.

Can you guess where I am?

And who lives here?

Brace yourself, Orson.

It's Beatrice, your third daughter.

She's in her 60s now,
but is still a rocker chick.

And sometimes drives with no hands.

MARK: What am I doing first?

All those should be his paintings,
if I remember right.

- That is gorgeous, that, isn't it?
- Isn't that fabulous!

That was a Christmas card.

It was a Christmas card.

That's sort of what I saw this morning
when I got up.

- That's... I call it Broadway Blues.
- Hm-mm.

And that's about a producer saying,

"So sorry, Mr Welles, we haven't
got around to reading it yet."

You know, this is just like the usual.

- And he's saying, "How about my play?"
- Yes, exactly, that's him.

And see, "Where did the money go to?"
See, it's just... It's like my father .

Some... Sign he put here,
some Broadway blues.

This was in Munich, when he was travelling
with his father around the world.

- This is before he got to Ireland?
- Oh, yes.

This is probably when he was about,
I think, 12.

And that's in Munich. And then here,
he's... I don't know. Our dearest family.

He'd been to Shanghai at this point,
hadn't he?

- Yes.
- Hence this one.

And then,
these look like German caricatures.

He's on his way to Germany, obviously.

A drawing of you painting, Orson,

and look how many kisses
you put on this letter.

And I just went, 'Wow, look at this
picture', and then I remembered

that this was the painting he drew when
they threw him out of "Touch of Evil",

when they said, "You can't come back,
and you can't touch your movie".

- Which is this one?
- Yeah. And you can see the anger in it.

I mean, you can just...

Can't you?

MARK: Wow!

You took a line for a walk.

Portraits, sketches in letters,
costume designs, stage layouts,

backdrop plans, Christmas cards,
pictures of your loves and travels.

You drew compulsively,
a lifetime of lines.

Were you in the zone when you drew, Orson,
like sports people?

Do your sketches
show us your unconscious?

PEN SCRATCHES

Can we glimpse in them the story of
your life, its politics, love and power?

GUITAR PLAYS

Ordinary people, Orson,
the 20th century was theirs.

Many got to vote for the first time,
old elites lost power.

Was the extraordinary Welles
ever ordinary?

Did you know
many working-class people?

My own allegiance
is stronger to the idea of citizenship,

and my own loyalty is greater to the idea
of myself as a member of the human family

than it is to a...
as a member of any profession.

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

The Hotel Meurice, in Paris, 1960.

A TV interview.

How solid you are in the frame.

And then your laugh,
and that trademark cigar.

But where did your belief
in citizenship start?

With your mother, Beatrice.

She co-founded the Women's Alliance
to help Chicago's poor.

Her activism was inspired by
this Unitarian church,

which was open to all races and classes.

The Women's Alliance hosted speeches
on the persecution of Jews in Russia.

Your mother was the first woman
in your hometown of Kenosha

ever to be elected to public office.

She had a community tree planted -

I think it's this one -

to raise money so that every
Kenosha child between two and 14

would receive a Christmas gift.

One of the reasons you painted and
drew Christmas trees so often, Orson?

In impasto.

Snow white paint on black card.

A black line helix
daubed with green and red.

A gothic black ink tree in the sunshine.

An eight-second felt-tip pine.

A grisaille tree encased.

Magenta and sage.

A pine branch in ink and brush wash.

The helix in white now,
reduced to a hieroglyph.

All distant reminders of your mother,
perhaps? What a woman she was!

This film should be about her.

She laid the foundation
of your political beliefs.

But she died when you were just nine.

And then the Wall Street Crash came.

The Depression brought new realism
in American art.

But something more personal
happened to you, Orson,

that further shaped your politics.

You took a boat, the SS Baltic,
to Ireland

explicitly to draw and paint.

PEN SCRATCHES

We can feel your 16-year-old eyes
darting about on the Baltic, Orson.

There are four lookers alone in this small
section of one of your drawings.

They're befuddled, suspicious or glowing.

What you saw on the boat was people.

Real people,
like you'd seldom seen before.

What about this woman's twisty jawline
and pursed lips?

And these two profiles?

Did they know you were drawing them?

PEN SCRATCHES

Did this guy?

Your background was privileged,

but on the Baltic you met migrants
and really looked at them.

You later became fascinated by ageing,
sagging faces.

Aged just 23, in the play
Heartbreak House,

you were like the man you drew
on the Baltic.

Were you in a hurry to get old, Orson?
Did youth bore you?

Or maybe in the months in Ireland,
your youth ended.

And then you set foot on Ireland.

You wrote,
"Our very landing was dramatic...

men and women got on their knees,
weeping for joy.

"It's almost beyond belief
that two days' journeying

from the world's greatest metropolis
brings one to a land

where an intelligent and aristocratic
people lives in archaic simplicity."

Intelligent, aristocratic, archaic.

The words you used
about the Irish were rich indeed.

You wrote, "In 16 short years of living,

nothing comparable with Galway
or the West of Ireland

has loomed so unexpectedly
or breathtakingly on my horizon".

You bought a donkey - Sidheog -
and cart and roughed it.

You wrote, "I curled up under the cart
and fell asleep".

"There were nights too, spent in cottages,
wakes, weddings and matchmakings.

"My week with the band of gypsies,
my mountain climbs,

my night in the quagmire."

You really encountered the old world.

You spoke of, "these people who produced
and flourished in Tutankhamun's time".

You painted hundreds of landscapes here,
but destroyed them.

It was the people and faces
that you preferred.

You went to the Aran Islands

and came across a visual world
as exciting as Chicago.

It's here that the documentarist
Robert Flaherty had made this film,

which he'd started shooting
in the same year that you were there.

His eyes scanned between faces, too.
The camera pans between them.

Your mother had taken you to see
his early film, Nanook of the North

and you loved it.

Now, you were in the world of his movies.

More profiles.

Pencil and then ink wash.

Same for Mr Costello, a Galway shopkeeper.

"This man has sold himself
to the black one", your note says,

and so you've devils winking
around the edge of the page.

And ski-slope noses -
your most geometric Irish sketches.

It's like you were using a protractor.

And then you were for Dublin...

...where you famously blagged your way
into the Gate Theatre.

You claimed to be famous
and then in Ireland became so.

You drew make-up sketches

for the performance at the Gate
that made headlines, Karl Alexander.

But, again, your eyes darted
to new types of faces.

In the three on the right,
your hand was getting freer.

Looking at Irish people
was training you to look, to draw.

Talk about taking a line for a walk.

So, to your mother's politics
and Ireland's,

now let's add a third encounter
with working people.

Two years after Ireland,
you went here. Morocco.

Another new visual world for you.

A faster place, was it?

No pose in your Irish drawings

is as confidently done
as this guy's on the left.

His left elbow and his raised knee.

Less than a dozen pencil lines give us
the shape of his body under his jubba.

And this is better still.

The diagonal of the long pipe
of the big guy on the left

sets the line for the shadows
on his face, jubba and legs

and the wall on the left.

You were seeing real people
better than ever, Orson.

And these three women are haunting.

From left to right, a dark face,
what looks like glasses

and then that beautiful single eye.

PEN SCRATCHES

And a drawing like this is echoed
22 years later,

in a moment like this,
in your film, Mr Arkadin.

