“For many years, one of the most legendary of all uncompleted films was Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, which was shot in Los Angeles from 1972 to 1976 and subsequently languished in legal entanglements and editing difficulties for the next forty years. Welles edited about forty minutes before he died in 1985, and it was this nucleus around which the rest of the film was formed. As edited by Bob Murawski — though with extensive input from both Welles’s notes from beyond the grave and the committee that approximated his unspoken wishes — the film is quite simply one of the most stunningly edited films of the century, a furious torrent that smashes together numerous perspectives and figures while remaining almost fully coherent.
“Such an approach is essential to The Other Side of the Wind’s raison d’etre: a kaleidoscopic view of aging Hollywood maverick Jake Hannaford on the last day (and 70th birthday) of his life, interwoven with segments from his final, to-be-uncompleted film, also called The Other Side of the Wind. Welles and Murawski mix together 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm segments, variously shot in black-and-white and color, freely and seamlessly, in addition to switching aspect ratios between the 1.37:1 of the faux “documentary” footage of the party and the 1.85:1 of the film-within-the-film. It is an enormous credit to the skill of both editors (and the numerous other people involved) that this all registers not as simply as a cute formal device, but as a conscious configuration of the play between cinema and reality. And of course, it is a vital element in establishing the complex, almost free-jazz rhythm that the film takes on from almost its opening frames and carries through to the final shot — which, itself, is a post-production “fabrication” that, as paired with the closing lines, stands as one of the most enigmatic yet potent images in recent memory.” ~ Ryan Swen
This year’s “nominees:”
BlacKkKlansman (Barry Alexander Brown)
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Eddie Hamilton)
The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles and Bob Murawski)
Roma (Alfonso Cuarón and Adam Gough)
You Were Never Really Here (Joe Bini)
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