Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mr. Arkadin
1955 · Orson Welles · Mr. Arkadin on Sightlines
A plane crosses the Mediterranean with nobody flying it. That is the first thing Mr. Arkadin shows you, and a voice over the image — Guy Van Stratten's, already looking back on all of it — tells you it means somebody is dead. The film opens on its own ending, then reels backward into the story of a man hired to find out where another man came from. Hold onto that empty cockpit. Nearly everything here is a vehicle with the pilot missing, the film included.
The setup is a con. Gregory Arkadin, one of the richest men in Europe, tells Van Stratten, an ex-convict and small-time American operator, that he remembers nothing before the late 1920s, and pays him to reconstruct it. Van Stratten goes to work. An aging gang matriarch. A flea-bitten wreck named Jakob Zouk in a cramped garret. A scatter of others across the map, each interview its own small movie shot in its own country. Then the witnesses start dying and you understand what you've been watching. The investigation was never research. It was a hunt, and the investigator was the dog.
Deleuze gives you a precise way to see how the trap is built. He splits action cinema into two shapes. In the large form, a situation bears down on somebody until they act decisively and change it. In the small form, you begin with the act, and the act discloses a situation hiding behind it. Detective films live in the small form: a man asks a question, and the question opens another inch of a concealed world. Welles runs Arkadin on that engine, then does something nobody had done with it. He hands each disclosed inch to the villain. Every door Van Stratten opens, Arkadin closes with a killing.
So the gestures in the middle of this film mean two things at once. Deleuze calls that an index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two different situations, so the act itself won't tell you which story you're in. Van Stratten knocking on a witness's door is honest legwork and a death warrant being served, and it is the same knock. The queasiness of that long middle stretch comes from both readings staying live for an hour.
Notice, too, where the past is kept. Not in Arkadin's head. A flashback is a dated memory, a former present rewound for us; Deleuze is after something stranger, the past as terrain that exists all at once, entered by leaping into a region of it. He calls those coexisting regions sheets of past, and Welles makes them geography. Arkadin's history is out in the world, held by living people with addresses, and Van Stratten travels through it the way you'd travel through a country. Bourgoin's deep focus does the same work inside the frame, holding foreground and far background in one hard clarity so the strata sit together rather than in sequence. The horror of the premise follows. You can't repress a past made of people. You can only go find them.
Deleuze names Welles as the filmmaker who retired the truthful man — the hero, the witness, the detective who discovers what was already so — and put in his place the forger, le faussaire, who makes truth rather than finds it, and who never appears alone, since a forger implies another forger behind him. Mr. Arkadin is one of Deleuze's own examples, and it earns that. Arkadin forged a financier out of a criminal. Van Stratten, the ex-con, forges a detective. Welles, in his late thirties, forges a titan out of a false beard and prosthetics so heavy the face stops reading as a face; shot from below against castle walls, the head becomes a carving. Even the paperwork is fake: a novel went out under Welles's name that he flatly denied writing, and scholarship hands it to Maurice Bessy. None of this is lying inside a true world. There is no original to have copied.
Then the concept ate its own film. There is no authorized cut. Dolivet, out of patience, took the picture away from Welles and had it assembled without him, and what survives is the European Confidential Report, a shorter American version, a Spanish version shot partly with other actors, and a 2006 reconstruction built from whatever remained. They differ in scene order and in how they handle the framing flashback. A movie about a man destroying the record of his origins now exists only as competing records of itself, none of them originary. Ask what Mr. Arkadin really is and the honest answer is a question back: which one did you see? Bazin's generation built a theory on the camera's fidelity, on the contract that images report something that was there. Welles spent his exile years pulling that contract apart, and here the damage ran past the story and into the prints. The Cahiers critics who defended this "failure" could read the ruin.
