“From Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons through Othello, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight, Welles evinced a fascination with the decline of men once thought to be great. Anderson is similarly intrigued. Mr. Blume in Rushmore, the whole Tenenbaum clan, Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic, and the splintered family of The Darjeeling Limited are all wrestling with real or perceived decline. Anderson and Wilson’s script for The Royal Tenenbaums contains many acknowledgments of Welles’s second feature, Ambersons, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a prominent small-town family in decline. There’s a similarly palatial, cone-topped family home, significant action blocked on and around imposing wooden staircases, and a sense of collective anxiety born of the feeling that time has passed a once-important family by and the community knows it. Both movies feature novelistic third-person narration, by Welles in Ambersons and Alec Baldwin in Tenenbaums.
Both directors prefer to use wide-angle lenses that distort screen space and make it seem almost more figurative than literal. Most of all, Anderson, like Welles, is a visually bold, wunderkind director who has an affinity—some might say a weakness—for virtuoso shots, shots so logistically impressive that they momentarily and perhaps purposefully take the spotlight off the movie and shine it on the director. Think of the elevator-style crane shots that rise into the stratosphere of the opera house in Kane—a move that finds its horizontal equal in The Life Aquatic when the camera tracks Steve Zissou across the entire length of his boat, the Belafonte, dollying backward until the captain is a mere speck on the prow."
I know that doesn’t have too much to do with your question, but I thought this was a good description of the things in common between the two movies you mentioned. The beginning of both are very alike.
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-1-20090330
I find that very interesting. I haven’t seen enough Welles to make any judgements on it, but I can definitely see how Citizen Kane influences, say, The Darjeeling Limited in the grand scope of his shots- every scene is full of art, as said in the article. Again, I need to see more Welles.
It’s an interesting comparison, though… Wes Anderson and Orson Welles.
If you go to the site, he did a 5 part video essay on Anderson and his influences that not only has that writing as the narration, but also shows specific shots and aspects that are alike. Sorry if I’m slightly derailing the initial intent of the thread, but I thought it’d be interesting to throw out there.
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the warm-up:
brady qw
I was wondering, in The Royal Tenenbaums the characters sort of “get ready” for the movie to start (they get packed, they receive letters, etc…). What are some other movies where this occurs?
I heard The Magnificent Ambersons does it, too.