You walk towards us, and then
one of your frames within frames.

Also, in the summer of 1933,
you went here, Spain,

to the gypsy quarter of Seville.

Working people again.

Traditional culture again.

The non-Anglo world,
the non-Protestant world.

Catholics and Arabs were more
expressive than Protestants. More visual.

In the beginning was NOT the word.
Your life experience was broadening.

And also in 1933 of course,
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Italy was a police state by then.

Within a year, you were in New York
doing radio,

a pawn medium, intimate and personal.

Dictators and democrats
were devoted to it.

It let you get into the minds
of the people.

It let you whisper to them,
or boom that big voice of yours.

You wanted to be the listeners' griot,
their consigliere,

their consciousness-raiser.

And so, you acted as the announcer
in a radio play

by Archibald MacLeish.

It's set in a central square in a city.

A conqueror like Hitler is coming.

He's getting closer, and your clipped
English-accented voice of the announcer,

describing what he sees.

ORSON ON RADIO: He's coming.
He's clear of the shadow.

The sun takes him.
They cover their faces with fingers.

They cower before him. They fall.
He's alone where he's walking.

He marches with rattle of metal.
He tramples his shadow.

He mounts by the pyramid,
stamps on the stairway.

Turns. His arm rises.

His visor is opening.

There is no one.

There is no one at all.

No one. The helmet is hollow.

The metal is empty, the armour is empty.
I tell you, there's no one at all there.

The people invent their oppressors.

They wish to believe in them.

They wish to be free of their freedom.

Look, it's his arm!

It is rising. His arm's rising.

They're watching his arm as it rises.

They stir. They cry.
CROWD CRY OUT

They cry out! They are shouting!

They're shouting with happiness.
Listen!

They're shouting like troops in a victory.
Listen!

The city of masterless men
has found a master.

You'd say it was they were the conquerors,
they that had conquered.

CLAMOUR CONTINUES

The city is fallen.

NARRATOR: Fascism as a beast.

In Ireland, you drew mostly faces,

but quite a few of your later paintings
and drawings are faceless,

like the conqueror was faceless, Orson.

PEN SCRATCHES

And in films, you usually tried to hide
your face under whiskers, a false nose

or thick make-up.

And look, Orson, at how your wife, Paola,
Beatrice's mother, painted you.

We'll come to your love life later.
Bet you can't wait for that!

If your mum seeded to your political life,
Orson, and your trips abroad peopled it,

the rise of fascism made it ramrod.

So, you came here,
to Harlem in New York.

The year was 1936. Your progressive
politics were taking on a new dimension.

The Depression had led the US Government
to launch, the previous year,

a nationwide theatre project

to give jobs to unemployed
theatre and entertainment workers.

This woman, Hallie Flanagan,

as much of an activist as your mother,
made it happen.

Did she remind you of her?

The Harlem Renaissance
had been a big story in the 1920s,

but a decade later
80 per cent of Harlemites had no work.

And you and your team
decided to mount

an African American theatre production
of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

You were fascinated by Macbeth.

You built a plasticine model of the stage.

This stylised jungle backcloth
was painted.

The production was conceived, visually

as a series of pictures
in chromatic ascension.

The setting would be Haiti.

The witches would be Voodoo.

10,000 people showed up at the opening.

Searchlights. Roads were blocked.

The excitement of something new.
A new way of seeing and being seen.

Black intellectuals in ermine and jewels.

Inside, what were they about to see?

Their own people, classicised.

At the centre of culture... and acclaim.

APPLAUSE

Want to see the Lafayette now,
Orson, 80 summers after your triumph?

Are you sure? Okay. Look.

It's no more. It's apartments instead.

100,000 people saw your Voodoo Macbeth.

The company and the crew
of 110 African Americans

went on tour with it around the country.

The wind of change blew through the 1930s,
your 1930s,

the decade when you were in your 20s.

Your activism grew.

Since we're talking about social justice,

I bet you're expecting me to mention
The Cradle Will Rock,

the most famous left-wing theatre story
of the time.

You directed it, but the Federal Theatre
Project's government sponsors

had their guards padlock the theatre.

Are you getting goose bumps
thinking about it after all these years?

What did you do? Locked out
of your own theatre, you and your team

had the audience march way uptown
to an empty theatre.

Your fancy sets were left behind.

Union rules meant that your actors
couldn't perform on the new stage,

so all that could happen
was that the composer, Marc Blitzstein

could sit at a piano on the empty stage
and do the show alone.

Well, guess what, Orson?

They've made a film of it.

Close-up on Blitzstein.
On his own and nervous.

♪ ...up to my room

♪ Turn on the light... ♪

But, then, famously, your actors
stood up in the stalls and joined in.

♪ I ain't in Steeltown long
I work two days... ♪

A spotlight.

♪ The other five
My efforts ain't required... ♪

And then a crane shot
to help the spirit soar.

♪ Two dollar bills I'm given

♪ So I'm just searchin'

♪ Along the street... ♪

Talk about people's theatre!

And in the same year as this -
what a 1937 you had -

you made your anti-fascism more explicit.

You ripped into another Shakespeare play,

the one that stimulated
your visual imagination most,

and your political imagination, too.

Julius Caesar.

As a teenager, you drew Mark Anthony's
speech to the people like this.

He casts a vast shadow.

Already, you were thinking
of Julius Caesar in terms of lighting.

And look what I found in the box, Orson.
Drawings from about 1950.

You were planning a film of Julius Caesar.

You imagine a camera above a light.

A pink and black sky,

maybe the stormy night in Rome
after the plot to kill Caesar is hatched.

And, look, you planned to shoot it
in Rome's EUR,

the chilly monumental district
built by Mussolini's fascists.

You saw Caesar as an ancient Mussolini,
didn't you?

And the ancient crowd didn't resist

like they didn't resist the conqueror
in MacLeish's play.

You wanted to use a hanging miniature
in front of the camera,

an old Hollywood technique.

You thought of the Capitol
as a kind of beehive.

But back in 1937,
your visual ideas were even bolder.

You'd seen images
of the Nazi Nuremberg Rallies.

The vertical torchlights
made columns like a Roman temple.

So, you had your stage production
look the same. And guess what, Orson?

They recreated your production
in the film, Me and Orson Welles.

Square-on shot.
That graphic white lighting.

The camera glides in
as the audience gets engrossed.

MAN: Caesar! Caesar!

FANFARE

Peace! Let every noise be still.

NARRATOR: And all this
before Hitler invaded Poland.

We've come a long way
from your mother's Unitarian good deeds.

But the story of your social ideas
isn't over yet. Far from it.

You were only 22
when you did Caesar on the stage.

After radio and theatre, you found
a new medium of the people.

Movies.

Your first feature, of course,
was Citizen Kane.

It changed cinema

and it is known for its expressionism
and critique of vainglory.

But its most touching moment
is related to your mother's ideas

or your time in Ireland.

Why don't you try laughing at me again?

Charles Foster Kane is in the rented room
of a working-class woman, Susan Alexander,

who offered him a place to clean up after
he got covered in mud by a passing car.

I'm wiggling both my ears
at the same time.

And, at the top right, photos of a woman
who looks a bit like your mother.

Took me two solid years and the best boys'
school in the world to learn that trick.

