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62 dga quarterly In the 17 years since Citizen Kane (1941) made him the boy wonder of American movies, the same thing had happened to The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger (1946), and The Lady from Shanghai (1947) in Hollywood, and Mr. Arka- din (1955) in Europe; during World War II, RKO pulled the plug on his ambitious South American project, It's All True, before he'd even completed shooting. So at this point in his life, he was becoming philosophi- cal, telling himself that it was the process, not the product, that mattered. "I'm not interested in works of art, you know, or posterity or fame," he told his French interviewers (one of whom was the great critic André Bazin), "just in the pleasure of experimentation itself—it's the only domain where I feel I'm really honest and sincere." Welles was then a few years into filming a movie of Don Quixote, an on-and-off process of grabbing shots here and there, whenever he'd amassed enough money from acting to bring his cast and crew together for a few weeks. It's no won- der he was sounding a little weary when he spoke to Cahiers. "I can't spend my whole life at festivals or in restaurants beg- ging for money," he said. "Can I wait another 15 years for someone who's willing to have total confidence in me again?" Welles lived 27 more years and managed to complete just five more pictures. He shot footage for several others, most notably a semi-improvised Hollywood satire called The Other Side of the Wind. (There's currently a crowdfunding cam- paign to finance the completion of that film.) He never did find a way to finish his Quixote. Welles is best remembered, still, for his first film, Citizen Kane, made when he was all of 25 years old. After a string of high-profile successes in theater and radio, the young Welles was granted the sort of freedom—including final cut—that he would never enjoy again in Hollywood. The film is looked to by other directors even now as an inspiration: It's so stuffed with visual and narrative innovations that it makes movies seem a medium in which anything is possible. In Chuck Workman's 2014 documentary Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, Sydney Pollack says of Welles' films: "Every single, not just every scene, but every shot has an idea. There's a concept, an idea being executed at every second." Pollack is exactly he career of Orson Welles, born a century ago this year, is one of the strangest an American movie direc- tor has ever had, and by the middle of his filmmaking life he seemed to realize it. "I'm only an experiment- er," he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1958. He was then 43 years old and had already directed over half the films that now bear his signature—including the last picture he would ever make for an American studio, the dazzling, baroque film noir Touch of Evil, which had earlier that year been reedited by the studio and released in a form he'd never approved. The experience of having a movie he had shot ripped away before it was finished to his satisfaction wasn't new to him. PHOTO: PHOTOFEST C L A S S I C S Why Orson Welles Still Matters By Terrence Raffer ty T He spent much of his career trying to salvage troubled productions. But in his centennial year, Welles' glorious experiments are still thrilling to anyone who cares about directing. Citizen Kane (1941)