Four ways to celebrate the 100th birthday of Orson Welles

Last Wednesday (May 6) would have been the 100th birthday of the man who made Citizen Kane.

Naturally, the global film community is celebrating the life and work of an artist whose impact on the moving image is incalculable. Here in Vancouver, the party starts tonight at the Cinematheque with—of course!—a screening of Kane presented by Vancity Theatre’s Tom Charity. 

Cinematheque, in fact, is performing a heroic community service with its complete Welles retrospective, running through the rest of May and June. Besides his most well-known works—Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil—the series also includes his two Shakespeare adaptations, the “troglodyte” Macbeth and Othello—plus his breathtaking version of Kafka’s The Trial, and the quasi-doc F for Fake, which still looks vertiginously ahead of its time 40 years after it was made.

The Vancity Theatre is offering its own complimentary (and super-sized) portion of Orson with the Vancouver premiere of Chuck Workman’s doc, Magician: The Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles (May 16, 17, 23, 24), plus Richard Linklater’s 2008 beauty, Me and Orson Welles (May 23), and Journey Into Fear (May 24)—the 1942 noir that was a Welles film in all but directing credit. Among other Welles-related events, the film centre is also presenting a panel discussion following its screening of Kane (May 24).

For those who can‘t quite make it out of the house, perhaps you'd like to join Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach in donating the benjamins to help complete the master’s final film, The Other Side of the Wind. Welles didn’t survive to complete editing on the film; an epic tale that began with an argument between Welles and Ernest Hemingway in 1937, and (almost) ended 40 years later with the great filmmaker returning from his European exile to make a film about a great filmmaker returning from his European exile. Another 40 years along, the legal limbo that kept The Other Side of the Wind on ice has finally ended. Be a part of film history here.

And if you want to just do something for free, please enjoy The Orson Welles Show—an utterly extraordinary 1979 talk show pilot flamboyantly directed by Welles and buried until it was finally posted to YouTube just yesterday. Orson is joined by the Muppets, Angie Dickinson, and Burt Reynolds. More to the point, it’s a dazzling feast of Welles himself and a beautiful summation of the same quality the Vancity Theatre's Tom Charity expressed earlier today to the CBC.

“He spoke to me because he seemed to be such an almost apotheosis of an artist, a maverick, an independent,” he said. “You can look at any 30-second clip and recognize Orson Welles' style because it's so much style. He has immense charisma…”