Free The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore Page A

novella depended upon its limited, first-person viewpoint. On the stage this technique would be nearly impossible to achieve, but in the movies, which can fuse theatrical spectacle with the narrative potential of the novel, it offered interesting possibilities. Welles’s idea was to substitute the eye of the camera for the “I” of Conrad’s narrator; the camera would become Marlow, whose voice, that of Welles himself, would be heard offscreen. He even wrote a brief prologue to the film, hoping to “instruct and acquaint the audience as amusingly as possible with the technique.” After the regular RKO trademark title, followed by the Mercury title, it begins this way:
    FADEOUT
    DARK SCREEN
    WELLES’S VOICE : Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Orson Welles. Don’t worry. There’s just nothing to look at for a while. You can close your eyes if you want to, but—please open them when I tell you to. . . . First of all, I am going to divide this audience into two parts—you and everybody else in the theatre. Now then, open your eyes.
    IRIS INTO
    INTERIOR BIRD CAGE —
    1.
Shooting from inside the bird cage, as it would appear to a bird inside the cage, looking out. The cage fills the entire screen. Beyond the bars can be seen the chin and mouth of Welles, tremendously magnified
.
    WELLES’S VOICE : The big hole in the middle there is my mouth. You play the part of a canary. I’m asking you to sing and you refuse. That’s the plot. I offer you an olive.
    A couple of Gargantuan fingers appear from below cage and thrust an enormous olive towards
CAMERA ,
through bars of cage
.
    WELLES’S VOICE
(cont’d)
: You don’t want an olive. This enrages me.
Welles’s chin moves down and his nose and eyes are revealed. He is scowling fiercely
.
    WELLES’S VOICE
(cont’d)
: Here is a bird’s-eye view of me being enraged. I threaten you with a gun.
Now the muzzle of a pistol is stuck between the bars of the cage. It looks like a Big Bertha
.
    WELLES’S VOICE
(cont’d)
: That’s the way a gun looks to a canary. I give you to the count of three to sing.
    Nothing could have made a more dramatic transition from radio to cinema, and nothing could have announced more clearly the director’s potential authority over the audience. In fact the whole prologue seems designed to establish the illusion of Welles’s omnipotence. One imagines his amused, slightly hypnotic voice filling the theater, giving the impression that the ultimate magic trick is about to be performed. “You aren’t going to see this picture,” he says at one point, “this picture is going to happen to you.” And the “you” here is of course singular, because in the movie theater everyone sees the same thing, the camera becoming the collective eye of the audience, which is manipulated by Welles’s unseen hand.
    It is worth noting that in contrast to the typical Hollywood production of the period, which tried to conceal its mechanics, Welles’s movie would never let the audience forget that the whole thing was being cleverly managed. Thus after leading the audience through a series of unpleasant situations, including a scene where “you” become a condemned man about to die, Welles concludes the prologue with a couple of visual jokes meant to underline his point:
    WELLES
(cont’d, looking straight into lens)
: Now, if you’re doing this right, this is what you ought to look like to me.
    DISSOLVE
    INTERIOR MOTION PICTURE THEATRE (PAINTING)
    5. SHOT
of inside of theatre as it would appear from the stage
or rather from the center of the moving picture screen!
Beginning on theprojection booth, CAMERA PANS DOWN taking in the orchestra floor of the theatre, dimly lit by the reflected light from the screen
. The audience is entirely made up of motion picture cameras.
When this has registered:
    WELLES’S VOICE : I hope you