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

get the idea.
    FADEOUT
    FADE IN
    BLACK SCREEN
    6.
A human eye appears on the left side of screen. Then an “equal” sign appears next to it. The capital “I.” Finally the eye winks and we
DISSOLVE .
    I hasten to add that all of this hardly amounts to an “alienation effect.” Welles was aware, after all, that a good magician can be appreciated if you know something about the skill involved in creating his tricks. Nevertheless, in a period when most technique was supposed to be invisible, concealing the labor behind the product, Welles’s approach was anomalous. It cut against the grain of the impersonal factory style, serving both as an entertaining device and as a commentary upon the illusory, potentially authoritarian nature of the medium. Indeed his prologue to
Heart of Darkness
underlined the theme of manipulation and demagogic deception that was central to the story; on another level it helped establish the sense of pervasive evil, the subtle link between the audience and Kurtz that Conrad himself had implied. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has observed, “the multiple equations proposed by the introduction, whereby I = eye = camera = screen = spectator, are extended still further in the script proper, so that spectator = Marlow = Kurtz = Welles = dictator.”
    The subsequent “Mexican Melodrama” touches upon many of these same issues, but it transposes them into a Hitchcock-style, “wrong man” thriller. It also abandons the camera eye technique, opting for a more conventional subjectivity. On the untitled cover of the script Welles wrote a brief explanatory note: “My part in this story has no name. The character will therefore be referred to in the first person.” The importance of this device becomes apparent from the opening shot, which plunges us immediately into a bewildering, Kafkaesque situation, revealing Welles’s grand egotism as strongly as the opening of
Heart of Darkness
:
    MY FACE FILLS THE FRAME
.
    ME : I don’t know who I am.
    THE CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL
me seated in the middle of a big, bare white-washed room, dressed only in a sheet. I am surrounded by a lotof men, representatives of nearly every race. With a sudden rush of sound, they begin firing questions at me
.
    â€œWhere did you come from?”
    â€œWhen did you arrive?”
    â€œWho attacked you?”
    â€œHow did you get into the country?”
    These and more questions in as many languages as there are men to speak them:—Spanish, German, French, Italian, English and Japanese. I don’t know any of the answers
.
    ME : I don’t know who I am. I don’t know my name. I don’t know where I come from.
    Here the subjectivity is achieved by a method precisely opposite from
Heart of Darkness
. The camera aims at the central consciousness, and the objective world enters from offscreen. From this point on, Welles conveys emotions through simple reaction shots, the audience staying with the protagonist until late in the film, finding their bearings and learning the meaning of events only as he does. The technique is similar to the way Hitchcock treats Roger Thornhill in
North by Northwest
, but with one difference: in this case the protagonist suffers from amnesia. We soon discover that he has been struck on the head by political enemies, stripped, and brought to a police station, but we have no more idea of his identity or what country he is in than he does. At least Thornhill knows he is not Kaplan, but when the protagonist of this film is told his name is Kellar, he believes it. As he tells us later in the film, he has been born full grown (the opening image of Welles clad in a sheet contributes to the metaphor) and must find his way like a child.
    The result of this narrative strategy is to make the audience’s identification with the protagonist at once intense and uneasy—a situation rather different from the typical film. At first we are not sure