Cinematic Encounters

Interviews and Dialogues

Jonathan Rosenbaum

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083884
  9780252042164
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050909
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Godard. Fuller. Rivette. Endfield. Tarr. In his celebrated career as a film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum has undertaken wide-ranging dialogues with many of the most daring and important auteurs of our time.

Cinematic Encounters collects more than forty years of interviews that embrace Rosenbaum's vision of film criticism as a collaboration involving multiple voices. Rosenbaum accompanies Orson Welles on a journey back to Heart of Darkness, the unmade film meant to be Welles's Hollywood debut. Jacques Tati addresses the primacy of décor and soundtrack in his comedic masterpiece PlayTime, while Jim Jarmusch explains the influence of real and Hollywoodized Native Americans in Dead Man. By arranging the chapters chronologically, Rosenbaum invites readers to pursue thematic threads as if the discussions were dialogues between separate interviews. The result is a rare gathering of filmmakers trading thoughts on art and process, on great works and false starts, and on actors and intimate moments.

CHAPTER 1

The Voice and the Eye

A Commentary on the Heart of Darkness Script

Writing an article about Orson Welles's first feature film project while I was living in Paris, I discovered that Welles was currently editing a film there. After acquiring the address of his editing facility, I wrote him a short letter asking a few questions, mostly about the casting, and sent it off on a Saturday afternoon. Not really expecting an answer, I finished a draft of the article by staying up Sunday night and finally going to sleep around 7 A.M. Two hours later, my phone rang, and a man describing himself as a Welles assistant asked me if I could meet his boss for lunch at noon at La Mediterranéee, a seafood restaurant only a short hop away from my flat on Rue Mazarine. Given my sleep deprivation, as well as my giddy sense of panic about this opportunity, I decided not to bring along a tape recorder and to simply take a few notes. My first words to Welles (who arrived only a few minutes late, with an apology) conveyed my amazement at the generosity of his invitation. He replied, by way of explanation, that he was too busy to answer my letter. I also owe a clear debt of gratitude to the efficiency of the French postal system at the time.

EARLY LAST JULY, a week before the completion of this article, I had the unexpected privilege of meeting Welles for lunch in Paris, where he was busy editing a new film entitled Hoax, which has something to do with the Clifford Irving/Howard Hughes scandal. (“Not a documentary,” Welles assured me, but “a new kind of a film”—although he didn't elaborate.) As other commentators have observed, the search for the truth about any Welles project is an endless trip through a labyrinth; possibly no other living director has been the subject of so many conflicting accounts, in large matters as well as small ones. To clarify my sources, all the information given to me by Welles is either stated explicitly or indicated by an asterisk. Unless otherwise noted, the remaining facts about the Heart of Darkness project come from either Richard Wilson or the script itself. (The interpretations, needless to say, are all my own.) Wilson, who was with Welles in Hollywood for most of this period, has generously supplied me with material from the early Welles–Mercury files. I am also indebted to Carlos Clarens for lending me his copy of the script.

I: The Voice

I became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward to—a talk with Kurtz…. The man presented himself as a voice…. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words…

—Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Appropriately, Orson Welles's first Hollywood project begins as a primal initiation: his voice in darkness, followed by an iris opening out into a bird cage. [2018 note: This alludes to the scripted prologue—a text originally included with this article and available now at jonathanrosenbaum.net/1972/11/41656/ and in my book Discovering Orson Welles.] With a master magician's instinct, he leads us directly from estrangement to entrapment—carrying us in the space of seconds from radio into cinema.

The “revised estimating script,” from which the preceding introduction is taken, runs to 184 pages and is dated November 30, 1939. Although no author is listed on the title page, it is clear from the existing evidence that it was written and adapted by Welles alone.¹ The previous November, shortly after his Halloween eve broadcast of War of the Worlds, Welles had presented Heart of Darkness on Mercury Theatre of the Air as the ninth and next to last program in the series (War of the Worlds was the seventh); like the earlier adaptation, it was scripted by Howard Koch², with the probable editorial assistance of John Houseman. According to Welles, the radio version—in which he played both Marlow and Kurtz—was weak, and except for the parts that came from Conrad, its influence on the screenplay was minimal. Without the availability of Koch's script, this cannot be verified.

The central drama of Heart of Darkness revolves around the myth of virtually unlimited power, achieved by Kurtz, an ivory agent, in the depths of the Congo, where he becomes a god to the natives. The story is narrated by Marlow, a skipper hired by the ivory company, and the plot mainly consists of his long journey down the river toward Kurtz. As with the central character of The Great Gatsby, our total sense of Kurtz comes to us filtered through the narrator's consciousness; he looms in the story as a mysterious figure of rumor and conjecture, and his meaning becomes the sum of everything that Marlow sees and experiences on his way into the jungle. In Conrad's novella, the actual appearance of Kurtz is somewhat anticlimactic, and is handled rather elliptically; in Welles's script, it becomes the dramatic climax that all the preceding action builds up to.

