The Australian film critic Adrian Martin has alerted me to this horror story. Read it and weep. Or, better yet, somebody teach Glenn Beck something about Orson Welles’s politics. — J.R.
Greg Beato from Reason.com: “When [Glenn] Beck was 8 years old, his mother gave him a record of old radio programs that included Orson Welles’ famous performance of War of the Worlds. Apparently the fictionalized news report of an alien invasion became a foundational text for him, an archetypal example of how you could create crazy, vivid, apocalyptic drama out of mere words. To pay tribute to Welles’ work, Beck starred in a live version of War of the Worlds that aired on his syndicated radio show on Halloween night in 2002. Shortly thereafter, an heir of the radio play’s author sued Beck and his producers for copyright infringement and won an injunction that prevents Beck from ever performing the play again.”
Glenn Beck (on his very own web site, verbatim): “WOR is just a — I mean, it really is truly an honor to be on the 710 frequency which Orson Welles, my company is named Mercury and it’s named after Orson Welles’ company and this is the frequency that Orson Welles did the shadow [sic] and everything else and it is really truly an honor for me to be anywhere on this station and here we come out of the legendary John Gambling in the morning and our first month on the air, and I don’t know if this has been done. Read more
From The Guardian (15 June 2002). — J.R.
I recently found myself arguing with an Australian friend about Tsai Ming-liang’s film What Time Is It There? — a disagreement pointing to contradictory notions about how the world seems to be changing. According to Adrian Martin, with whom I am editing a book on global cinephilia, the film “is all about ‘uncommunicating vessels’: Paris and Taipei, a man and a woman, the living and the dead, unsynchronised time zones, incompatible languages, unreciprocal desires”.
“There is a moment,” he said, “when we need cruel reminders of the realities that disturb any premature fantasies of oneness.”
For me, the film is a triumph of communication and even a kind of togetherness. “It is a Taiwanese-French co-production,” I pointed out, “and Tsai does reveal a certain connectedness, congruence, unity, even hope — not so much on the screen but inside each viewer’s consciousness, where it really counts. There’s even what I’d call a happy ending.”
Actually, we’re both right. From one point of view — mine in this exchange — nationality is already on its way to becoming irrelevant, except as a way for multinational companies to define parts of the global market. For me a major part of the significance of September 11 was its suggestion that the US could be as unsafe as anywhere else — and that even New Yorkers could get a taste of what it has been like to live in Baghdad. Read more
From Film Comment (January-February 2013), with a few cuts made to this piece restored and the spelling of *Corpus Callosum (which Film Comment is determined never to get right, or even to acknowledge its former misspellings) corrected. I’ve retained their title, however, which is better than mine (“Mark Cousins’ Friendly and Innocent Odyssey”). — J.R.
“Much of what we assume about movies is off the mark.
It’s time to redraw the map of movie history that we have
in our heads. It’s factually inaccurate and racist by omission.
The Story of Film: An Odyssey can be an exciting,
unpredictable one. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be
a bumpy ride.”
Delivered offscreen in Mark Cousins’ lilting Irish accent, this hefty promise and warning — only eight minutes into his lively, watchable, eight-part, fifteen-hour series — carries an undeniable thrill, even after one factors in the nod at the end to All About Eve, which suggests that some of the bumps along the way may be familiar and even predictable glitches. I haven’t read the book by Cousins (The Story of Film: A Worldwide History), written in 2002-2003, that served as his starting point and has already become an exorbitant collectors’ item on the Internet. Read more
