A bold artist acts first and thinks lat­er. In the case of Orson Welles, one of the bold­est artists pro­duced by 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, that habit also found its way into his speech. This became espe­cial­ly true in the inter­views he gave lat­er in life, when he freely offered his opin­ions, solicit­ed or oth­er­wise, on the work of his fel­low film­mak­ers. The man who made Cit­i­zen Kane did­n’t hes­i­tate to roast, for instance, the Euro­pean auteurs who ascend­ed after his own career in cin­e­ma seemed to stall, and whose work he elab­o­rate­ly sat­i­rized in the posthu­mous­ly released The Oth­er Side of the Wind. His con­sid­ered remarks include the fol­low­ing: “There’s a lot of Bergman and Anto­nioni that I’d rather be dead than sit through.” No, Orson, tell us what you real­ly think.

“Accord­ing to a young Amer­i­can film crit­ic, one of the great dis­cov­er­ies of our age is the val­ue of bore­dom as an artis­tic sub­ject,” Welles says in anoth­er inter­view. If so, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni “deserves to be count­ed as a pio­neer and found­ing father,” a mak­er of movies that amount to “per­fect back­grounds for fash­ion mod­els.” As for Bergman, “I share nei­ther his inter­ests nor his obses­sions. He’s far more for­eign to me than the Japan­ese.” Welles has kinder words for Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, whom he calls “as gift­ed as any­one mak­ing movies today,” but also “fun­da­men­tal­ly very provin­cial.” His pic­tures are “a small-town boy’s dream of the big city,” which is also the source of their charm, but the man him­self “shows dan­ger­ous signs of being a superla­tive artist with lit­tle to say.”

Welles esti­mat­ed the younger Jean-Luc Godard­’s gifts as a direc­tor as “enor­mous. I just can’t take him very seri­ous­ly as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to dif­fer, because he does. And though Godard may admire Woody Allen (him­self an admir­er of Bergman), Welles cer­tain­ly did­n’t: “I hate Woody Allen phys­i­cal­ly, I dis­like that kind of man,” he tells film­mak­er Hen­ry Jaglom. “That par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of arro­gance and timid­i­ty sets my teeth on edge.” When Jaglom objects that Allen isn’t arro­gant but shy, Welles dri­ves on: “Like all peo­ple with timid per­son­al­i­ties, his arro­gance is unlim­it­ed.” Allen “hates him­self, and he loves him­self, a very tense sit­u­a­tion. It’s peo­ple like me who have to car­ry on and pre­tend to be mod­est,” while, in Allen’s case, “every­thing he does on screen is ther­a­peu­tic.”

Allen has what Welles calls “the Chap­lin dis­ease,” and Welles’ inter­views also fea­ture severe crit­i­cisms of Chap­lin him­self. After ref­er­enc­ing the fact that, unlike his fel­low silent come­di­an Harold Lloyd, Chap­lin did­n’t write all his own jokes but used “six gag­men,” he declares that Mod­ern Times — regard­ed by many as Chap­lin’ mas­ter­piece — “does­n’t have a good moment in it.” Clear­ly Welles felt no more need to pull his punch­es on his elders than he did with the whip­per­snap­pers: John Ford “made very many bad pic­tures,” includ­ing The Searchers (“ter­ri­ble”); Cecil B. DeMille Welles cred­its with giv­ing Mus­soli­ni and Hitler the idea for the fas­cist salute; Elia Kazan will nev­er be for­giv­en for nam­ing names to the House Com­mit­tee on Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties (“it’s just inex­cus­able”); and even Sergei Eisen­stein, father of the mon­tage, is also “the most over­rat­ed great direc­tor of them all.”

