English - French onstage translation - In February of 1982, Orson Welles was sixty-six years old and hadn’t completed a dramatic feature since the docu-fiction “F for Fake,” from 1973. He was in France, to be decorated as a commander of the Légion d’Honneur, and while there he paid a visit to the Cinémathèque Française, for a Q. & A. Master Class with film students, mostly Film Directing students. The event was filmed by Pierre-André Boutang and Guy Seligmann; it’s both a moving portrait of the caged cinematic lion (who died in 1985, without making another feature) and an enduringly insightful set of lessons on the art and the practice of making movies.
Orson Welles' Filmmaking Master Class I - University of Southern California - 1981 - Restored 2001 - 4K on SN: https://dai.ly/x95975q
Welles declares his desire for the session to be a dialogue; the students (who form a standing-room crowd) prove reticent, however, and he makes strenuously good-humored efforts to get them to engage—and then delivers generous, copious, blazingly uninhibited answers to their brief questions. The discussion is moderated by Henri Béhar, who also serves as the onstage translator. The time that it takes Béhar to repeat Welles’s remarks in French (and, at times, to put the students’ questions into English) lends the discussion a natural rhythm, within which Welles composes his thoughts with rhetorical flair and invests them with dramatic weight and comedic timing. Welles, who was one of the greatest and grandest of actors and also of directors, turns the event into a performance—without sacrificing a whit of candor. He brings a mighty, Shakespearean pathos and comedy to the casually structured occasion.
Orson Welles à la Cinémathèque française
Pierre-André Boutang, Guy Seligmann
France / 1983 / 1:33:11
Avec Orson Welles, Henri Béhar.
Le 24 février 1982, invité à Paris pour être décoré de la Légion d'honneur des mains de François Mitterrand, et pour présider la cérémonie des Césars, Orson Welles dialoguait avec un public essentiellement composé de jeunes auditeurs.
Numérisation d'un élément inversible 16 mm (1 116 mètres) issu des collections de la Cinémathèque française.
Copyright - All rights reserved to their respective owners.
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Read the unabridged plays online: https://shakespearenetwork.net/works/plays
Screen Adaptation - Co-Production : MISANTHROPOS – Official Website - https://www.misanthropos.net
Adapted by Maximianno Cobra, from Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens", the film exposes the timeless challenge of social hypocrisy, disillusion and annihilation against the poetics of friendship, love, and beauty.
IMDb page: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6946736/
