The Magnificent Ambersons

EN

“The Magnificent Ambersons is often cited as a great lost film. It was drastically re-cut and certain key scenes re-shot on the orders of RKO after it tested badly. Away in Brazil shooting what would be the unfinished documentary It’s All True (1942; 1993) as a part of the war effort, Orson Welles had no control over the way his film was finished. He later said: “They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me”. And it is true that, with over 40-minutes of lost material and an ending that bears no relation to the rest of the film in tone or quality, The Magnificent Ambersons is not the film that Welles wanted to make. It is, however, the film that we are able to see. It seems to me that time is wasted lamenting a lost masterpiece – a film that could have been better than Citizen Kane (1941) – time better spent looking at the masterpiece available to us. Because, like the Ambersons, this film is magnificent.”

Tamara Tracz1

"Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose from his chains arul gone to sleep on the flower bed. He is an active loafer, a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity.”

Jean Cocteau

“With Ambersons, Welles adopted a different style from that of Kane, more lyric and tender, with a technique as different as the subject. Purposely, he holds many of his scenes for an extended time, cither with a stationary camera (as in the cake-eating scene between George and Aunt Fanny) or with a long tracking shot (George and Lucy in the carriage) so that the mood of rhe film is the sad, slowly developed atmosphere of the late 1800's. Welles displays an exquisite understanding of the period and its style – as in the beautiful opening shot with a fuzzy quality around the edges, framed with the archaic quaintness of tintypes, and his narration evokes a deep nostalgia for a time gone forever. Since he was not allowed to do the final cut of Ambersons ("It looks as though somebody had run a lawnmower through the celluloid.” ) and because a few of the scenes were neither written nor directed by him, it becomes difficult to evaluate exactly what Welles wanted the finished film to look like. It is known, for example, that he had shot a lot more footage of the growing, ever-industrializing town than is shown in the movie; clearly it was to have been used as a counterpoint to the Ambersons’ decline. Welles was then nearing the end of his tenure at RKO and Ambersons is a mutilated work. It is the more amazing that so much of Welles' conception survived the released print.”

Peter Bogdanovich2

“It would be easy to show, by taking examples from Kane and Ambersons, that Welles’s technical and dramatic editing – though it did not profoundly affect the basis of things cinematic – already demonstrated a singular inventive strength. In particular, the frequent use (remarkably subtle and masterful in Ambersons) of what could be called the anti-valuation of a subject had never been carried to such lengths. By that I mean Welles’s refusai to allow the spectator a clear view of the culminating events of a scene. This dramatic process, which is really a form of understatement, should not be confused with the ellipse which, as has been repeated so often – perhaps pejoratively – constitutes the fundamental rhetorical figure of cinéma. With Welles, the whole film is somehow partially inaccessible to the grasp; nothing that happens can altogether be gotten to. In Ambersons particularly, the lighting System set up by Cortez, the director of photography, serves, doubtless, on the one hand, to recreate the ambiance of gas lighting and, on the other, lets Welles have his actors evolve in a heterogeneous luminous space: a space in which the ordering of contiguous zones of dark and light constitute –within the immobility of the sequence – a kind of editing and a dramatic rhythm. But frequently, and paradoxically, Welles will see to it that essential lines are spoken at the exact moment when the actor is least well lit. The most significant moments thus evade us at the very instant when our desire to seize them is strongest. The famous kitchen scene in Ambersons between George and Aunt Fanny may be partially explained in this way. Welles’s refusal to move the camara for the entire length of the scene – and especially when Agnes Moorehead has her nervous crisis and flees (while the camera remains obstinately pointed with its nose in the cream pie) – is tantamount to forcing us to witness an event from the position of a man stupidly bound to a chair.”

André Bazin3

• 1Tamara Tracz, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Senses of Cinema, February 2006.
• 2Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Orson Welles (The Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1961).
• 3André Bazin, “A New Relationship Between Caméra and Object,” in: Maurice Bessy, Orson Welles. An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy (Crown Publishers Inc.: New York: 1963), translated by Ciba Vaughan. Originally published as ‘L’Apport d’Orson Welles’, Ciné-Club #7, May 1948