The Experimental Aesthetics of the Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) is an incomplete film. It is not one of the many unfinished films in Welles’s career that never reached their audiences, but it was not completed – and evidently not appreciated – by the director. “RKO destroyed Ambersons, and the picture itself destroyed me”, he explains in an interview, as a big portion of the film was removed from the original cut, and additional scenes were shot by the studio, leaving a mutilated version of what the director intended in the first place. The film’s complicated production process occurred at a time when RKO, one of The Big Five studios, already had lost money on Citizen Kane (1941), and it is exemplary in terms of illustrating the unstable power relationships between producers and filmmakers of the studio era. Ambersons is the only picture of mine I’ve seen after it was finished and released.Orson Welles (quoted in Rosenbaum 1992: 9)