Watch ‘The Hearts of Age’, the first-ever film created by Orson Welles
Orson Welles, the actor, director, writer, and producer who reshaped cinema as we know it, is often ranked among the greatest filmmakers of all time. With a career that stretched across radio, theatre, and film, Welles was a restless innovator who seemed to leave a mark on every medium he touched.
His first brush with widespread fame came in 1938, when he directed and narrated a now-legendary radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. The broadcast was so convincingly done that it triggered a wave of panic among listeners who believed an alien invasion was truly underway. But radio was just the beginning.
Welles’ seismic breakthrough, though, arrived in 1941 with Citizen Kane, a film he co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. Often crowned the greatest film of all time, it wasn’t just a cinematic milestone; it was a statement of what movies could be. Bold, layered, and technically ahead of its time, Citizen Kane secured Welles a permanent seat in the pantheon of film legends.
But years before that masterpiece, Welles was already toying with the moving image. In 1934, at just 19, he teamed up with his close friend William Vance to shoot a short experimental piece titled The Hearts of Age, which is technically his first film.
“It’s nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. It was a joke,” Welles once said of the short. “I wanted to make a parody of Jean Cocteau’s first film. That’s all. We shot it in two hours, for fun, one Sunday afternoon. It has no sort of meaning.”
They filmed it on the grounds of their former high school, the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where Welles had graduated only a few years earlier. What started as a playful exercise between friends would later be preserved as a fascinating early glimpse into the surreal side of a future master.
After graduation, Welles famously turned down a scholarship to Harvard, choosing instead to travel. He roamed through Ireland, London, Paris, Morocco, and even Seville, writing pulp detective stories to fund his journey. When he eventually returned to Woodstock to support a theatre festival at his old school, he and Vance borrowed a camera from their former principal and set out to experiment with film for the first time.
The result was an eight-minute surrealist short, starring Welles’ first wife, Virginia Nicolson, and Welles himself. The plot is cryptic and disjointed: an elderly woman rocks on a bell, a servant in blackface pulls a rope, and a mysterious gentleman appears as the tone shifts darkly. It’s dreamlike, raw, and unsettling – a nod to the early surrealist work of Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau.
Though Welles dismissed the film in later years, The Hearts of Age offers more than a juvenile spoof. It’s an early fingerprint of a young artist already thinking in images, already playing with tone and form. Long thought to be lost, the film resurfaced thanks to Vance, who kept the original and eventually donated it to the Greenwich Public Library.
See the film below.