Welles said that he originally planned to play only the part of Marlow, hoping he could find someone else for the part of Kurtz. By the time the final estimating script had been written, however, he had decided to take on both parts. As a penetration into the mystery of a powerful, legendary man, Heart of Darkness clearly prefigures Citizen Kane; exploring the tension between Marlow and Kurtz, Welles was obviously interested in expressing the same sort of ambivalence about power and position that informs his later films. To make this concern more personal and immediate, he updated Conrad's story to the present, made Marlow into an American, and explicitly linked Kurtz's despotism to the tyranny sweeping over Europe in the late thirties and early forties. As Marlow, he would figure primarily as Narrative Voice and unseen hero, glimpsed only occasionally as a reflection or, between episodes, back on his boat in the New York harbor, telling the story. As Kurtz, he would also remain offscreen for most of the film, but then make a grand demonic appearance at the climax.

Welles deliberately pointed up the doppelgänger aspect of this dual role by frequently drawing attention in the dialogue to the physical resemblance between Marlow and Kurtz; expanding the part of Kurtz's unnamed fiancée into a full-fledged heroine named Elsa,³ he even created a love triangle of sorts. Thus, broadly speaking, the multiple equations proposed by the introduction, whereby I = eye = camera = screen = spectator, are extended still further in the script proper so that spectator = Marlow = Kurtz = Welles = dictator—a notion that is at once so abstract and so audacious that, coupled with a million-dollar budget, eighty-two-day shooting schedule, and the outbreak of World War II, it is hardly surprising that RKO shelved the project. Welles told me he later learned the primary resistance came not from George Schaefer—the president of RKO, who'd brought him to Hollywood—but from the other studio heads.

The roots of the script can be traced through much of Welles's theater and radio work in the late thirties. In 1936, he had already conjured up a sinister atmosphere of jungle tribalism in his “voodoo” stage production of Macbeth, set in Haiti with an all-black cast. The following year, he played the title role in his staging of Dr. Faustus—a character who quite likely contributed to his conception of Kurtz—and then played Brutus in his modern-dress Julius Caesar, which was particularly noted at the time for its contemporary political parallels (fascist-style uniforms and salutes, “Nuremberg lighting,” etc.). But the importance of his radio work was probably even more decisive. The first Mercury radio series, First Person Singular, broadcast eight programs in the summer of 1938 and introduced a narrative technique that was, at the time, completely new to the medium. Newsweek ran a brief story about the show on the day that it premiered (July 11):

Avoiding the cut-and-dried dramatic technique that introduces dialogue with routine announcements, Welles will serve as genial host to his radio audience. As narrator, he will build himself directly into the drama, drawing his listeners into the charmed circle. He reasons:

“This method frees the script writer from the necessity of attempting to introduce a description of the locale into the dialogue…. A radio audience is apt to be bored when it hears someone say, ‘Once upon a time.’ Not so if you say, ‘This happened to me.’”

This first-person technique was carried over into subsequent Welles radio series; it was even used prominently in the second half of the War of the Worlds broadcast—which few people heard at the time. Apart from anticipating the use of subjective camera, and implying an autobiographical link between Welles and his heroes, this method leads to a form of narrative economy—encapsulating exposition and bridging scenes—that is essential to Welles's early film work. (The use of overlapping dialogue—as prominent in the Heart of Darkness script as in his subsequent films—also derives from radio.)

The opening of the script seems particularly rich with radio devices. Over a long shot of the New York harbor at dusk, Marlow's voice begins with a passage drawn from the sixth paragraph of Conrad's story, converted from past to present tense:

The old river in its broad reach rests unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the races that people its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the utmost ends of the earth.

The narration continues over dissolves showing the river traffic and Manhattan Island, and “lap dissolves” of the “great bridges of both rivers,” “parkways,” “boulevards,” and “skyscrapers,” each seen at the instant that their lights are illuminated. In the next sequence, “as we move down the length of the Island”—a passage more impressionistic in visual detail than most of the rest of the script—Marlow's voice is joined by “snatches of sound and music, the beginning of life of the city at night”:

In Central Park, snatches of jazz music are heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs. The sweet dinner music in the restaurants of the big hotels further West. The throb of tom-toms foreshadows the jungle music of the story to come. The lament of brasses, the gala noodling of big orchestras tuning up in concert halls and opera houses, and finally as the camera finds its way downtown below Broadway, the music freezes into an expression of the empty shopping district of the deserted Battery—the mournful muted clangor of the bell buoys out at sea, and the hoot of shipping.

