The Director's Chair - Orson Welles

By the end of his tumultuous career in 1985, Orson Welles had accumulated a body of work marked by his masterful grasp of the cinematic medium and his immense ambition. His films often dealt with lonely men consumed by their follies and egos, fascinated by power, oblivious to the isolation they brought upon themselves. Welles used the full potential of cinema to show characters frustrated by the confines of the film, larger than the world they inhabit, in desperate need to jump out of the screen. His trademark deep-focus shots, elemental compositional organization, low angle close-ups, imagistic associations and editing, imbue the films with a rhythm that compliments the narrative and adds multi-faceted subtext in organic unity. Welles proved himself a true auteur in love with cinema, the art he enriched with some of the most grandiose, complex and melancholy images in history.