Orson Welles Reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in a 1977 Experimental Film

Around here we subscribe to the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Orson Welles. A few weeks ago, we gave you Welles narrating Plato’s Cave Allegory, and before that the short animated parable/film Freedom River, and the list goes on.

Now, we present The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a 1977 experimental film created by Larry Jordan, an independent filmmaker who tried to marry “the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles.” As Jordan describes it, the film is “a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.” You can watch above.

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Related Content:

Orson Welles Reads Moby Dick

Listen as Orson Welles Reads ‘The Secret Sharer,’ by Joseph Conrad

Orson Welles Narrates Animation of Plato’s Cave Allegory


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