The continuing narration is basically an abridgement of Conrad's text, adapted from a European to American context:

I was thinking of very old times when our fathers first came here, four hundred years ago—the other day…Imagine the feelings of a skipper […], a civilized man, four hundred years ago, hove to off the Battery here—at the very end of the world. Imagine the trip up this river. With death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies…

(In the original, “our fathers” was “the Romans,” “four hundred” was “nineteen hundred,” “skipper” was “commander,” and “the Battery” was “the sea-reach of the Thames.”) Toward the end of this lengthy speech, we arrive at Marlow's boat, and see Marlow leaning against the mast while he speaks, the Manhattan skyline glimpsed behind him. As he relights his pipe, there is a dissolve to a reflection of him lighting his pipe in a shop window while the narration continues offscreen, and Marlow's story and the subjective camera treatment both begin: “I was over in Europe—” (the match flares; dissolve) “—loafing around one of the big port towns looking for a ship—when I saw that map in a shop window.” Throughout this opening, the narrative continuity is guided and controlled by the sound.

The legacy of Welles's radio work is vast—from July 1938 to March 1940 alone, he adapted, directed, narrated, and acted in nearly eighty radio plays.⁴ Unfortunately, the only recording from this period that is generally available today is The War of the Worlds. And according to Welles, even that performance is not the one that was broadcast, but one given at another time.

The likely impact of this broadcast on Heart of Darkness cannot be overstressed. It is estimated that six million people heard the program and 1,200,000 of them took it literally, believing that America had just been invaded by Martians; an unknown number of people who didn't hear the broadcast were likewise caught up in the hysteria.⁵ At the age of twenty-three, Welles was suddenly catapulted into a position of nationwide fame and notoriety, which led to both a commercial radio sponsor (Campbell's Soup) and a Hollywood contract granting him an unprecedented degree of artistic and financial control. When he arrived in Hollywood thirteen months after the broadcast—four months prior to the completion of the script—he was an unusually controversial and powerful figure, and the immediate dislike he attracted in the movie colony undoubtedly amplified this image. During the same month that he signed with RKO (August 1939), Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Poland; while Welles was preparing Heart of Darkness, the war broke out; and the relation between his own rapid ascendancy and (in his case, unwitting) sway over the masses and Hitler's was surely not lost on him. Marshall McLuhan's description of this relation in Understanding Media is, like many of his pronouncements, somewhat facile; but as an evocation of radio's power during this period, it bears repeating:

The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber…. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real.

Hitler is never cited by name in the Heart of Darkness script, but his relation to Kurtz is nonetheless unmistakable—coming to the fore in the final pages, when Kurtz remarks, “There's a man now in Europe trying to do what I've done in the jungle. He will fail.” A bit earlier, we find this exchange:

KURTZ: I have another world to conquer.

MARLOW'S VOICE: What world?

KURTZ: Down the river. Five more continents and then I'll die—

More generally, the alliance is expressed indirectly, as in Marlow's medical examination near the beginning, when Welles's two major additions to Conrad are explicitly racist remarks from the doctor, to be played by Everett Sloane* (while examining Marlow's head: “Mmm…Good Nordic type…the superior races you know”), and an early reference to Kurtz, whom the doctor identifies as “our next leader.” Later, when Marlow and the company men (who are all Germans in the script) come upon a row of poles supporting human heads in a foggy swamp, the station manager De Tirpitz, to be played by George Coulouris,* says, “That's how Kurtz and the rest of them got their power back in Europe. This shouldn't surprise you. You've seen this kind of thing in the city s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction. In Defense of Critical Interactivity
• Chapter 1. The Voice and the Eye: A Commentary on the Heart of Darkness Script
• Chapter 2. Tati's Democracy
• Chapter 3. Paris Journal on Stavisky…
• Chapter 4. Show Business in the End: Interview with Jim McBride
• Chapter 5. Phantom Interviewers over Rivette
• Chapter 6. “Conversation” with Paul Morrissey
• Chapter 7. Geraldine Chaplin Interview (from London Journal)
• Chapter 8. Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative
• Chapter 9. Sam Fuller Spills his Guts
• Chapter 10. Catching up with Godard
• Chapter 11. A Lesson in Modesty: Speaking with Alain Resnais
• Chapter 12. Cinema at a Distance: Interview with Peter Gidal
• Chapter 13. The “Presents” of Michael Snow
• Chapter 14. Ivan the Bearable: Ivan Passer on Cutter's Way
• Chapter 15. Just Jost
• Chapter 16. On Location with John Carpenter's the Thing
• Chapter 17. Jackie Raynal
• Chapter 18. Documentary Expressionism: The Films of William Klein
• Chapter 19. Pages from the Endfield File
• Chapter 20. The Seberg we Missed: Interview with Mark Rappaport
• Chapter 21. A Gun up your Ass: Interview with Jim Jarmusch
• Chapter 22. Trailer for Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma
• Chapter 23. Falling Down, Walking, Destroying, Thinking: A Conversation with Béla Tarr
• Chapter 24. Trying to Catch up with Raúl Ruiz
• Chapter 25. A Handful of World: The Films of Peter Thompson
• Index
• About the Author