Fellow who taught it to me
is now the President of Venezuela.

THEY LAUGHKANE: That's it!

NARRATOR: They play
a kids' shadow game.

He's famous, but she doesn't know it.

She's probably one of the most ordinary
people he's met in his life.

The camera drifts in.
The look of love, perhaps?

Some of the softest lighting
in the film.

Your small tribute to a powerless,
but sincere woman.

I'm awful ignorant,
but I guess you caught on to that.

I bet it turns out I've heard your name
a million times.

Hollywood was more interested
in glamorous people in the 1940s,

but you spoke highly
of this unpolished B-movie.

A scene like this
must have caught your eye.

A white couple's in Harlem,
where you did your Macbeth,

and they go into a bar.

No fancy lighting here,
no Wellesian angles,

but a social setting not often seen
in escapist Hollywood cinema.

MUSIC PLAYS

In It's All True, the film that you shot
in Brazil in the early 1940s,

but didn't complete,
there's a similar sincerity.

ORSON: It's the sameness
I'm talking about now.

Sameness in spite of difference.

Different sounds to the words,
but the same idea.

Different colours, but the same spirit.
Different churches, but the same faces.

Different liquor, but the same hangover.

Different jokes, but the same laughter.
Different nations. The same humanity.

Thank God for the differences,

because it's out of those differences
that culture grows

and grows big in all directions at once.

NARRATOR: It's like a Soviet film
by Eisenstein.

Brilliant close-ups
of un-Hollywoody faces.

And this soundtrack
is one of your radio broadcasts

about South and Central America.

ORSON: ...Quieroz of Argentina.

Thank God for Walt Disney, el Gran Otello,
Carmen Miranda.

Thank God for Chavez, Villa-Lobos
and a thousand unknown troubadours

who improvised the people's thoughts.

Thank God for Mark Twain
and Mickey Rooney

and all the others, living and dead.

NARRATOR: And, look, Orson!
Low angle, a girl crying,

and is that your hand
reaching up to console her?

In 1947, Joseph McCarthy was elected
Senator in your home state, Wisconsin.

You made political speeches now.

One said, "In this shrinking world,

adult education must first enlist
in the war against provincialism.

"Educators are sworn to the tremendous
task of telling people about each other."

You received hate mail.
Hundreds of letters.

One asked if you would, "allow your
daughters to be touched by Negroes".

Another said, "If you and the other Jews
of your class, and the Negroes

want us to love you,
why not better yourself?"

J Edgar Hoover had your name
added to the security register.

Were you scared, Orson?

If so, you didn't show it, especially in
the case of the African American soldier,

Isaac Woodard.

Here's your drawing of him.

In your BBC TV show,
Orson Welles' Sketch Book,

you told his story square on, straight
to camera, underplaying your rage.

...on a bus. On the way he felt ill and
he asked the bus driver to let him off.

The bus driver refused, abusively.

There was an argument

at the end of which a policeman was called
in who dragged the boy out of the bus,

took him behind a building
and beat him viciously.

Then, when he was unconscious,
poured gin over him, put him in jail,

charged him with drunkenness and assault.

When the boy regained consciousness
he discovered that he was blind.

The policeman had literally
beaten out his eyes.

NARRATOR: A terrible crime in itself,
but the fact that Woodard ended up blind

seemed to dig deep into you,
such a visual person.

And so, on radio, you tried to hunt down
the cop who blinded him.

The policeman's name wasn't known,
so you called him Officer X.

You said that he brought the justice
of Dachau and Auschwitz to America.

You went on, "Officer X,
I'm talking to you.

"Where stands
the sun of common fellowship?

"When will it rise on your dark country?
I must know, Officer X,

because I must know where the rest of us
are going in our American experiment."

You continued, Orson.
"We will blast out your name, Officer X.

"I will find means to remove from you
all refuge, Officer X.

"You can't get rid of me.

"God judge me if this isn't
the most pressing business I have.

"The blind soldier fought for me
during the war.

"I have eyes, he hasn't.
I have a voice on radio."

Orson, the research carried out by you and
your associates did help find the officer.

He was Chief of Police
Lynwood Lanier Shull.

He was tried, found not guilty
and returned to his job.

Years later,
again in your sketchbook programme,

you drew out the lesson
of the Woodard incident.

You're speeded up now
and are leaning forward into the lens,

into your passionate theme.

I'm willing to admit that a policeman
has a difficult job, a very hard job.

But it's the essence of our society
that the policeman's job should be hard.

He's there to protect.
Protect the free citizen,

not to chase criminals -
that's an incidental part of his job.

The free citizen is more of a nuisance
to the policeman than the criminal.

He knows what to do about the criminal.

It's nice to look out of our window

and see the policeman there,
protecting our home.

We should be grateful for the policeman,
but I think we should be grateful too

for the laws which protect us
against the policeman.

NARRATOR: Which brings us to here,
Orson, and another story about the law.

Do you recognise this place?

One of your favourite cities -
the City of Light.

You drew and painted it.

You've seen the Eiffel Tower
a hundred times, of course,

but wait 'til you see this.

From the year 2000, it has... sparkled.

We're here, Orson, to end the story
of your political evolution.

You made a film mostly here.
The Trial, from the novel by Kafka.

In the box, I found this.

I think it's one of your early drawings
for the film.

Joseph K, who's accused of an unspecified
crime, is in the middle, casting a shadow.

On either side are the two agents
who arrest him on his 30th birthday.

In the novel, K is helped by a painter,
hence the paintings on the wall.

Is that right?

And above, a light exactly like
the one you sketched

for your abandoned film
on Julius Caesar.

You have such lights in The Trial.
They're totalitarian for you.

Who are they?

I can't expect you to know where
the Interrogation Commission is sitting.

That's right, I don't.

NARRATOR: But, then, in Paris, you decided
to film in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay.

TYPEWRITERS CLACK

Low angle. Plunging perspective.
And your drawing comes to life.

And one of your crane shots -
a rise, like an airplane taking off.

The drawing has that facelessness again.

The Trial is about facelessness.

The law has no name.
Officer X.

Very well, then.
Just go ahead with your work, my boy.

NARRATOR: The Trial was your portrait
of the 20th century,

its desk-bound armies of salarymen.

You can't talk business to him now.

It was a Rene Magritte painting
in which the law, played by you,

is faceless at times.

MAN: We can discuss anything.

Mummified and steaming like a racehorse.

And you famously changed
the ending of the novel.

Kafka had Joseph K lead the henchmen to
the place of his execution. He acquiesces.

JOSEPH K: You.

You.

Anthony Perkins whispers at first.

You.

And then yells the yell of the century.

YOU! YOU!

YOU! YOU DUMMY!

YOU'LL HAVE TO DO IT.

YOU'LL HAVE TO KILL ME.
COME ON! COME ON!

NARRATOR: A salaryman
and the final solution.

K was a pawn in the game of the century.

HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER

In this unedited handheld shot,
which captures the atmosphere of a Q and A

after a screening of The Trial,
you explain your change.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the changes
you made in the story was at the end

when Joseph K is killed.

He's killed in a very alarmingly different
way than in the book,

and I was really curious as to why you
changed both the way he was killed

and the way he was acting when he died.

Because the book was written
before the Holocaust.

