Look out! He's got a knife!

Sex with Orson

I recently saw the documentary Orson Welles: the One Man Band. It had a whole heap of scenes from his unfinished movies in it, including two from The Other Side of the Wind.

Man, that movie looks fucking dope. I hope Oja Kodar & Peter Bogdanovich are able to get their shit together and finish it. Supposedly the first half is complete (finished by Welles) and the second half just needs to be edited. Though judging it from the fragments I've seen, "just" isn't the word, Welles pulled some freaky shit in there (especially considering it was the early '70s).

Like the sex scene.

Welles's collaborator on most of his late movies was Oja Kodar, a young Croatian woman. She co-wrote The Other Side of the Wind and acts in it. One of the two scenes from it in the One Man Band doco is of her riding in a car with several young men, and having sex with one of them in the back. It is, to my knowledge, the only sex scene in a Welles movie.

It's like no sex scene I have ever seen in a movie before. It plays like a full-on psychedelic scene, concentrating almost entirely on Ms Kodar. I think Welles was trying to do something new: rather than depict sex on screen, I believe he was trying to convey the experience of sex using the medium of film.

The scene is short, and the film quality was poor, but it was truly mind-boggling.

The rest of the doco was pretty entertaining. It nowhere near lives up to the promise of recreating the style of Welles's brilliant final completed film, F for Fake - at best it comes across as a poor imitation - but the clips alone are worthwhile, and there is a long, fetishistic sequence at the start where the camera lingers on Oja Kodar's collection of hitherto-unseen Welles film that ably conveys the longing many people have for his lost films, whether they be the unfinished ones or the masterpieces that are only available butchered, like The Magnificent Ambersons.

Posted by joey at June 16, 2005 12:23 AM