Film byJonathan Romney
Suddenly it's open season on Orson Welles. Two of his films are being re-released, as is Carol Reed's The Third Man, which established his public image as a charismatic smirker in the shadows. Welles is also a character on screen: a forthcoming film recounts the making of Citizen Kane; he appears, broadly impersonated by Angus MacFayden, in Tim Robbins' new film The Cradle Will Rock, a tableau of agit-prop theatre in 1930s New York; John Sayles is even writing a script about Welles's lost Italian years. A new Welles work, of sorts, is doing the rounds: one of his late scripts, a political parable called The Big Brass Ring, has been filmed, with everything going for it, say the critics, but the Welles touch.
There's no simple explanation for this revival, although a part has certainly been played by two recent biographies: Simon Callow's, which reminded us that Welles's theatre years weren't just prehistory but the foundation of his identity as a film-maker; and David Thomson's Rosebud, less a biography than an imaginative reading of Welles's career as a fiction about itself. We're really no closer to having a manageable picture of Welles than we are to understanding his first great alter ego, Charles Foster Kane.
Citizen Kane is re-released this week under the confident rubric "The Greatest Film Ever Made", which begs the response: "Yes, but is it?" Both the claim and its refutation, however persuasively argued, are essentially meaningless. What really matters is the question of whether anything new can be said about the film. And Kane still has the peculiar quality of making the mind buzz afresh, of making you ask questions that never occurred to you before. The film, with its central metaphor of the jigsaw, remains an extraordinary vindication of the complexity of surface rather than depth.
Kane accumulated meaning throughout Welles's career, becoming increasingly poignant as his Icarus-like fall from unprecedented carte blanche privilege saw him crashing through the years of scraping together small, off-the-cuff projects. Welles finally became a wizard of the fragmentary, a borrower dining out on his myth and occasionally managing to spin that myth afresh out of whatever came to hand. Witness the quasi-documentary F for Fake (1973), in which a cock-and-bull story about Picasso and another film-maker's material about art forgery are spun into a tangential contemplation of his own fate.
Citizen Kane, as Thomson argues, resembles a model for Welles's career - at once a map of the royal road that he never followed, and a mythic CV, a story of grandiose achievement that proves futile. Kane is also a lesson in the dangers of the personality cult. Welles may have won the laurels for his film, but just as Kane's collaborators fall by the wayside in his rise, so, too, in terms of renown, did the other names who made Kane. Supposedly the first and last word in auteur autonomy, Kane belongs as much to the film's then unknown ensemble players (Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead et al), to the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (whose corner was controversially defended by the critic Pauline Kael) and to the cinematographer Gregg Toland.
In the improperly boisterous News on the March newsreel that recaps Kane's life, the film comments on its own future reputation. Kane's fortress Xanadu is called "a collection of everything - so big it can never be catalogued or appraised". That description is part of the PR stunt whereby Welles persuaded the world that his film was the biggest thing ever, cinema's alpha and omega. In reality, the Xanadu newsreel is a flim-flam assemblage of second-hand footage, matte shots and innuendo about the career of the news tycoon William Randolph Hearst. And that sequence also set a keynote for the Welles myth. Just as Kane's own unencompassable collection can finally be catalogued down to a forlorn forest of crates, so Welles's oeuvre at last resembled a junk room of glorious incompletion - scholars have mulled for years over the scraps of uncompleted and apocryphal projects.
The sense that no Welles film is ever a closed case is reinforced by the new re-edit of his 1958 thriller Touch of Evil. The film was yanked out of Welles's hands by Universal and recut to make the story easier to follow. He retorted with a 58-page memo that has now been followed meticulously by Rick Schmidlin and the eminent sound designer Walter Murch to approximate Welles's original vision - a more complex, edgy set of cross-cuts and sound cues than we've hitherto seen. The new version will be controversial - the opening tracking shot gains Welles's cacophonous forest of radio sounds, but then it loses Henry Mancini's hothouse Latino theme. The new Touch of Evil is a scholarly provocation; in no way tailored to 1990s tastes, it is still, literally and figuratively, the mono mix we're used to.
We still regard Welles's career with churlish dissatisfaction - we agree he made masterpieces, but somehow not enough masterpieces. But what does it mean that he failed, or refused, constantly to make bigger and better? He simply went on making different. It's significant, also, that among his unrealised projects was a Moby Dick - not a raging- winds epic such as John Huston's 1956 film, in which Welles appeared, but a straight-to-camera recitation. For if Welles recalls any writer's vision, it is Herman Melville's. He was his own Ahab and whale; in F for Fake, he made his own version of The Confidence Man; and finally, he was like Melville's recalcitrant clerk Bartleby, for he preferred not to.
"Citizen Kane" (U) continues at the Curzon Soho, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (0171-734 2255). "Touch of Evil" (12) opens at the Renoir, Brunswick Centre, London WC2 (0171-837 8402) on 18 June
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