Welles is perhaps the greatest amateur in cinema, having never learned to "properly" direct because of the artistic success of Citizen Kane. His camera placements are always off in some way: actors are pushed too close in, the angle much too slanted, the sight lines mismatched. Characters jump off screen and then back into place without reason, and spatial relations are constantly shifting with motivation. Actors deliver Shakespearean dialogue much too pointedly, as if they were still on the stage any no sense for the camera. There's too much love paid to the bombastic sets and some of the cuts take away from poignant moments in which the camera should simply rest. Shots are either filled with too much information that allows the negative space to act its own drama, or all too pointed toward a single focal direction.But this critique of Welles on a form of cinema that is narratively or thematically efficient. I couldn't help but recalling filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry who choose the great shot because it is the great shot. Not the prettiest or most, um, perfect shot, but the one that transcends its own pictorial beauty and simply seems to enact a life of its own. To appreciate Welles as a filmmaker is to appreciate someone whose cinema feels untied to the system, whatever system we may want to consider. The biggest action scene is pretty much incomprehensible on a spatial comprehension level, but each cut registers with a visceral impact, with the shots of the oafish Welles in that hilarious fat armor throwing us off in our emotional response. Welles didn't always master his own form—I found his Othello too focused on its architectural locations, missing the rhythms of the drama—but when he did, it was because he finds something living in every image and sound. This is an unwieldy movie by design: five Shakespeare crunched into one, focused on the minor character of the fool who thought he was the most powerful of all, much like Charles Foster Kane.Watching the film again, I was utterly taken with a moment during the opening credits, where Welles focuses on a soldier who loses his hat while marching and must dash back for it in the wind. Leaving that awkward mistake in feels like the quintessential Welles moment: not one of perfection, but a search for something ethereal that seems beyond our usual discussions of cinema.
