Unfinished Final Film Finally On The Big Screen: Review of Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind”

From 1970 – 1976, Orson Welles attempted to make a film so bold that it took four decades for the world to catch up to his vision. The will of a great director, however, transcends time and now thanks to the current state of production technologies and the support of Netflix, a new generation of cineastes can bear witness to the final testament of genius from the man who changed modern cinema with Citizen Kane. With the  release The Other Side of the Wind, audiences worldwide will bear witness Welles’ final film – a meta, free-jazz cross-genre piece that answers the question “What would Welles do in the era of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls?”

The line between reality and cinema is a delicate, flexible veneer in the mind of a film director. A spiritual cousin to Fellini’s 8 1/2, Welles’ restored and completed film delves into the world of a filmmaker whose own personality, obsessions, and social circle of pseudo-intellectual artists and socialites expose the zeitgeist of the time when Old Hollywood gave way to the New Hollywood of hippies, leftists, and the oft-well-intentioned (though still colonial in nature) white liberalism. The official synopsis for the film, thought not as simple as it sounds, reads as follows: “A Hollywood director emerges from semi-exile with plans to complete work on an innovative motion picture.” John Huston as Jake Hannaford, Orson Welles as himself, and Peter Bogdanovic as Brooks Otterlake Over the course of the picture, the eccentric director Jake …