There is no such thing as film production. It is a joke, as much as the production of literature, pictures, or music. There are no good years for films, like good years for wine. A great film is an accident, a banana skin under the feet of dogma; and the films that we try to defend are a few of those that despise rules. –Jean Cocteau, 1949
Obviously, DVDs aren’t a perfect source for film history. The copyright holder of Orson Welles’s 1952 Othello is his daughter Beatrice, who chose to rerelease the film in 1992 with all its music and sound effects reworked. She had a golden opportunity to release that version of the film alongside her father’s on a single DVD–if she believed in her version enough to show everyone what the differences were. Instead she elected to release only her version, keeping her father’s out of reach. Yet another DVD has made most of a documentary TV series by Welles, Around the World With Orson Welles, available in this country for the first time–an event virtually unheralded in the mainstream press and film magazines, which were far more interested in an upcoming made-for-TV boondoggle that ludicrously purports to be based on Welles’s original script for The Magnificent Ambersons. (Having spoken at length to a reviewer who’s seen it, I gather that, among other things, the narration and final sequence were removed to make way for flashbacks and a happy ending–none of which was in the original.)
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At the Savannah film festival I was fascinated to see some of Waking Life’s initial live-action DV footage on Sabiston’s laptop, and I hope that samples of this material will be included on the film’s DVD. A.I.’s DVD is slated to be released in April, and I’m sorry it apparently won’t include any of the 90-page Ian Watson script written for Kubrick that served as Spielberg’s main source–though it reportedly will include a few of the 600 drawings by Chris Baker that Kubrick also commissioned.
The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein–another key film New York has yet to show, see, or acknowledge–reveals almost equal amounts of anger and detachment. It has much less craft and polish than the other films on this list, but it’s an ambitious effort to capture what the gulf war meant to this country from the vantage point of New Mexico–a theme that’s pursued through three stories and various documentary and experimental segments on everything from war toys to Iraqi music to a Mexican holiday celebration. It can’t be called an entertainment like 1999’s Three Kings, but it’s a complex and passionate human response that seems all the more vital given the recent battering of Afghanistan.
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