ORSON WEST UN FILM DE FRAN RUVIRA

12 ORSON WEST ORSON WEST 13
DIRECTOR´S DESCRIPTION
NOTES DEL DIRECTOR
MEMORIA DEL DIRECTOR
NOTE DU RÉALISATEUR
Fran Ruvira
I was born in a small borderland village in
the Spanish hinterland, where dry farming
and winds form an arid landscape, reminiscent
of the landscapes of the old Wild
West. These spaces allowed the children
of my generation to dream up adventures
with Indians, cowboys and outlaws. As a
young boy, I remember hearing a neighbour
talk about the visit to the village by
a director who wanted to film a western in
the area. I always thought that it was one
of those stories which adults tell children
to entertain them. Years later however, I
came across an article which explained
the frustrated venture of Orson Welles’
western during his years in Spain.
But, in truth, this film is not a story about
Orson Welles, but rather about the land
where he wanted to film a western. The
camera portrays the landscapes of my
childhood with the aim of illustrating the
cinematographic poetry resulting from the
union of cinema and nature; the confrontation
between the individual and the environment,
the uprooting... This communion
of landscape reveals a time when Welles
passed through this borderland.
This geographical barrier is transferred to
the language of cinema to tell a tale set in
a borderland where different realities confront
each other: a form of cinema which
suggests a cinema which tells a story;
versus a cinema which uses technical documents;
versus a genre-based cinema, a
cinema with non-professional actors; versus
the methods of professional actors…
The spectator is taken to “no-man’s land”
where everything is possible, and where
everything is still to be done. It is an ideal
place to make a film in which every day the
filming is seen as an exploration with its
surprises, delays, changes of route and
moments of doubt.
In this way, the film gradually reveals itself
as it progresses, and the narration itself
becomes the testimony of a quest. The
film adopts a form of a sketch or scribbled-down
story, even more so when we
talk about one of the unfinished projects
of Welles or the personal stories of the
past in need of closure. With this view,
and with the help of filmmaker Joaquim
Jordà, I began to write a script where real,
epic and legendary events coexist, like any
good western.
The cast is headed by Sonia Almarcha,
an actress with a long career behind her,
who we saw in Solitary Fragments, by Jaime
Rosales (2007) and who, in fact, was
born in the area. Once again, the frontier
between fiction and reality, the actress and
the character, evaporate in a game of (re)
interpretation in favour of the film. The arrival
of the film crew to the village represents
the coming home for the main actress to
her land of birth. This return brings to light
past conflicts triggered by memory. Sonia
is incapable of laying down personal roots
and tries instead to conquer faraway lands:
the passage of irrecoverable time, lost love,
insecurities… Borders are also invisible barriers
which stand in the way of personal
relations.
We wanted to mix professional and nonprofessional
actors in order to seek naturalness
in their gesture and portray from
an ethnographical viewpoint aspects such
as the dialect of the area and its customs,
etc… With this in mind, a group of children
become attentive observers of the world
of cinema. The unspoilt way of looking of
these children who are not actors help us
to recover our lost innocence and nativity
of the first viewing with the aim of finding
that maxim which states that the western
provides satisfaction to the lost childhood
of the adult spectator.
And finally, I, as director of the film,
“appear” in front of the camera, exploring
the details of the western which was never
filmed. Together with the spectator, we
wanted to begin a story which would take
us in search of the ghost of Orson and his
unfinished film. The life and interrupted
projects of Orson Welles are surrounded
by confusing incognitos and half-truths,
which make it impossible to tell apart
what is real from legend. This is why the
investigation is condemned to failure from
the first moment but as John Ford said:
“when you have to choose between truth
and myth, print the myth”.
In summary, with Orson West we want
to continue exploring new territories of
cinema which mix genres, materials, fiction,
documentary... in favour of cinema
as an impure art. But above all, Orson
West is a realist, intimate and poetic film
which seeks to find again the (false) innocence
of cinema.