Orson Rehearsed (2021)

Name: Orson Rehearsed
Released: 2021-06-01

Directed by: Daron Hagen
Country: United States
Elsewhere: IMDb

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How it feels

An opera about Orson Welles blends live performance with pre-filmed footage and electronic music. The story imagines Welles reflecting on his life in the moment between death and the afterlife.

experimentalsurrealoperaticcontemplativemelancholicdocumentary-stylefragmentedlyrical

What happens

Orson Rehearsed is a 2021 American independent film by Daron Hagen about Orson Welles which combines elements of opera film, documentary film, and Surrealist cinema. The narrative follows a 2018 staged production of Hagen's eleventh opera integrating extensive pre-shot films and electro-acoustic tracks in which, poised in the bardo between life and death on the night of his demise, Welles takes stock of his life. Directed by Hagen based on his own screenplay and musical score, the film was produced by Burning Sled Media and the Chicago College of Performing Arts. It stars Robert Orth, Robert Frankenberry, and Omar Mulero as Welles, and features the Fifth House Ensemble. Hagen began the screenplay in 2016 as a collection of 52 dramatic beats featuring Welles and Marlene Dietrich, John Houseman, Paola Mori, Rita Hayworth, and Marc Blitzstein set to original music by Hagen and words fashioned by Hagen from William Shakespeare and Welles' own public domain comments. Conceived simultaneously as a live operas (in various dramaturgical configurations) and a film that is an artwork in itself that folds the live performance into a larger vision, in spring 2018 Hagen pared down the 52 beats to 14 which centered on the character of Welles divided into three avatars—one young, one middle aged, and one on the night of his death. During 2016–17, Hagen shot and edited three sets of 14 60-minute films for projection over the heads of the onstage Orsons in live performance. Hagen directed the staged premiere of Orson Rehearsed at the Studebaker Theatre in the Fine Arts Building (Chicago) in September 2018 in a staging designed to work in the theater but also to provide the shots mapped out in the 2016 storyboards. From 2018 to 2020, he edited the musical soundtrack and folded the onstage films into footage of the staged premiere while adding another layer of semi-opaque images carrying a narrative unique to the film. The film was released on February 2, 2021, although a traditional art release has been delayed because of COVID-19, it has received substantial positive attention at film festivals worldwide, receiving laurels for Best Musical Score, Best Composer, Best Director, and Best Editing. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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