Orson welles gay
Queer & Now & Then: 1942
In this biweekly column, I look back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay.
All images from The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
The word “queer” is at once too big, too meaningful, and too vague to do all the work it needs to do. The way that “Q” perches at the end of “LGBTQ” fond a squiggly little tail speaks to its general precariousness; it somehow risks overtaking the whole and being forgotten all together. Yet at the display moment, the term feels fully integrated into the overall discourse, richly inclusive, straddling academia and famous culture; the “Gay and Lesbian” Anthologies and Volumes of the ’90s hold become the “Queer” Readers of the 21st century. The word, an indicator of how more speculative scholarship gradually filters down into definitive mainstream concepts, has a strange, malleable currency: it has develop a significant shorthand of solidarity, not only for members of the male lover, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual communities but also for the essential questioners of the dominant heteronormative procreative culture t
Polygamists, Cyborgs, and Lgbtq+ Marriage, Oh My! Orson Welles and Future Shock
“Our modern technology has achieved a degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a cute heavy price. We dwell in an age of anxiety, a time of stress. And with all our sophistication we are in fact, the victims of our own technological strength. We are the victims of shock … of future shock.”
No, this isn’t a quote from a Huffington Post column on the Facebookization of modern communication. Nor is it pulled from an academic treatise on the phenomenologies of post-industrial universe. This statement was made by Orson Welles in the 1972 futurist documentary Future Shock, and, unlike some of the more dated elements of 1970s educational films, Future Shock remains shockingly current in verbalizing the concerns and anxieties that come along with rapid societal and technological change.
1970s Visions Of A Dystopic Future
The 1972 documentary Future Shock was created as a companion piece to the 1970 book of the alike name by author and social theorist Alvin Toffler. Toffler’s Future Shock posited that t
Actor, poet, cartoonist and only ten." headlined a story in a Wisconsin sheet with a shot of the cherubic little Orson Welles. Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (640 pages. Viking. 832.95) deals with the "only" part of Welles's life. He was only 18 months old when he startled a family doctor by saying: "The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals." He was only 16 when he walked into the Gate Theatre in Dublin, fibbed that he was a Broadway actor and was hired to participate a major role. He was only 20 when he directed a landmark all-black production of "Macbeth," only 22 when he cofounded the Mercury Theatre, only 23 when his radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" panicked the country into thinking the Martians were coming. And he was only 25 when he directed "Citizen Kane," still considered by many the greatest movie of all time.
Callow wants to "deconstruct" the Welles story, observe the real man who made himself a myth in cahoots with a pushover press. His publication (the first of two volumes) is easily the best Welles biography, orchestrating previous work anti his own six years of research. Callow's expertise as actor
The scripts for almost all films go through a number of drafts. The changes that are made give an intuition into the film-makers' thinking: plots change, themes appear, characters are developed. Sometimes the film-makers are diverted down blind alleys and this was the case for The Third Man.
Carol Reed's 1949 thriller establish in Vienna was produced under the auspices of Alexander Korda and the American David O. Selznick (a renowned Hollywood figure who had been responsible for Gone with the Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939)), with whom Korda had struck a four-picture finance and distribution deal in 1947. As part of their consent Selznick had the right to be consulted on the scripts, though he had no final authority to enforce changes.
Selznick was a domineering workaholic with an amphetamine ('speed') habit: he would chew benzedrine tablets to help him through his hectic schedule. His comments on the script of The Third Man were forceful and sometimes crazy. Many of them were recorded in a series of minutes of meetings held in California in August 1948 between Selznick, Reed and writer Graham Greene; these documents are preserved in the Carol Reed files i
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