Retrieving Orson Welles's Suspended Inter-American film, It's All True

Abstract

RETRIEVING ORSON WELLES'S SUSPENDED INTER-AMERICAN FILM, ITS ALL TRUE __________________CATHERINE L. BENAMOU__________________ University ofMichigan Too much effort and real love went into the entire project for it to fail and come to nothing in the end. I have a degree of faith in it which amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if It'sAll True goes down into limbo I'll go with it. Orson Welles, in a letter to Fernando Pinto (1943) For over fifty years, Orson WeUes's unfinished semi-documentary film It's All Tme, shot in Mexico and Brazil in 1941 and 1942, has figured as a proverbial pea under the matress of EuroAmerican film history, especiaUy within the sector devoted to WeUes's film oeuvre, where it has commonly been perceived as holding the key to his rupture with the HoUywood industry early in his career. The curiosity it has attracted, if not the dismissive epithets ("misadventure," Allais, 1961; "curse," JeweU, 1988; "wound," Thomson , 19%), is weU-deserved. It's All Tme was the first film to be directed by WeUes on location using 35mm Technicolor camera and stock. (This was also the first usage of this technology, together with synchronized sound recording equipment, outside the continental United States). It was the third project that WeUes intended to shoot in Mexico, with Mexican crew and talent (foUowing a proposed "Nazi" spy thriUer based on Alexander CalderMarshaU 's The Way to Santiago, and a Mexican "melodrama"). It was the only film incorporating documentary strategies and subject matter that Welles would make untU the sixties and seventies. It was the only film WeUes ever directed under the aegis of the United States government. Of aU of the films (but not projects) sponsored directly by the Motion Picture Division of Nelson RockefeUer's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) in the early forties, it commanded the largest budget: $300,000 guaranteed against losses if a class "A" picture had been released. Yet, for many years, these aspects and many other questions linked to the intrinsic qualities of It's All Tme as both a work-in-progress and an historical event have remained obscure within the historical record owing partly to circumstantial factors. RKO abruptly terminated support for the project in mid-1942, at a point when shooting was nearly complete, leaving much of the footage in an unedited —and for many, undecipherable— state for decades. The prolonged inaccessibiUty of the footage due to its sequestering©1998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 25J)____________________________________________________CATHERINE L BENAMOU by the studio in the mid-forties, when Welles was unable to secure the financing necessary to retain the rights, led to the presumption that it was lost. It was then transferred to Desilu in 1957, then from Desilu to Paramount in 1967. Along with the wide geographic dispersion of historical evidence, the international dimension of the project carries in its wake not only linguistic and logistical chaUenges for both the participant and the investigator , but a high degree of complexity at the level of textual construction (sound-image relation, thematic articulation of distinct sociocultural spaces of expression, stylistic variations) motivated by strategic as weU as creative concerns. FinaUy, the ethnocentric and auteurist bias in much of the Uterature on WeUes has ironicaUy caused the project to be viewed as an anomaly —and therefore unworthy of serious historical or textual analysis— within the scope of the director's oeuvre, and has excluded from consideration key protagonists and developments within the broader historical context where both the causes and the impact of the film's suspension are concerned. In particular, there has been a tendency to overlook those factors that are linked to the film's design as an instrument of U.S. cultural diplomacy during World War II. Unfortunately, the release in 1993 of a partiaUy restored and reconstructed version of the film has not produced a dramatic reversal in this tendency towards critical neglect. I. Points of Departure My work with It's All Tme, at least initiaUy, did not stem from an interest in Orson Welles, but rather from ongoing comparative research into Latin American film...