And I couldn't bear the defeat of K
in the book, after the Holocaust.

I'm not Jewish, but we are all Jewish
since the Holocaust.

And I couldn't bear for him
to submit to death as he does in Kafka,

masochistically submit to death.

It stank of the old Prague ghetto to me.

NARRATOR: Your politics
had come a long way from Kenosha

and the community tree of your mother.

You'd travelled the world, fallen for
Irish islanders and Moroccan merchants

and been outraged by racism.

You'd felt at home in Harlem,
become an idealist

and used three art forms -
radio, theatre and film -

to dramatize and visualise your ideas.

But the Europe you so admired
disgraced itself in the 1930s and '40s,

and it's hard not to see that disgrace
in some of your drawings.

PEN SCRATCHES

Even in a scribble on a menu
in Rio de Janeiro.

What political smoke signals you sent.

What a trail you left.

We've tried to follow that trail, Orson,
to see where it leads.

Eight years after you died, there was
a movie called Groundhog Day

in which the same elements were relived
over and over.

It's sometimes good
to rewind the clock, isn't it?

It's good to look at a life again,
through another lens.

MUSIC PLAYS

What's the story of your love life, Orson?

You'd probably prefer me to talk about
politics than love,

but you're not here to stop me.

You travelled the world
and fell in love everywhere.

What and who and how did you love?

I think there are five answers.

You loved places, you loved visually,
you believed in the chivalry of love,

as if it was a waltz.

You were an omnivorous lover
and you felt the guilt and end of love.

Let's start with your love of places.
And this place, Arizona.

When you lived here
you didn't go for walks,

but you seemed to have loved
the sunshine.

Crayon on watercolour paper.

The opposite
of that totalitarian spotlight.

Chalk and paint and felt-tip pen
to conjure a storm over the red rocks.

The first place you loved
was Grand Detour, Illinois.

Your father, Dick, who took
you travelling, owned this hotel there.

Dick built a ballroom on the first floor

and you recalled sneaking up there
at night, in the moonlight and dancing.

And you had a hut across from it that was
your art studio when you were a boy.

Is that it in the bottom left
of this picture, Orson?

As you know, the hotel burnt down.
Look what's there now.

You called Grand Detour,
"one of those lost worlds,

one of those Edens
that you get thrown out of".

Look, Orson! It's still a kind of Eden.

Your first love.

For the rest of your life, you talked
about places of pre-industrial innocence.

Merrie Englands, you often called them.

Timeless places of joy,
unspoilt nature and love.

I hate to do this to you, Orson,

but here's another Eden,
a snowy Eden in Citizen Kane.

A building like the Sheffield Hotel.

Come on, boys!

Be careful, Charles. Pull your muffler
around your neck, Charles.

I think we shall have to tell him, now.

Yes. I'll sign those papers now,
Mr Thatcher.

You people seem to forget
that I'm the boy's father.

NARRATOR: Parents arguing,
as yours did in the Sheffield.

I don't see why
we can't raise our own son.

Just because we come into some money.

NARRATOR: Your film, Chimes at Midnight,
was part-set in such an Eden.

The Boar's Head Tavern.

You loved to have actors swirl.
Women and laughter.

It was a labyrinth, this pleasure dome,
this playpen.

And you designed and oversaw
the painting of it yourself.

A place from your unconscious,
in which you wake up as Falstaff.

Here's where you shot
some of the Boar's Head Tavern scenes,

in Spain,
another one of your beloved places.

This guy was in the film,
and still lives here.

What other places did you love?

319 West 14th Street, Manhattan, where
you lived with your first wife, Virginia.

It's Gothic in your drawing,
but guess what, Orson? It's still here.

You said that it had
"space, charm, electric icebox, garden

and all for $55 a month.

"Virginia's having the time of her life
here. A real home and all the rest of it."

With Virginia, you had
your first daughter, Chris.

And in The Magnificent Ambersons,
there's another paradise.

A Christmas card scene
with bells on the soundtrack.

The snow as a blanket, and a clarinet.

CLARINET MUSIC PLAYS

- Are you all right?- WOMAN: Georgie!

They're all right, Isobel.
The snow bank's a feather bed!

NARRATOR: Only in a studio
could such an idealised scene be shot.

And that's what you used,
the biggest icebox in Los Angeles.

It was on this corner, but it's gone now.

This part of downtown LA
is now one of the most deprived in the US.

Paradises don't last.

The second aspect of your love life
is how visual it was.

When you were 17, you saw this film.
Dolores del Rio swims naked.

You fell in love with her visually
and later became her lover in real life.

The man in this scene is Joel McCrea,
but the imagery sums up YOUR love life.

Staring, obsessive, love at first glance.

Moonlit and flickering
to capture the look of love.

What looking feels like.

You and Dolores. Beatrice says
that she was the true love of your life.

In The Lady from Shanghai,

your camera glided towards
another of your loves - Rita Hayworth.

It was your eyes, Orson.

You saw her on the cover of Life magazine
and immediately pledged to marry her.

MAN: Good evening.

"Dearest little loved one", you wrote,

"I love you more tonight than ever -
really, really - even more!"

And how's this for the look of love?

You move in again.
The point of view of a kiss?

♪ Don't take your arms

♪ Away

♪ Comes a change in weather... ♪

NARRATOR: And then closer still on Rita.

Framed along one of your famed diagonals.

♪ ...the rain will start... ♪

Then you seem summoned from below,
drawn by her tractor beam.

♪ Don't love me... ♪

Your make-up artist wanted to put
beads of sweat on her brow,

but you said, "Horses sweat; Rita glows".

♪ Then don't take your lips

♪ Or your arms

♪ Or your love... ♪

She kept your love letters and notes
in her make-up box for years.

♪ ...away ♪

NARRATOR: With Rita, of course,
you had your second daughter, Rebecca.

You cast your third wife, Paola,
as your daughter in Mr Arkadin, Orson.

A film about a powerful man
with a mysterious past

MAN: I want to speak to my daughter!

- Yes, Father.- Have you seen...?

NARRATOR: And you gave Paola
these concerned close-ups

when she hears that her father
was less than he seemed.

- Tell him it's too late!
- It's too late.

INTERVIEWER: This relationship
with your mother, did he woo her?

BEATRICE: Oh, yes.
I mean, how they met.

They were in Fregenae
and she was walking on the beach

and he was with Visconti, and then he saw
her, and he said, "Oh, I gotta meet her".

She was a young starlet and the next day,
she got a phone call.

It was Visconti's assistant and he said,

"Mr Visconti would like for you
to do a trial", and she was so excited.

And she went rushing over there
and instead, she met Orson Welles.

PEN SCRATCHES

NARRATOR: In 1961, while filming
The Trial, you met Oja Kodar.

She became your long-term lover
and companion.

Look how you introduced her
in F for Fake.

Glimpsed, glanced, ogled, long-lens,
the centre of a network of men's looks.

A head-turner.

An eye-opener.

No scene in your films is more about
looking, its splinters and seductions.

The look of love as a mosaic.

So, you loved places, Orson,
and you loved visually.

The third aspect of your love life
is its attraction to chivalry.

MUSIC PLAYS

The millennium-old idea
of the chivalrous knight in love

is so archaic now,
so like a faded pencil line.

