The Eyes of Orson Welles

Best known for his television documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, filmmaker Mark Cousins here adopts the form of a film essay, a letter from himself to Orson Welles. In this idiosyncratic and highly personal work, he muses on Welles’s life, career, and visual imagination. Cousins gained rare access to hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings made by Welles, and he uses these images to inform his observations about the legendary director. “Movie lovers under the impression that Welles owed his visual sense of cinema entirely to his work with the Citizen Kane cinematographer, Gregg Toland, will find ample correction to that here” (Glenn Kenny, New York Times).