By CATHERINE L. BENAMOU*

Excerpt from the recently published book

It's all true, Orson Welles and the history of the hemisphere

Since I began this project, constant efforts have been made to preserve and examine excerpts of It's all true have been accompanied by a series of public debates, most recently at the Locarno International Film Festival, where two newly preserved reels (of “My Friend Bonito” and “Jangadeiros”) were shown in August 2005, which greatly helped to include the film in the studied oeuvre of Welles as an auteur.

In this book, I have sought to use these discoveries alongside a wide range of evidence selected from across the hemisphere to rescue, resignify and re-present the history and textual contours of It's all true how they took shape in the early 1940s and how they appear to us today [1997].

I have argued that this story is deeply embedded in the deepening of inter-American relations during World War II and in Hollywood’s relatively stolid attempt to incorporate and engage Latin American experiences and perspectives into something other than a dominant/subaltern framework. As I examine these chapters, I see that numerous artistic and cultural contributions emerge, and I also see that historical insights were made possible by the film as an event and as a text.

First, far from representing an anomaly in Orson Welles' half-century of filmmaking, It's all true left indelible marks on his later works – and not just because he was mentioned in subsequent films, in which he appears as an “allegory” within a commentary on American neocolonialism (The Lady from Shanghai e the mark of evil) and the transition to modernity on the periphery of the European world (Macbeth, Othello and maybe Truths and lies).

In a different way from Citizen Kane, the project planted, for Orson Welles, the seeds of the aesthetic and rhetorical possibilities provided by documentary, which did not only take the form of his acclaimed “essay films”, of which It's all true can be considered the first, but also, quite literally, the epigraph of documentary images and techniques, starting with The Stranger, which, according to Peter Bogdanovich, was the first American commercial feature film to contain real footage of Nazi concentration camps,¹ going through The Lady from Shanghai, Othello, Don Quixote e Falstaff – The stroke of midnight (to quote the most famous fiction films), the Truths and lies, Shooting “Othello” e The other side of the wind.

In this endeavor, it is necessary to recognize that Orson Welles owes a debt to cinematographers Gregg Toland, Floyd Crosby, George Fanto (who also filmed parts of Othello), Anchisi Brizzi (who had previously worked for Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica), Rudolph Maté (who was not credited in The Lady from Shanghai), Edmond Richard (in Falstaff – The stroke of midnight, who also filmed The process and was instrumental in perfecting the Debrie 16mm handheld camera), Gary Graver (Truths and lies, Filming “Othello”, The other wind side) and Michael Ferris (The other side of the wind, who, like Graver, also worked for John Cassavetes).

Less evidently, but equally decisively, It's all true allowed Orson Welles to experiment with location filming (making maximum use of local details) and to take a collaborative, international approach to filmmaking that would become his modus operandi after he went to Europe in 1947, bringing him closer to the non-American filmmakers of the post-industrial era (what Hamid Naficy called “cinema with an accent”),² starting with the exponents of Brazilian Cinema Novo.

Thus, in several ways, and even without the advantage of the narrative outcome and the setting of space-time parameters given to the edited work, It's all true tested the limits of Welles's possibility of historical expression as an American director on American soil. As I have tried to demonstrate, this has less to do with the characterization of Orson Welles's conduct as terrible author in relation to a film studio that had suffered a decline in revenues in the 1930s and was in the process of restructuring than with Orson Welles's interpretation of – and his designs for – inter-American relations that took the form of a semi-documentary during a period of global geopolitical and economic change, accompanied by a tightening of state control over the international flow of screen images. It's all true emerged during a period of intense transformation of the American nation-state that included, in addition to an escalation of the war, an unprecedented – though not always harmonious – collaborative relationship between the American government and the film industry regarding the conception and distribution of Hollywood products under a new policy of cultural and economic solidarity with a foreign market; the gradual abandonment of socially progressive documentaries in favor of a message of democratic unity in the face of Axis aggression; the emergence of public protests and the first steps in civil rights legislation to protect ethnic minorities against discrimination; the formation of global circuits of cultural transmission through the use of mass media, especially radio; and the creation of protectionist measures to stimulate and protect the growth of Latin American industrial cinema.

