The Eyes of Orson Welles

Mark Cousins's 2018 documentary approaches Orson Welles not through his films but through his drawings. With the permission of his daughter Beatrice, Cousins gained access to hundreds of drawings and paintings in the archive, most of them never seen. The film tries to derive where a director's visual world came from out of that hand-drawn material. Cousins builds the narration as a letter written to Welles and addresses him directly; for some viewers that choice is too intimate, for others it is the best thing in the film. Its most concrete finding is showing that Welles's sense of composition formed on paper rather than behind a camera. Welles's political side, particularly his anti-fascist writing and his journalism against racism, is the least known part of the film. Who it's for: viewers interested in film history, Orson Welles and the essay film form. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a straightforward biography, or who will find the narrator's personal, poetic manner excessive.