Lancelot and Guinevere.
Arthurian legend. The Middle Ages.

But more than most artists of the 20th
century, you filled in the line drawings.

You believed in these samurai,
these courtiers who behaved with honour,

who played by the rules of love and
courtship from the era of the Magna Carta.

The myths held true for centuries.

One of the best interviews you gave
to Bernard Levin takes this further.

You're leaning forward again,
close-up, and in profile at first

And I'm rather fond of chivalry
and honour and I, er...

to use a hackneyed
drugstore psychiatry word

I identify with Quixote to the extent
that I'm interested in outmoded virtues.

The virtues of chivalry?

Yes. Honour, personal honour and courage,
and things like that.

LEVIN: Well, you're clearly a romantic.

Well, I suppose so.

But aren't you a romantic
in a very unromantic time?

Yes.

- Do you feel out of your time?
- Oh, yes.

I think every self-respecting artist
ought to.

NARRATOR: Which brings us, Orson, to
the most out-of-time knight in your art.

An absurd but glorious man,
who rails against everything

and doesn't seem to realise
that chivalry is long dead.

He was one of your obsessions, this man.

You made what you called
a home movie about Don Quixote

and his sidekick squire, Sancho Panza.

...and others will cheer you.

You filmed the Don against the sky,
his head in the clouds.

Someone, squire,
has kidnapped the princess!

But I shall free her, thank you!

Wait, sir. Don't let the devil
deceive you. It's only a Vespa.

NARRATOR: And here's a moment which
tells us something about the Don and love.

He thinks the woman - look, it's Paola -
had been kidnapped by the Vespa.

- Who is this lunatic?
- Don Quixote de La Mancha. Knight...

Ever the gallant knight,
he wants to rescue her.

This isn't your editing, of course.
You never finished the film.

But does the moment capture some of
the energy you wanted, the absurdity?

But also the Don's desire
to do the right thing?

DON: How can you treat your liberator
like this?

Now, promise you'll go to El Toboso
and inform my Dulcinea,

or I'll run you through!

NARRATOR: And in your painting,
the Don's head is against the sun.

Like Icarus.

Such a delicate man in your painting.
He'll be burnt.

The Don doesn't look at Sancho Panza
and in the book and film they bicker,

but you have them joined at the hip.

They're on the road of life together.

Opposites, but indivisible. Yin and yang.

Your Sancho Panza
is thick smears at the Don's elbow.

A blur to him in some ways.

In love in other ways.

You relished this.

The thickness of their story.

Their themes, their history.

The novel's author, Cervantes,
set out to mock chivalry,

but ended up celebrating it.

Maybe Laurel and Hardy
were the knights of your time.

And your one painting of a bullfighter
is knight-like.

He's a slayer in a swirl of light,
like your St George with his dragon,

against the sun, like Don Quixote,

his head lowered as if in prayer
at his own violence.

The figure in your art that you loved most
was another knight,

but a penniless one who lived in
The Boar's Head, one of your Edens.

On the Dean Martin Show,
you painted him in a way,

but the canvas was your own face.

It was what you might call a swinger.

MUSIC: GREENSLEEVES

In the 15th century, they didn't call them
swingers, but they swung.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

And nobody more so than Sir John.

NARRATOR: Your intensity.

You forget to speak,
as if you're lost in the transformation.

GREENSLEEVES CONTINUES

He was a funny man. He was a fat man...
but he was a great man.

NARRATOR: Then,
Shakespearean language.

He was a wit

and as he said himself,
he was not only witty in himself...

but the cause that wit was in other men.

This huge hill of fat,

this ton of man...

this reverend vice,

this grey inequity.

NARRATOR: Then, Eden again.

He was a spokesman, you might say,
for Merrie England,

the old Merrie England
of May mornings and Midsummer eves.

GREENSLEEVES CONTINUES TO PLAY

When even villainy was innocent.

NARRATOR: And, of course,
you filmed Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight.

Your drawings
for the Battle of Shrewsbury sequence

are a gallery of horsemen,
of chevaliers.

In pen.

PEN SCRATCHES

Coloured brush and pen.

And this, the swiftest and the best,
in brush only.

In pose and concision,
it's as good as this.

This bed scene in Chimes at Midnight
with you, Doll Tearsheet, Prince Hal

and his friend, Ned Poins, is remarkable.

You get up and move left, and then
a swirl of movement like a '60s love-in.

I owe her money. Whether she be damned
for that, I don't know.

Am I not fallen away...?

NARRATOR: Like a Tintoretto painting.

Like you, he liked to have people
almost roll in the foreground.

He looked up at the world.

Everybody in bed, the camaraderie of love.

The bed scene is another Eden.

...the doctor to my water.NARRATOR: There's Beatrice.

The water itself is a good water,
but for the party who owned it.

NARRATOR: And it brings us
to the fourth aspect of your love life,

after place, visuality and chivalry.

How omnivorous you were.

Your relationships with the men you loved
weren't sexual,

but it sounds as if they were as intense
as those with women.

Your letters are full of ardent love
for male friends.

You adored Joseph Cotten, didn't you?

And can I mention John Houseman?

Here in New York, in December 1934,
aged 19,

you were playing Tybalt
in Romeo and Juliet.

A British-Romanian grain merchant turned
theatre producer came to see the show.

It was Houseman.

He called your performance

obscene, terrible and "driven by
some irresistible interior violence".

He visited your dressing room
and found you half-naked.

The two of you went outside
to a nearby bar.

Your dedicated biographer, Simon Callow,
says you wooed Houseman.

You said that he fell in love with you.

It was part of a pattern.

You seemed to become addicted
to Jack Carter,

the actor who played the lead
in your Voodoo Macbeth.

You threw your arms around him, crying
with gratitude, according to Houseman.

You wooed him and went carousing with him
in the bars of Harlem.

You loved as passionately
as a bullfighter fights.

But, of course,
the bullfight ends in death.

Which brings us to the last aspect
of your love life.

Guilt, and the death of love.

Do you believe in love at all,
Mrs Bannister?

Give me the wheel.

NARRATOR: The Lady from Shanghai again.

You and Rita look purposefully ahead,
but she steers.

I was taught to think about love
in Chinese.

The way a Frenchman
thinks about laughter in French?

The Chinese say
it is difficult for love to last long

therefore, one who loves passionately
is cured of love in the end.

Well, that's a hard way of thinking.

NARRATOR: But it seems borne out
by your love life, Orson.

It was full of guilt and sadness.

Your relationship with Hayworth
quickly waned.

You'd draw yourself crying.

And, in one of your most surprising
images, also for Hayworth,

you have a devil visit you in her absence.

You had affairs.
Is the devil your guilt,

or your guilt and sadness combined?

You called this pencil and watercolour
sketch, with its miserable sun,

"Another Self Portrait of Self Pity."

And how about this?

You're far from Eden here. The smoke from
the factories gathers to show your mood.

And then there's this drawing of Paola.

BEATRICE: Very pregnant,

and she had a horrible pregnancy,
she must have been a bitch.

- INTERVIEWER: Pregnant with you?
- Yeah.

NARRATOR: "I feel lousy" is one of
your most ambiguous drawings, Orson.

Are you just recording Paola's
feeling bad, or empathising with it,

or mirroring it?

