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Orson Welles on Ingmar, Michelangelo, and potato peeling peasants

It's amazing what you stumble across at 4:30 in the AM, when the battle to find sleep has been lost. From Barbara Leaming's grossly subjective, Orson Welles: A Biography:

"I have this terrible sense that film is dead – that it's a piece of film in a machine that will be run off and shown to people. That is why, I think, my films are theatrical, and strongly stated, because I can't believe that anybody won't fall asleep unless they are. There's an awful lot of Bergman and Antonioni that I'd rather be dead than sit through. For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn't come alive. I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses – but I can't read that kind of novel either."

Oh, Orson. . .

August 3, 2007 in Film | Permalink

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Wow ... I zoned out halfway through the quote but ... it's fascinating to see Welles describe both Bergman and Antonioni as NOT hallucinatory, no?

Does his packaging the two of them together like that so long ago mean that they really are cinema's John Adams and Thomas Jefferson?

Posted by: Aaron | Aug 3, 2007 12:21:39 PM

Good point Aaron. If there's one word that perfectly fits both directors, hallucinatory is it.

Posted by: Filmbrain | Aug 3, 2007 2:49:34 PM

Sometimes too much wine makes you catty. Was this a snarky attempt to dismiss European cinema as slow and boring?
Big O was really appreciated more in Europe later on so perhaps he was just taking down the competition.
Still I wonder which of their films he saw.

Posted by: harakiwi | Aug 3, 2007 6:37:44 PM

Bergman made similarly negative comments about both Antonioni and Welles.

[on Orson Welles] "For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of- is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable."

[On Orson Welles] "I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he's croaks. In my eyes he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker."

[on Michelangelo Antonioni] "He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress."

Posted by: Justine | Aug 3, 2007 8:57:43 PM

I liked the Leaming bio, if only because Leaming obviously liked Welles so much. It was endearing, if not something to make you trust the book as definitive.

Justine makes a good point. I don't know that Antonioni was ever similarly bitchy but Bergman, hoo boy. He obviously did have a sense of humor but several interviews I read with him reminded me of the Max von Sydow character in Hannah and Her Sisters.

I like the Liv Ullmann interview where she said (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "Living with Bergman is not like living with Bob Hope. Every morning I would have to get up and tell him what my nightmares were. And then he turns them into movies."

Posted by: Campaspe | Aug 5, 2007 3:30:09 PM

I kind of love the idea of Liv Ullman living with Bob Hope. Where's SCTV when you really need it?

Posted by: G. Kenny | Aug 5, 2007 4:18:35 PM

How about SCTV's other Bergman parody, SCENES FROM AN IDIOT'S MARRIAGE, starring Jerry Lewis.

God bless those wonderful Canadians. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEz2neoofOA

Posted by: Filmbrain | Aug 5, 2007 4:28:13 PM

Wow. I feel kinda bad for disagreeing with Welles so much. I have always felt that film was a collection of single images. I find that a lot of poorer films focus on "the sum of the parts".

Posted by: tuvalu | Aug 6, 2007 1:31:29 AM

as someone whose father kindof made her sit through l'aventurra and the seventh seal when she was like 6 - i remember i saw the incedible mr. limpett and l'aventurra the same year - i would have welcomed orson's commentary at that age. i distinctly remember during l'aventurra: NOTHING IS HAPPENING. WHAT ARE THESE GROWN-UPS INSANE. and it wasn't that i didn't have a taste for adult films. my parents would often go to the last matinee of the day and stay for the adult movies - we saw the the ipcress file after limpett. aside from michael caine's glasses which i found off-putt, it was okay.

Posted by: dubarry | Aug 7, 2007 2:03:03 PM


If you read what Welles says carefully, his quote is radically different than Bergman's. Welles is just stating his own personal preferences and undercuts that confession of personal taste - he admits that other directors have done well with a type of movie he himself can't or doesn't make, and he personally doesn't enjoy. (which is not necessarily a positive thing to admit that you yourself are limited artistically). There's even a bit of self-deprecation when Welles admits he can't even read novels of a particular kind.

Bergman pretty much just went around trashing other people, which is quite another thing.

Posted by: burritoboy | Aug 7, 2007 2:17:15 PM

I recall another Welles-on-Bergman quote: I`m argentinian, so Ill do my best on the translation. As I remember, it goes like this:

"Dont talk to me about making movies: you make movies with thirty friends, I make movies with a hundred sons of bitches"

Posted by: Agustin | Apr 11, 2008 9:24:22 PM

Orson Welles was also notorious for not watching films all the way through later in his life, and he was also supremely sensitive. I always got the feeling that he was just reacting poorly to Bergman's criticism, but Bergman's criticism's are expected due to his and Welles' contradictory styles.

Posted by: Joshua Wiebe | Nov 11, 2008 1:26:41 AM

I find Welles' words very direct and truthful. He was a man of great insight. Very realistic. He looked at the film-art and questioned its purpose. He felt that although Bergman and Antonioni were very original, creative and innovative, he found that their creativeness was taking the wrong direction. Bergman's and Antonioni's art was food for philosophers. They used the cinematic medium to...contemplate. Welles wanted films to enchant. Simple as that.

Welles thought that the film's destiny should be enchantment, hallucination, a play with images and the viewer's emotions. Philosophical simbolism and intelectual aspects were sort of "killing the enchantment. That's why he preferred Fellini to Antonioni or Bergman.
There's a beautiful quote from Welles talking about Bergman:
"I don't condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Ingmar Bergman; it's just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman's Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen's Norway—that it was full of 'the odour of spiritual paraffin.' How I sympathize with that!....I share neither his interests nor his obsessions. He's far more foreign to me than the Japanese."

I feel that...Bergman knew that Welles isn't a superficial man, that why he was so "intense" in bashing Welles for his superficiality. I always felt Bergman was a bit defending his ego instead of telling the truth.

In the end both Bergman and Welles were brilliant film makers. They just lived on two separate planets. They can never be compared to each other. Welles emphasizes this very well in his quote.

Posted by: Vedoni | Jan 27, 2009 12:20:47 PM

Let me say that there only four for me which I consider the greatest film-makers - Pasolini, Bergman, Welles, Bunuel - (I omit Tarkovsky because it is very hard for Russian (and I'm Russia) to speak about Tarkovsky)

I don't remember Pasolini say anything about any of them, Welles - Berggman cross-shooting we can see above, and as far as I remember Bergman found Bunuel boring.

I don't know anything more touching, deep, fascinating, true, veritable, touching, full of life, belief, hope an love than "Fanny and Alexander", "Veridiana", "The Flower of 1001 nights", " The Process".

I love something from Fellini, a few from Antonioni, really love Visconti, and care much about Truffot and Chaplin, well, I can go on and go on)

But those four above are the the persons that made the world their and only their own.

Posted by: Jonah | Mar 17, 2009 6:38:03 AM

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