Discovering Orson Welles by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Discovering Orson Welles Reviews

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  Josh

  Retired Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of my favorite writers about the movies. I always learn something from him even when I disagree with his opinions, and he's led me to so many of my favorite films I would have never seen without his recommendation. Besides his film criticism, he's also developed a sideline as an Orson Welles scholar, researcher, and expert, editing the collection of interviews between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich and serving as a consultant on the version of Touch of Evil released in 1998. This book collects almost every piece he's written about Welles from the early 1970s to the mid-2000s. Because it is a collection of essays, reviews, scholarly research, criticism of Welles biographers, and papers given at conferences instead of a single, unified book-length work, there is a lot of repetition here, which Rosenbaum freely admits in his introduction. Because of this repetition, and because some of the material here is more academic in nature than most of Rosenbaum's writing, this book is not as entertaining or as compulsively readable as the other Rosenbaum books I've read. However, Rosenbaum is great at debunking Welles myths, tracking down elusive facts, sifting through contradictory information, and pointing out errors and flaws in many Welles biographies and reviews. Most importantly, he's an enthusiastic and passionate defender of Welles the artist, who continued to make vital work his entire life, whether he was able to finish that work or not. Too often, Welles is seen as a boy wonder who never delivered another Citizen Kane and ruined his promise by not playing nice with Hollywood, and the butt of jokes about his weight gain and the commercials and bad movies he acted in to fund his own work. I agree with Rosenbaum's contrary assessment of Welles as an independent artist who used Hollywood resources when available and who never made the same work twice and who was more interested in the process of creating art than in churning out product. I also see him as a vital artist up until the end, when he died at his typewriter working on a screenplay, and that's why this book is valuable to me, despite the repetition and occasional dull stretches.
• 
  Muzzlehatch

  Absolutely essential for any lover of Welles, for anyone who (like me) believes that the man is probably the single most talented filmmaker we've had in the world thus far. Much of this collection is taken from very obscure original sources, so even longtime followers of Rosenbaum in his "Chicago Reader" days won't be familiar with all of it. Much of it also is introduced or even deconstructed by the author in the form of prologues or asides to the main text, allowing the book itself in its own interconnectedness to mirror at the times the complexity of Welles' later, less-well-known but just as fascinating essayistic works ("F for Fake", "Filming Othello", etc).
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  Harriett Milnes

  I'm not finished, I'm abandoning it after about 1/4 was read. Too technical. It seems to be a collection of articles Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in response to other articles. Too many footnotes, too many explanations. He is a Welles fan.