[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]
On two
ways to AmericanStudy Orson Welles’ Magic
Show.
I’m not
particularly proud of the fact that the only post to date in which I’ve thought
at length about the iconic artist and American Orson Welles (1915-1985) was my non-favorites
examination of Citizen Kane (1941). I
stand by the critiques in that post, but I don’t want to suggest for a second
that I don’t recognize Welles’ towering talent, nor the countless aspects of
American culture and society which he impacted in the course of his influential
career and life: from his early work with the Depression-era
Federal Theatre Project in New York through his groundbreaking radio
shows (especially the infamous
1938 War of the Worlds
adaptation) and up to a hugely important career as a film actor and director for which
Kane was just the tip of the iceberg.
I could dedicate an entire week’s series to Welles, and maybe will have the
chance at some point; but for today, I’m writing about a project of his that
was never completed in his lifetime, his unfinished television special Orson
Welles’ Magic Show (filmed between 1976 and 1985 but as those
hyperlinked clips indicate never finalized in his lifetime and only edited
together and partially shared, both by his romantic
partner Oja Kodar, after his death in 1985).
It’s pretty
striking that Welles spent so much of his last decade working on this seemingly
quixotic project, and I think there are a couple ways we can make broader analytical
meaning of that quest. Clearly magic was something personally important to
Welles, as he details in the posthumously published autobiographical book This
is Orson Welles (1992; it’s really a series of conversations between Welles
and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich) where he describes being taught magic tricks
at a young age by none other than this week’s inspiration Harry Houdini. I’m not
saying that magic tricks are Welles’ “Rosebud,” exactly, but at least that
there’s something telling and moving in seeking in the final stage of life to
connect back to and recapture a part of our childhood that we’ve moved away
from. And, in this case, that element is also a skillset that Welles had not
been able to master or make central to his success, compared to the many
aforementioned artistic and cultural arenas in which he had already left
lasting legacies by that time.
Speaking
of those many other cultural arenas, I also think it’s worth considering ways
in which magic might be more parallel to and interconnected with them than we
generally acknowledge. This
Saturday Evening Post Considering
History column on blackface entertainment led me to think more than I ever
had before about just how much Vaudeville is a part of (and was an influence
on) other defining 20th century media like radio, film, and
television. Magic tricks were a part of
countless Vaudeville routines and performers’ acts, so there’s a direct
intersection here; but more broadly, I’d say that both are examples of early
and foundational forms of mass entertainment, late 19th and early 20th
century cultural forms that foreshadowed and helped shape the way that other
multimedia genres developed and evolved. So it stands to reason that one of the
American artists who most fully mastered those multimedia worlds of radio,
film, and the like was also greatly influenced by, and apparently spent his
life and career trying to recapture, the world of magic.
Next
MagicStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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