Is it you that feels bad?

PEN SCRATCHES

You showed the death of love, the
perversion of love, most visually, Orson,

in Morocco and Venice.

You know what I'm going to say, don't you?
Othello.

Strumpet! Weep'st thou for him
to my face?

- Banish me, my lord, but kill me not!
- Down, strumpet!

Kill me tomorrow. Let me live tonight!

NARRATOR: Othello kills Desdemona.
Facelessness now is murder.

He's blinded by jealousy.
Another Magritte painting.

DRAMATIC CHORAL MUSIC

And when she's dead...

This.

This circle in the ceiling was inspired
by this Mantegna painting in Mantua,

wasn't it?

You had a ceiling built
to echo it, visually.

And, before James Bond films,
you liked a circular ceiling.

Your camera's low enough to show it well,
to halo him, to anti-halo him.

- Sophie. What was her last name?
- WOMAN: She married years ago.

What's her married name?

Nothing extenuate,
nor set down aught in malice.

NARRATOR: Love as hell, not Eden.
You had the camera on a scaffold here.

Not... wisely, but... too well.

NARRATOR: Is that how you loved?
Not wisely, but too well?

THUNDERBOLT

But love doesn't just perish naturally
in Shakespeare's play,

it's poisoned by Iago whispering gossip
in the Moor Othello's ear.

You talked well in Filming "Othello",
like an art critic.

The film was more an illustrated lecture
than a documentary.

ORSON: The visual style of the film

mirrors the marriage
at the centre of the play,

which is not
that of Othello and Desdemona,

but the perverse marriage
of Othello and Iago.

NARRATOR: Filming "Othello"
had a late-night feel.

And you were both cautious and bold

in how you discussed your film
and used clips.

ORSON: Now, the grandeur and simplicity
are the Moor's.

The dizzying camera movements,
the tortured compositions,

the grotesque shadows
and insane distortions.

They are Iago,
for he is the agent of chaos.

NARRATOR: Iago torpedoes the marriage
with gossip. You did it with style.

The death of love, the back of love.

They're not much fun to talk about,
are they, Orson?

I wonder, am I losing you here?

We're getting onto
kingship in a moment,

but before we do,
one more chord about passion dying.

It's in Chimes at Midnight again,
and you know what's coming, don't you?

The most resonant line in your art.

Here it is in your screenplay in Michigan.

Are you ready to be heartbroken?

"I know thee not, old man."

The prince, the boy, says to the man
that the dream is over.

Their friendship is over.

Vertical spears
like the Nuremberg searchlights.

Then you break through.

And the back of the new king,
your old drinking and cavorting pal.

My King!

My Jove!

I speak to thee, my heart.

I know thee not, old man:
fall to thy prayers.

How ill white hairs become
a fool and jester!

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man.

So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane.

But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

NARRATOR: Despise?
Wouldn't reject have been enough?

Shakespeare's pen was a dagger here.

Not only an end of love,
but a rewrite of its history.

Till then, I banish thee,
on pain of death,

as I have done
the rest of my misleaders

not to come near our person by ten mile.

NARRATOR: And Falstaff falls to his knees,
like John Houseman did,

as he realises who has the power
and who can control the love.

Hal's exclusion order.

You wanted to be Falstaff, Orson,
but let's face it, you were Hal.

PEN SCRATCHES

The prince, the knight.

Loving a lot, but, in your exhilaration

moving on to other loves, other worlds.

So, we move on to our next world.

PIANO MUSIC

DRAMATIC MUSIC

NARRATOR: All the decent people
in your life and work, Orson -

your mother, your headteacher,
Michael O'Hara in The Lady from Shanghai,

Joseph Cotten's character Jedediah Leland
in Citizen Kane,

Don Quixote, Charlton Heston's character
in Touch of Evil,

Sir John Falstaff - these knights
and pawns are often exemplary and right.

But there's another type of person
who excited you more.

Dive deeper into your unconscious
and you find him there.

This creature from the black lagoon.
He is, of course, the king.

You mocked the king in Chimes at Midnight.

He can't even get up onto his throne.

He has a pot for a crown
and speaks like John Gielgud.

Harry,

I do not only marvel
where thou spendest thy time,

but also how thou art accompanied.

WOMAN LAUGHS

NARRATOR: But you were attracted
to the grandeur of kingship.

PEN SCRATCHES

Admit it, Orson, your tastes were regal.

Is it true that the director
Richard Fleischer

once accused you of treating a lowly
photographer as if you were royalty?

"I am royalty", you barked back.

You used to say that you're a king actor.

And you were fascinated
by a Latvian gunrunner

and friend of Nazis Himmler and Goering.

His name was Michael Olian. You visited
him in this mansion designed by Raphael.

You should have played Napoleon, Orson,
or Henry VIII.

Actor Geraldine Fitzgerald
said that you were like a lighthouse.

"When you were caught in his beam,
he was utterly dazzling.

"When the beam moves on,
you're plunged into darkness."

Kingship in your work is visual,
about law-making, suffocating, isolating.

And about ambition, totalitarianism,
corruption and madness.

Let's take visual first, Orson.

Most aspects of your visual style
were extravagant.

As we saw in the pawn section,
you had moments of realism in your work,

but you mostly rejected them.

You famously walked out of this film,

Luchino Visconti's neo-realist
La Terra Trema.

It's hard to imagine you
doing a simple pan like this.

Shoulder height to show a fisherman scene
naturally.

This was more your style: Macbeth.
A distant castle, a misty middle ground.

It's like Charles Foster Kane's
isolated castle.

Castles fired your imagination,
especially if they were crumbling.

This etching of yours
looks like there's been a fire.

You had an eye on Piranesi's
Imaginary Prison sketches of the 1700s.

PEN SCRATCHES

The lens you liked to use most,
the 18.5, was a king lens, you could say.

It made the world bulge.

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock.

NARRATOR: You slung it low, of course,
to make foreground people look massive.

Cribb'd, confined,

bound in to saucy doubts and fears.

NARRATOR: To make patterns
between near and far.

It was expressionist, this lens.

It was good at abstraction.

Beyond visual things, your king men
are lawmakers and lawbreakers.

That lens again.

A seated king, an insolent press baron.

Dear Wheeler, you provide
the prose poems, I'll provide the war.

- That's fine, Mr Kane.
- Yes, I rather like it myself.

NARRATOR: And here in your late film, The
Immortal Story, you're a king of sorts,

in a carriage.

The running man is a sailor
you've just picked up.

You'll pay him to have sex with a woman.

You're a pimp king,

making the rules, setting down the law,

treating others like pawns.

CARRIAGE CLATTERS

You arrive at where the sex is to happen -
your own home in Madrid, Orson.

And here's your Hank Quinlan
in Touch of Evil.

Belly first,
then looming above the camera,

then a Wellesian body twist.

He's a king in his own mind, a detective
who thinks the law is for little people,

for pawns, not for him.

He's above the law
and bends it to his will.

Beyond their visual and legal lives,

your kings are often suffocated
or imprisoned.

They're trapped inside their castles.

They can't escape their own power,
their own thoughts.

Their echo chambers.

Beatrice tells us
this was painted in frustration

at the Universal film studio
stopping you completing Touch of Evil.