You can read more of Welles’ choice words on his col­leagues in cin­e­ma in this thread of inter­view clips post­ed by a Twit­ter user who goes by John Franken­stein­er. It also includes Welles’ assess­ment of Alfred Hitch­cock, who declined into “ego­tism and lazi­ness,” mak­ing films “all lit like tele­vi­sion shows.” Welles sus­pects age-relat­ed cog­ni­tive issues — “I think he was senile a long time before he died,” in part because “he kept falling asleep while you were talk­ing to him” — but he also trash­es the work Hitch­cock did in his prime, such as Ver­ti­go. Sight & Sound’s last crit­ics poll named that film the great­est of all time, but Welles calls it even worse than Rear Win­dow, about which “every­thing was stu­pid.” But at least all these film­mak­ers, liv­ing and dead, can rest easy know­ing they did­n’t rank as low in Welles’ esti­ma­tion as John Lan­dis, “the ass­hole from Ani­mal House.” Jaglom, believ­ing he can influ­ence Lan­dis and mend their rela­tion­ship, asks what he can do to help. Welles’ sug­ges­tion: “Kill him.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ing­mar Bergman Eval­u­ates His Fel­low Film­mak­ers — The “Affect­ed” Godard, “Infan­tile” Hitch­cock & Sub­lime Tarkovsky

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­work (1945): “Cit­i­zen Kane Is Not Cin­e­ma”

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Ter­ry Gilliam on the Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick & Spiel­berg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spiel­berg Wraps Every­thing Up with Neat Lit­tle Bows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“I’ve noticed that when peo­ple remem­ber Lawrence of Ara­bia, they don’t talk about the details of the plot,” writes Roger Ebert in his “Great Movies” col­umn on the 1962 David Lean epic. “They get a cer­tain look in their eye, as if they are remem­ber­ing the whole expe­ri­ence, and have nev­er quite been able to put it into words.” Redun­dant though it may sound to speak of a “film of images,” Lawrence of Ara­bia may well mer­it that descrip­tion more than any oth­er motion pic­ture. Its vast images of an even vaster desert, as well as of the tit­u­lar larg­er-than-life Eng­lish­man who turns that desert into the stage of his very exis­tence, were shot on 70-mil­lime­ter film, twice the size of the movies most of us grew up with. To expe­ri­ence them any­where but in a the­ater would be an act of cin­e­mat­ic sac­ri­lege.

The small screen ren­ders illeg­i­ble many of Lawrence of Ara­bia’s most’s mem­o­rable shots: Omar Sharif rid­ing up in the dis­tance through the shim­mer­ing heat, for exam­ple. Oth­ers are such tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­ic achieve­ments that their appre­ci­a­tion demands full-size view­ing: take the assem­bly of two images that comes out of a search for “great­est cut in film his­to­ry.”

It invari­ably comes out along­side the bone and the satel­lite from Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Lawrence of Ara­bia’s famous cut more than makes up in sheer sub­lim­i­ty what it lacks in com­par­a­tive his­tor­i­cal sweep. It occurs ear­ly in the film, just after the young British army lieu­tenant Lawrence has received word of his impend­ing trans­fer from Cairo to the Arab Bureau. He lights a cig­ar for Mr. Dry­den, the diplo­mat who arranged the trans­fer, blows it out, and sud­den­ly the sun ris­es over the Ara­bi­an desert.

“If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if some­thing inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spec­ta­cle that Lean has con­jured, then you might as well give up the movies,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane in his remem­brance of the direc­tor. But Lean did­n’t con­jure it alone: the work of the cut was done by edi­tor Anne V. Coates, who died just last year. “The script had actu­al­ly called for a dis­solve, in which one scene slow­ly fades into anoth­er,” the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Travis M. Andrews writes in a piece on her edit­ing career in gen­er­al and this edit in par­tic­u­lar. “Today, that can be done quick­ly with edit­ing soft­ware. At the time, though, film­mak­ers and edi­tors had to cre­ate the effect by hand, order­ing extra neg­a­tives of the film, which was then often dou­ble exposed and over­laid with each oth­er.”

“We marked a dis­solve, but when we watched the footage in the the­ater, we saw it as a direct cut,” Coates told Justin Chang in Film­Craft: Edit­ing. “David and I both thought, ‘Wow, that’s real­ly inter­est­ing.’ So we decid­ed to nib­ble at it, tak­ing a few frames off here and there.” Ulti­mate­ly, Coates only had to remove two frames to sat­is­fy the per­fec­tion­ist direc­tor. “If I had been work­ing dig­i­tal­ly, I would nev­er have seen those two shots cut togeth­er like that,” she added, throw­ing light on the hid­den advan­tages of old­er edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, not in terms of price or speed but how it made its users think and see. (Famed edi­tor Wal­ter Murch has writ­ten along the same lines about the ideas gen­er­at­ed by hav­ing to man­u­al­ly roll through many shots to find the right one among them, rather than dig­i­tal­ly jump­ing straight to it.)

