Orson Welles

May this year marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of director Orson Welles, and October will see the 40th anniversary of his death. In the context of his time, Welles was certainly the most original film innovator, but at the same time too original for the commercial American studio system. The beginning of Welles' painful break with Hollywood was marked by the family saga The Magnificent Ambersons, which, even as a fragment, ranks among the best American films of the last century.

The other two films we will be screening at Ponrepo were made outside Hollywood. Othello, one of Welles' Shakespeare-inspired films, won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. In his late masterpiece Vérités et mensonges, Welles meditates in an extremely entertaining way on the question of where the originality of the artist ends and where the creativity of shameless forgers or magicians, among whom he counts himself, begins.