Summary
It’s a package of raw outtakes cobbled together as a film, but it’s genius either way you look at it.
Oh, you tricksy fellows, Messieurs Hopper and Welles. In 1970, Dennis Hopper is making The Last Movie and Orson Welles is putting together the (initially) ill-fated The Other Side of the Wind.
The story of the latter — which was considered a lost chapter of Welles filmography until its 2018 reconstruction and release — uses a film-within-a-film technique. It’s a mockmentary of sorts, spearing Old Hollywood while taking some sly digs at the New Hollywood that rode in on the success of Hopper’s Easy Rider. Filmmaker J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (played by John Huston) hosts a screening party for an unfinished project. Several celebrities appear as themselves, while others appear as barely disguised parodies.
In HOPPER/WELLES, we get something of an oddity. Assembled by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski, it’s well over two hours of unseen outtakes of an interview between an off-camera Welles and the rising star Hopper. The grainy black and white footage in a dimly lit room takes on a verité quality as it floats back and forth between the titular pair, with the camera occasionally latching onto a few unexplained friends and colleagues in the room.
You could take the film on the surface: that is, it’s simply the 34-year-old Hopper, claiming not to be “a reader” and frequently trailing off into obscure mumbles while the 55-year-old Welles — who in turn claims to have never heard of Bob Dylan — is there for meeting of minds. They discuss art, the myth and magic of filmmaking, Jesus and the crumbling of America. Hopper demurs anytime politics is raised, implying that ‘The Man’ would crush him if his real views were known. He occasionally has prophetic statements about the nature of decentralised protest and revolution in the future, and that “there’s an actor in every president.” Welles remains off camera throughout, and we get to be a fly on the wall.
Or you can take it as a cleverly constructed semi-fiction from two Hollywood rebels of different eras. The men who explored the corruption of the American Dream almost three decades apart in Citizen Kane and Easy Rider. It’s a fiction that has all the illusion of truth. In the absence of Huston, Welles plays Jake as the reporter, and Hopper in turn presents the version of himself that the public believes exists. If Hopper didn’t keep referring to the off-camera Welles as ‘Jake,’ you might never guess that they were acting.
Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Like The Last Movie, it’s a perfect recreation of a film, going through all the requisite parts but leaving us unsure of what’s what in the end. Then again, it might just be some rough footage that got slapped together for film tragics like us to obsess over fifty years later. Either way, it’s a fascinating, albeit long, experiment.
2020 | USA | DIRECTOR: Orson Welles | WRITER: Orson Welles | CAST: Dennis Hopper, Orson Welles, Janice Pennington, Glenn Jacobson | DISTRIBUTOR: MIFF 2021 | RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 5 – 22 August 2021 (MIFF 2021)