Coates had also “con­vinced her boss to check out a cou­ple of these new-fan­gled nou­velle vague films, ‘Chabrol and that sort of thing,’ ” writes The Guardian’s Andrew Collins. “Rather than be affront­ed by their sub­ver­sive jump cuts, Lean was enam­ored, and embraced the French style.” And so it’s in part thanks to the rule-break­ing of the nou­velle vague — which, with Jean-Luc Godard­’s Breath­less released less than two years before, was cer­tain­ly nou­velle — and in part to the lim­i­ta­tions of the edit­ing process in the ear­ly 1960s that we owe this unim­prov­able exam­ple of what, in tech­ni­cal lan­guage, is known as a “match cut” — or more specif­i­cal­ly a “graph­ic match,” in which a con­nec­tion between the visu­al ele­ments of two shots masks the dis­con­ti­nu­ity between them. So is 2001’s sin­gle-frame jump over mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion, of course. But Lawrence of Ara­bia’s immor­tal match cut is the only one that uses an actu­al match.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Lawrence of Ara­bia Remem­bered with Rare Footage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“It’s not what a movie is about,” Roger Ebert famous­ly wrote, “it’s how it is about it.” Sub­ject mat­ter, we might say, sep­a­rates the weak film­mak­ers from the strong: those who require a strik­ing “high con­cept” (killer doll, body switch, Snakes on a Plane) fall into the for­mer group, while those who can make a film about absolute­ly any­thing fall into the lat­ter. It’s safe to say that not every­one is moved by the scene in Amer­i­can Beau­ty where the cam­corder-tot­ing teenag­er wax­es poet­ic about his footage of a plas­tic bag in the wind. But what would sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al look like in the hands of a more assured direc­tor?

For an exam­ple, have a look at Plas­tic Bag, the eigh­teen-minute short above. Every cinephile with an inter­est in Amer­i­can film knows the name of Plas­tic Bag’s direc­tor, Ramin Bahrani. Over the past decade and a half he has emerged as the mak­er of unusu­al­ly pow­er­ful and real­is­tic glimpses of life in his home­land, focus­ing on char­ac­ters like a Pak­istani immi­grant run­ning a New York bagel cart, an orphan work­ing at a chop shop, and a Sene­galese cab dri­ver in North Car­oli­na.

In its own way, the pro­tag­o­nist and title char­ac­ter of Plas­tic Bag is also at once an out­sider to Amer­i­can life and a fig­ure insep­a­ra­ble from it — and voiced by an insid­er-out­sider of anoth­er kind, the Ger­man film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog. (Their col­lab­o­ra­tion has con­tin­ued: you may remem­ber Her­zog’s appear­ance in a Bahrani-direct­ed episode of Mor­gan Spur­lock­’s series We the Econ­o­my about a lemon­ade stand.)

Begin­ning his jour­ney at a gro­cery-store check­out counter, he spends his first few hap­py days at the home of his pur­chas­er. But not long after this idyll of ser­vice — car­ry­ing ten­nis balls, being filled with ice to numb a sprain — comes to its inevitable end, he finds him­self deposit­ed into a land­fill. But the wind comes to his res­cue, car­ry­ing him across a series of sub­ur­ban, post-indus­tri­al, and final­ly rur­al land­scapes as he looks des­per­ate­ly for his own­er.

Ulti­mate­ly the bag makes it into places sel­dom seen by human eyes, with a com­bi­na­tion of grav­i­tas and won­der imbued by both Her­zog’s dic­tion and the music of Sig­ur Rós’ Kjar­tan Sveins­son. Watched today, Plas­tic Bag feels more ele­giac than it did when it debuted a decade ago, since which time plas­tic-bag bans have con­tin­ued to spread unabat­ed across the world. How long before not just the hero of Bahrani’s film, but all his poly­eth­yl­ene kind fade from exis­tence — for­got­ten, if not quite decom­posed?

Plas­tic Bag has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog, Mor­gan Spur­lock & Oth­er Stars Explain Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry in 20 Short Films

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates Poké­mon Go: Imag­ines It as a Mur­der­ous Metaphor for the Bat­tle to Sur­vive

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

Start Your Day with Wern­er Her­zog Inspi­ra­tional Posters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.