ALBERT MAYSLES Memorial Film Festival (May 8-14, 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

MAYSLES BROTHERS: ORSON WELLES IN SPAIN(1963)


STILL FROM THE MAYSLES' WELLES IN SPAIN

A glimpse of Orson pitching a project

ORSON WELLES IN SPAIN was made in 1963 and is a 10-minute film in which Welles pitches a film to well dressed people, that was to have been a fictional narrative about important, chic -- and obsessed -- bullfight aficionados. It was to be entirely improvised based on Welles' predetermined structure as laid out in his own written script. The film, like so many Welles projects, apparently did not finally see the light of day. It's very experimental nature may have been a drawback. Welles' eloquence and fluency are much in evidence. Spanish music is included at the beginning and end along with some images of a major Spanish Plaza de Torros. The film seamlessly edits together several different moments, as they will do at greater length in the longer Marlon Brando film they made a couple of years later. An online commentator suggests that a lot of the idea pitched by Welles here, including the character of Jake Hannaford, he transferred to his The Other Side of the Wind, a hitherto unreleased film whose cast includes John Huston, Robert Random, and Peter Bogdanovich, which is listed on IMDb as coming out 5 May 2015.

A print of this little early 16mm color Maysles film portrait of Orson Welles can be found on the Welles.net website here.

The Maysles brothers did some commercial work at the outset, starting in the late Fifties to make films together. A notable effort was a promotional film for IBM, for which they were apparently handsomely paid.

All the films in this thread were screened in connection with the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival organized by David L. Brown at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, May 8 - 14, 2015