Some of the jaggedness is damage, and a reading should say so rather than launder it. But the vignette build is design, extended out of the elliptical montage of The Lady from Shanghai. The engine is Citizen Kane's: an investigator assembling a mogul from testimony. The Third Man supplied the canted angles, the wet chiaroscuro of postwar intrigue, and Harry Lime, the charming monster Welles was already renting to himself. Caligari is in the angular distortion and the mask-face; Lang's M is in the looming low angle and the manhunt run through an underworld of informants, inverted here because the monster does the hunting. The Magnificent Ambersons had supplied the ending years early: a Welles film seized by producers and recut into versions he never approved.
Deleuze's expressionism names the look, light and shadow worked as a gradient until objects take on a non-organic life of their own. Arkadin's borrowed grandeur stops being décor and starts arguing. The thesis arrives as a symbol, one figure condensing the whole relation: the scorpion stings the frog carrying him across the river and drowns with him, because stinging is his character. Arkadin tells it at a masked ball, where every face is covered, and his guests raise a glass to his character. A man in a false beard, at a party of masks, on the one thing that can't be disguised.
Listen, as well. Welles came out of radio, and this story is told almost entirely in testimony. It was also post-synchronized on the cheap for a multinational cast, Welles himself looping several supporting voices, so speech sits loose in the bodies. Audiovisual disjunction arrived here by accounting, not by theory. It works anyway, and it is uncanny to hear the forger's own voice coming out of the witnesses he means to kill.
What did it do? It turned the investigation plot inside out, so the seeker becomes the instrument of what he seeks, which is the spine of the paranoid conspiracy thriller. It fed Touch of Evil and The Trial. And it made the unfinished film a serious object, the case everyone reaches for when arguing about restoration and what a director's intention can mean with no cut to point to.
Watch it again for the doors. Watch Van Stratten's questions land like blows he doesn't feel himself throwing, and watch the faces of the people he has just left. Then remember that you are holding a confidential report someone else compiled, about a life that was invented, in a version assembled by hands that weren't the director's. Nobody is flying it.
Concepts in play
- le faussaire (the forger) — Arkadin is a criminal who forged himself into a financier, played by Welles in his late thirties under a false beard and heavy prosthetics that turn the face into a mask; Van Stratten is an ex-convict forging a detective; even the novel published under Welles's name is of disputed authorship, most likely Maurice Bessy's.
- puissances du faux (the powers of the false) — The amnesia is a fiction and the investigation a murder mechanism, and the falsity runs into the film's own body: no director-sanctioned cut exists, only Confidential Report, the shorter American version, a partly re-cast Spanish version and the 2006 reconstruction, differing in scene order and in the handling of the framing flashback.
- action-image, small form — The picaresque structure of interviews — Sophie, Jakob Zouk, the gallery of witnesses — where each act of questioning discloses another concealed piece of Arkadin's buried past, the detective's ASA' circuit, which Arkadin turns into a target-finding device.
- index of equivocity — Van Stratten's legwork is simultaneously research commissioned by Arkadin and the location of witnesses for elimination; the same act belongs to two incompatible situations, and each witness he finds dies shortly after.
- sheets of past (order of time) — Arkadin's past is not recalled in dated flashbacks but distributed across Europe as coexisting regions to be travelled into — Costa Brava, Madrid, Segovia, Munich, Paris, Rome — while Bourgoin's deep-focus staging keeps foreground and far background in simultaneous play, layering strata inside the single shot.
- expressionism — Extreme wide-angle lenses, low camera placements that make Arkadin loom like a carving, canted Dutch angles and stark high-contrast chiaroscuro, with castles, cathedral and cavernous halls charged so the decor argues rather than merely houses the action — the direct debt to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
- symbol — The scorpion-and-frog fable Arkadin tells at the masked ball: the scorpion stings his ferryman mid-river and drowns with him because stinging is his character — the film's organizing relation (forged identity versus unforgeable nature) condensed into one figure, delivered at a party where every face is covered.
- audiovisual disjunction — The largely post-synchronized soundtrack for a multinational cast, with Welles reportedly looping a number of the supporting voices himself, leaves speech slightly detached from the visible bodies and gives the film its unmoored, dreamlike aural texture.