Mr. Arkadin

Orson Welles, 1955

In honor of the filmmaker’s hundredth birthday today, it seemed appropriate to present these frame enlargements and screen captures from his best film, which turns sixty years old itself this year. I understand that mine is a minority opinion regarding the worth of this work, but I also know that I’m in very good company here.  I first saw Mr. Arkadin in 1975 at the University of Connecticut Film Society.  It was the first film by Welles that I saw projected on a screen, and, though it probably wasn’t the best print, it was certainly the best version of it then available, the Corinth version, which remains the one I prefer (though I don’t at all mind seeing the others when the opportunity arises.)  I urge anyone interested in Welles, in his life and work, to see this movie, if it is yet unseen.

 

 

Burmese Pantomime of Barnaby Rudge

April 2015, Yangon, Myanmar
I considered calling this series of photographs Barnaby Rudge after Dickens’s early historical novel about the Gordon Riots, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch (though it still seems appropriate to me despite my inability to explain exactly why)  and would likely be misunderstood in light of the current revolutionary activity in Baltimore.   I doubt that even the few people alive who have read the book would understand the association I intended. (The novel's central character is a bit of a fool who finally finds his true calling in life as the natural born leader of a mob.) These pictures were made a couple of weeks ago in Yangon with the help of some friends there, and employ a few props and masks that were obtained rather cheaply in the street.  The setting is an outside wall of a Judicial Court building a few blocks from where I was staying.  As well as they could, I asked those posing to think of themselves as dancers in a revolutionary pageant.  

oil on tin

The Cabinet Paintings 
by Francisco Goya 
oil on tin, circa 1795

This series of small scale figure paintings that Goya made during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a time of great upheaval, hope and brutality, mark a great turning point in his work.  They reflect contemporary news stories of spectacular disasters, the sort of stuff that comes by way of imperialist expansion, current popular fantasies concerning savages, noble and otherwise,  and they clear the ground for the great graphic series just to come, his great examination of the "Spanish Character", Los Caprichos.