The thing Orson Welles hated about young filmmakers: “The most detestable habit in all modern cinema”
Whether or not you can categorically call Orson Welles the greatest director of all time, there’s no arguing with the assertion that he is at least one of the most influential. From his unparalleled feature debut, Citizen Kane, he took cinematic storytelling to the next level, drawing on influences from the German Expressionists to show how to reveal a character’s psyche through light, shadow, and camera angles rather than clunky dialogue.
It’s impossible to look back at Welles’s work without lamenting what might have been. From the start, he was sabotagedby producers who didn’t understand his vision. Several of his films were so tampered with that they can barely justify having his name in the credits, while others simply never got finished.
Despite seeing his work butchered, reshot, and re-edited on numerous occasions, however, Welles remained a staunch advocate of cinema, and spent his later years as a spokesperson for the medium. In his commanding baritone, he extolled the virtues of going in with ignorance and embracing roadblocks.
One of his tips seemed downright facetious, though. During a 1982 Q&A at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, Welles said people needed to watch fewer movies. “Don’t be marinated, don’t soak yourself in films,” he said, after acknowledging that, of course, you had to see some movies. The trouble with seeing too many films, he explained, was that it leads to imitation.
“The most detestable habit in all modern cinema is the ‘homage,'” he said. “I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie. There are enough of them which are unconscious.”
This was a surprising statement from someone who drew heavily on the work of other filmmakers, particularly the aforementioned German Expressionists. It’s hard not to get extremely granular and philosophical with a comment like that, because the logical outcome of the argument is that nothing is ever truly original. Even filmmakers as seemingly idiosyncratic as David Lynch frequently referenced Golden Age directors like Jacques Tourneur and Billy Wilder.
However, from a 21st-century perspective, Welles’s comments are far more understandable. Pretty much everyone with a smartphone is constantly ‘marinating’ in media, whether it’s visual or auditory. And as far as Hollywood goes, we’ve gone beyond the homage to blatant repetition. Prequels, sequels, and reboots are the anchor points of every year’s release schedule, and anything approaching an original idea needs to be funded independently.
On the other hand, surely this over-saturated, repetitive 21st-century reality is the perfect example of why we should be marinating in movies from cinematic pioneers like Welles himself. Even he acknowledged that there was some merit in studying the great artists of the medium.
“All the best young directors are soaked in films, and they have managed to rise above that and to be remarkable cinéastes,” he acknowledged, no doubt thinking of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who were making their mark at the time. “So, you are in the presence of a speaker who is not only paradoxical, but confused.”
Welles’s self-deprecation is endearing, but his conflict is very logical. We call directors auteurs when they have their own style, but Scorsese, the French new wave crowd, and Quentin Tarantino had (or have) encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema history and were constantly making homages to past masters. Whether he recognised it or not, Welles did too.
