NP Ansel Adams

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

[Sorry - when not a nonstarter, I'm a hopelessly late
contributor.]

On Tue, 13 May 2008 robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
> One of the great features of Mr.Arkadin and surrounding
> films by Orson Welles [Touch of Evil, The Trial, Lady
> >From Shanghai] is the intense "ugly beauty', the
> absorbtion of the more entropic art movements of the the
> 50's and 60-'s into his own auto-destructing cinema. The
> photographs of Dennis Hopper and Robert Rauschenberg's
> works come to mind.

I agree. Working with a different medium, Welles was, of course,
a great sound artist too (at least when he was allowed to create
a finished soundtrack). He drew on his experience as an innovator
in the wonderfully messy genre of radio plays. The ceaselessly
overlapping, splendidly rhythmed dialogue in "Touch of Evil" is a
case in point. The U.S. novelist with a similar knack for dialogue
is Gaddis. (In cinema, Hawks is another, albeit quite different,
master). But Gaddis was a disillusioned highbrow satirist - unlike
Welles for whom traditions of either "high" or "mass" culture have
no intrinsic value, but are often necessary to be appropriated -
to be wallowed through - in his rough, inclusive art. His "impure
poetry", to use Neruda's concept.


Heikki