A question
When I walk through an art museum, I often hear volunteer tour guides gushing over a Van Gogh. Im not sure they really love the work. I think there exists a culture-wide guilt Van Gogh had to suffer so much in his lifetime. Therefore we overcompensate with post-mortem praise for his paintings. Is it the same with Orson Welles? Are we allowed to call ourselves movie lovers and NOT love Citizen Kane? I've watched it half a dozen times personally, but do I really love the film? Or am I--and the rest of the world of cinema--overcompensating for the pain of knowing Welles got the shaft of a lifetime after this movie?
Posted
Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:10 AM
When I turned the corner in the Auckland Art Gallery and saw Van Gogh's painting of the postman dominating the wall, I knew he was an amazing painter.So some like him because of his work, some because he is part of the canon of "great painters," and some because there's subconscious guilt about his suffering. As my review a couple days ago of Welles' The Stranger said, we should forget about the Welles story and watch the movie. The primary thing should always be the movie (or the painting). As Andrew Sarris said about the auteur theory, it attempts to explain why a movie is the way it is rather than attempting to predict how a certain director's movie will be. The same goes for the information surrounding Welles, I'd say.