It's an isolation picture, too, isn't it?

A Piranesi in the desert.
You were the king forced to abdicate.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

NARRATOR: Intense visuals,
a man above the law, isolation.

You know where this is leading, I'm sure.
To Scotland, and your film, Macbeth.

You'd first imagined Macbeth
in your teens,

in this drawing
in your Everybody's Shakespeare book.

And we've seen your Voodoo Macbeth
of 1936.

Just nine years later - what a long
nine years they must have seemed -

two marriages, war, radio stardom,
Hollywood fame, four films.

You were filming it on the cheap
for a B-movie studio.

You imagined the film's landscape
with angular trees against the sky.

The film would be shot quickly
in a studio,

so you came up with this main set.

PEN SCRATCHES

Scotland can sometimes look like a
production designer has had a hand in it.

The characters were to be horned,
like cattle or rams.

It was your most graphic film.
The witches' pagan symbols.

That set - it looked like something
you'd see in a fish tank.

An underwater Macbeth, perhaps.

Your contrasts were violent.

Slo-mo mist, then dissolve
to this close-up.

One of the most contrasty images
in American film.

Then we're behind the head of Macbeth,
this king whose ambition is detestable.

This Hank Quinlan. This Stalin.
This Faust.

Say, sir.

As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam.

NARRATOR: The real world
seemed to enter the film as a nightmare.

Macbeth is so in the shadow of himself

that he doesn't even realise
that he's free.

He feels railroaded
by the witches' prophecy.

He's a slave
to his own lust for power.

You've dived so deep now
that you're in the land of the surreal.

The colonnade.

It's like a Di Chirico nightmare painting,
Orson.

The least categorizable image
in Macbeth,

and in all your art, I think,
is this shot, Orson.

It looks like clouds
seen from an airplane,

or an archipelago
with a colossus standing in it.

Satan!

BELL TOLLS

NARRATOR: Macbeth's one of the few films
I've wanted to draw as I watched.

BRUSH STROKES

The fourth aspect of your kingship
is its totalitarianism and corruption.

These themes are in Caesar, of course.

And in your Cesare Borgia in the film,
Prince of Foxes.

A map of all he conquers.

The king actor's big shoulders
and flowing gown.

...ultimate goal. One Italy.
One kingdom.

One king. Cesare Borgia.

NARRATOR: You made Prince of Foxes

in the same year that you played
your most corrupt character, Harry Lime,

who profiteers from penicillin
stolen from hospitals.

He famously talks of the Borgias

as you casually put on gloves
and the camera glides in.

Remember what the fella said:
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias,

they had warfare, terror, murder,
bloodshed,

but they produced Michelangelo,
Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance.

In Switzerland, they had brotherly love,
they had 500 years of democracy and peace

and what did that produce?
The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.

NARRATOR: A scene you wrote, of course.

Cinema's most famous strike
of the authoritarian bell.

In the late 1930s, before Citizen Kane,

you were to make a film
about an even more dangerous man.

Ivory trader, Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's
novella, Heart of Darkness.

PEN SCRATCHES

Here's your sketch of the compound
where he lives.

In 1938, you adapted
Heart of Darkness for radio.

You played Kurtz, of course

and tried to capture his genius,
his panic, his tyranny.

MAN: How are you tonight, Mr Kurtz?

KURTZ: Well enough to be back
at my station.

That place is mine.
They've no right to take me away.

That manager, that stupid scoundrel!
He wants my ivory.

He's blocked me at every turn.

MAN: Don't excite yourself, Mr Kurtz.
You're sick, you know.

KURTZ: Sick! Sick?

Not so sick as you'd like to believe.

NARRATOR: Heart of Darkness is set during
one of the worst human atrocities, Orson,

Belgium's colonisation of the Congo.

Kurtz was, for you, a fascist king.

That's the end of the king line, in a way,
except for one more thing.

The madness of kingship.

In 1953, you played King Lear live on TV.

That low king angle,
that roaring king voice.

Here I stand, your slave.

A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.

NARRATOR: He says, "O, let me not be
mad, not mad, sweet heaven!"

... two pernicious daughters...

But he's driven by the burdens
of power and family.

...and white as this.

The camera pulls out and lightning
and that expressionism again.

THUNDERBOLTS, SCREAMING

Did you intend this to be Lear, Orson?

It's like it's raining here,
or it's a lightning storm.

You did Christopher Marlowe's Faust
on stage in 1937.

You had him say, "I refuse to be insane.

"I do not claim the sanctuary
of the madhouse.

"Do not think I stumbled into the pit.

"Pray for the free man
who damned himself."

Did you damn yourself, Orson?

And if so, for what?

Politics?

Love? Power?

Glory? Excitement?

Loneliness?

Decline?

Fury?

MUSIC PLAYS, PEN SCRATCHES

ORSON VOICE: Dear Mark,
I pray in your letters

when you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
speak of me as I am.

Nothing extenuate.

So, the world kept turning after I died.

Who'd have guessed?

It sounds as if I'd have taken to
the 21st century.

I wasn't tired of living,
I wasn't tired of art.

In your letter, Mark,
you split my politics from my love,

but they're the same thing -
or at least have the same root.

You missed how funny I found it all.

You do know that life is a circus,
don't you?

Beatrice still seems to.

Was this not in your box? HE LAUGHS

My ending of The Lady from Shanghai.

That crane shot
as I walk into the empty funfair.

MAN: Everybody is somebody's fool.

The only way to stay out of trouble
is to grow old,

so I guess I'll concentrate on that.

Maybe I'll live so long
that... I forget her.

Maybe I'll die trying.

ORSON VOICE: That's more important
than the ending of The Trial.

And as you're so taken by my drawings,
how about this one?

PEN SCRATCHES

ORSON VOICE She's Lady Would-be
from Jonson's Volpone.

A broad, bumbling and inept.
Those pursed lips. I adore her.

The toffs with their drinkers' noses
and eyes closed.

Amidst all the power and politics
of which you speak,

my line ran naturally
to doodles like this.

Does he remind you of anyone?

And several lifetimes ago, before Kane,

I made a lark of a film called
Too Much Johnson.

There was a scene where a well-dressed
young man and police officers

had their hats removed.

It was absurd, like a Mack Sennett comedy.

That's cluelessness again,
like so much of life.

And since you mentioned Mr Arkadin,
recall if you can its climax.

I stalk through the film like a shadow,
but the world of my story is absurd.

Akim's character, Zouk,
has lost his pants.

Think if he catches me out here,
dancing around in my underdrawers!

ORSON VOICE: Does it remind you
of anything?

Laurel and Hardy, perhaps?

My camera was usually lower, of course,

but the humanity in Stan and Olly
is the same.

The childishness, the circus,
the commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella.

What you in the UK call Punch and Judy.

I did scores of pictures of St Nick.

BRUSH STROKES

There were conventional ones
in red and white.

He'd come down the chimney
or be by the fire.

But I remember that as I drew,

he started to look like
he was on the stage,

taking a bow perchance,
or a curtain call.

Those with a keen eye might say
I painted him more and more

so he merged with some of the things
that I admire.

And he morphed.

His colours changed.

The red disappeared.

Or rather it shrunk to his nose,
because you see,

Santa was becoming a drinker
in my Christmas world.

