First Person Plural

It begins with a death, of course, the first of the many quotations, slips, and rhymes coursing through The Other Side of the Wind, now finally arrived, more than 50 years after word of its conception first entered public circulation, in a saleable form, if not a definitive one. Though I must defer the work of surveying the distance between the film which enters the market bearing this title and the film its ghostly author, Orson Welles, would have signed his name to had history unfolded otherwise, the matter of intent, of authorship, of the director as auteur, is integral to its present coherence, and so cannot be avoided as an internal concern. This is to say that a foundational rhyme between the film now given to us and its more-than-50-year production history is inevitable; any comment on material relating to one half of this equation necessarily bears on the other. And if it is not the hidden masterpiece promised by those desperate to see its completion, the disorientation one feels in the presence of this endless series of mirrorings marks it as a perfectly Wellesian object, the richest figuration of the concept of its author as an ideological challenge.

“May he not be knave, fool, and genius altogether?”
—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

What one sees first is, in fact, not the terminal image which traces a line through (1955), (19510, and (1942) back to the wellspring of (1941), but a scroll of didactic text which concludes, “Welles died in 1985, leaving behind nearly 100 hours of footage, a workprint consisting of assemblies and a is built, in form and content, of thrown voices, feints, false fronts, and tall tales leading to and from Welles’ idea of himself as a public figure, as the performance of a lifetime, drawn at maximum clarity then cracked apart and squirreled within shadows of such depth as to permit only flashes, glimpses, and whispers of that self image. To be a wreck is, it seems, a certain sort of freedom.