A drunk.

Sir John Falstaff.

The more cards, I did,
the more rapid I became.

The colours leached out.

Day became night in this Christmas carol
of mine.

And the bottle grew.

And then even the nose was no longer red.

They took on the tone of a lot of my work.

Call it dark exuberance if you like.

That's what The Lady from Shanghai was.
And Macbeth.

Tenebrous and excessive.

I've often said that Kane
has the same tension.

Kane himself is close to farce,
close to parody, close to burlesque.

That rollercoaster you showed
was like the great imperium,

the United States.

PEN SCRATCHES

I was a satirist.

Didn't you see that?

The stick was straining.

What happens when it breaks?

Absurdity becomes the norm.

PEN SCRATCHES

The sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive
than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause.

How is Ireland these days?
Yours, Orson.

MUSIC PLAYS

NARRATOR: Dear Orson, I just imagined
that you wrote back to me. I wish you had.

How do I finish a letter like this?

Should I mention
that there's been another financial crash?

The wolves of Wall Street screwed up
like they did in 1929.

This is Kenosha, where you were born, now.

Parts of it look like
a deserted Hollywood studio backlot,

or images from the 1930s.

The Great Depression
that followed the Wall Street crash

helped form you, didn't it, Orson?

Will our new Depression
make a new Orson Welles?

Beatrice had an unopened letter from you
to your guardian, Dadda Bernstein.

This letter was written
on the 14th of October, in 1931.

When Dadda was still living in Chicago.
And it is unopened.

Nothing in it! LAUGHS

This is too funny. He forgot
to put something... This is insane.

NARRATOR: We were hoping that there'd be
some secret in that envelope, Orson,

some new way of seeing you.

Isn't that wild!

NARRATOR: But maybe what was in the box

and what's in the University of Michigan
archive

is a bit of a new way of seeing you.

Your art has made me look again
at your life and work.

This scene in Mr Arkadin, for example.

What's with all these crazy Frankensteins?

MAN: You don't understand. These people
are supposed to represent the paintings.

Some of us have come as the visions
and monsters of Goya.

- Who?
- You know Goya.

Glad to meet you!

NARRATOR: It's a Goya painting, with
an added pinch of Josef Von Sternberg.

In the same film,
this scene near the start is, what?

Graphic, certainly.
It's a murder-and-chase moment,

but who's being shot or why
doesn't seem to be your main concern.

You're more taken by the steam
of the train,

the shapes within the frame,
the angles, the cubism.

TRAIN CHUGS AND BRAKES

And in The Lady from Shanghai,

you painted these sets yourself,
didn't you?

You walked through a lattice, shards,
a constructivist design.

MAN: And if the cops
traced it to Grisby...

NARRATOR: Like this one
by Aleksandra Ekster.

And a few scenes later,
in your hall of mirrors

we're in the land of Muybridge.

Panel imagery.

Erotic.

In love with lenses.

And then The Lady from Shanghai
is like a drawing.

MAN: I knew about her.
She planned to kill Bannister.

She and Grisby.

NARRATOR: Is that it? Is that what's been
on the tip of my tongue in this letter?

Many of your films
are like charcoal drawings.

Their nets and grills
are hatchings, shadings.

PEN SCRATCHES

In Mr Arkadin, you used the Segovia
Aqueduct like an architectural drawing.

- I knew it.
- What do I win?

This.

NARRATOR: As I'm thinking this, I see
this scene in The Lady from Shanghai.

Rita wants her cigarette lit.

Your shot sweeps left with it,
mano a mano.

There's no story need to do this,

but there's a graphic need,
a drawing need.

MAN: ...she'll never be too old
to earn the salary...

NARRATOR: And then the shot comes
back again, following the cigarette again.

Two simple moments,
but they're like this drawing of yours.

Or this drawing.

That's it!
That's my lightbulb moment, Orson.

That's what's been on the tip
of my tongue. Your visual thinking.

You thought with lines and shapes.

Your films are sketchbooks. Calligraphy.

That's why people who love

Laurence Olivier's literary
and psychological Shakespeare films

don't like yours.

Yours were rougher and more to do with
space and graphics and power.

Once I realise this, I discover that
you'd sort of said it already.

You told one of your biographers

that Macbeth was a violent charcoal sketch
of the play.

And the Nazi Party's filmmaker,
Leni Riefenstahl, of all people,

wasn't far off when she said that,

"Welles draws marvellous pictures
in the margins of Shakespeare".

F for Fake was a sketchbook
on folded paper.

Touch of Evil's a fresco.

The Trial is like a linocut.

Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai,
Othello and Mr Arkadin

scratch at their characters

like your quill and ink
scratched in the TV sketches.

Approximately, excitingly,
but in a way that many found too sharp.

They make you seem mad
for contact with the world,

taking its fragments roughly
and absorbing them into yourself

to make art that's jagged and fractured.

In 1953, you went here,
Edinburgh in Scotland,

and made a speech
about the future of the movies.

You said that a Hollywood film
needs an audience of 60 million people

to break even, but you dreamt of
smaller, more distinctive films

that could speak to two million people.

Guess what, Orson?

From the future, I can tell you
that your dream has sort of come true.

Film technology has changed massively
since you died.

If many of your films were like sketches,

if you dreamt of a camera
being more like a pencil,

your dream is coming true.

More than ever,
you can draw with a camera now.

Studio cinema was like history painting.

Now, film is more like oil painting.

And look at this.
An oil painting of you?

No, it's an accident.

Our computer didn't copy some footage of
you properly, and so it pixelated it.

And it looks like Manet or Rembrandt.

Way back in the 1940s,
when you were making Citizen Kane,

you and cinematographer Gregg Toland

dreamt of a time when there would be
no film

and the camera would be an electronic eye.

That dream has come true, too.

On the morning of October 10th, 1985,
you died.

It was said that you were
at your typewriter when it happened.

This typewriter?

But your life probably ended
in your bathroom.

But still, is this one of the last things
in the world

those great eyes of yours saw, Orson?

If you were alive now,
if you were still seeing,

you could be making so many films.

Your archetypes -
pawns, knights, kings and jesters -

are as relevant as ever.

Your friend, Kenneth Tynan said,
when writing about you,

"The bee will always make honey".

What honey you made.

MUSIC PLAYS

What honey you could have made.

In an interview in 1962, you said,

"Being alive means not killing
the tensions one carries within oneself.

"On the contrary, a poet must seek out
and cultivate his contradictions."

You buzzed with contradictions, Orson.

You loved pawns, knights and kings.

ORSON VOICE: Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then. I contradict myself.

I am large. I contain multitudes.

I too am not a bit tamed.

I too am untranslatable.

I sound my barbaric yawp
over the roofs of the world.

MUSIC PLAYS

We can still hear your sound, Orson.

And, most of all, we can still look
through your eyes.

Thank you.

TURBINES BEAT RHYTHMICALLY

"Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend,

and see those 30 or so wild giants

with whom I intend to do battle
and kill each and all of them."

"What giants?"
asked Sancho Panza.

"The ones you can see over there,"
answered his master, "with the huge arms."

"Now, look, Your Grace", said Sancho,

"What you see over there aren't giants,
but windmills."

"Obviously", replied Don Quixote,
"you don't know much about adventures."