As to the relative weight of the State, compared to the studio system, in shaping inter-American representation, it is clear that the State may have had greater weight, both “on the ground” and “in the air,” after the films were ready for distribution; nevertheless, the studios continued to exercise a veto power, which, as the example of It's All True, during the war was still deeply tied to a socially conservative domestic distribution policy.

Furthermore, despite attempts by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) to increase the level of authenticity and cultural sensitivity of Hollywood cinema, to assist that same industry in its export efforts, the simultaneous appeal that represented the suspended It's all true for Pan-Americanism, for African diaspora consciousness, for indigenous memory and survival, and for the Creole ideal of pan-Latinidad highlights the economic limits of cultural reciprocity (Latin America remained primarily an export market, not a place to create a film industry), as well as the cultural and political interests tied to racial and popular representation in the films that were disseminated during the Second World War.

It is extremely important to consider how the rules of the game regarding national cinematic representation affected the conditions of transnational representation during this period. Ultimately, the shift in focus of the theoretical and historiographical lens of film along the domestic/hemispheric divide provokes a shift in emphasis away from the binary divisions of wartime politics (isolationist versus patriotic, Allies versus Axis) and addresses the thorny but equally crucial problems posed by the intersection of party and class politics with the search for racial equality and international solidarity.

Although we can perceive an element of politically conscious censorship (which I prefer to call “diplomatic gestures”) within the endotext of It's all true, especially when it comes to direct references to Mexican and Brazilian state power, there is no doubt that, both concretely and discursively, the film involved a collaborative and transcultural effort to make the word Americans more inclusive, while identifying places and circuits where sociocultural differences could be exposed and understood and the bases for dialogue could be explored.

Within the endotext, the hemisphere became a nearly borderless space in which subaltern identities and forms of cultural expression—suppressed by colonialism, neocolonialism, and incipient processes of modernization—could be affirmed and shared without necessarily going through official channels of communication. In the process, Pan-Americanism came to be defined as a multilateral, not a bilateral, endeavor in which Mexicans, Peruvians, and Brazilians could have as much to learn from each other as they would have to “show off” to curious and war-weary North Americans.

Modern progress and participatory democracy are presented in the film as delicate processes that, in order to be successful, need to take as an example the independent initiatives coming from the “popular classes”, as well as from the level of state power. In its narrative discourse and in its stylistic composition, It's all true It is a text with a double fissure: a fissure that, by interpreting literally the code of cultural equivalence and reciprocity, in addition to the popular education in various layers, promoted by Ociaa, resorted to the style and rhetoric of documentary precursors; in doing so, however, it also introduced a poetics that made it deviate from the skirmish between modern and artisanal forms in the interior of the country, affecting its degree of “authenticity”, as we observed in Chapter 5.

The unusual combination of social progressivism and cultural conservatism carried out by Orson Welles – thus inverting the terms that guided the cultural policy of the State and industry in Mexico and Brazil, as well as in the United States – caused both the project and Orson Welles, as its author, to lose synchrony with the dominant and diplomatically legitimate forms of public discourse in the Americas during the Second World War.

It also distanced the film’s inter-American discourse from the rigid parameters of the nation-state—which at the time were hindering differentiation and gradual change at the popular level. We can consider that the balance between respect for national sovereignty (in high demand during the Good Neighbor Policy) and the search for more pluralistic and multicultural forms of expression in cinema (despite the international-domestic divide) shows that an emerging “crust” between the endotext and the exotext was beginning to demarcate the film’s spatiotemporal parameters—and, consequently, its historical-cultural parameters—with consequences for its ontological and discursive future.

Se It's all true could have been produced by another studio, such as Twentieth Century Fox, or in a different context of inter-American relations (in early 1941, for example, when the improvement of US-Brazil relations was on the rise, and Walt Disney had been successful in researching and filming Hello, friends), or at a later point in film history when 16mm technology became widely accessible and acceptable as a professional production format, we will never know.

Broader organizational changes at RKO and the discursive reformulation that documentary film should immediately serve national security and anti-Axis goals also call into question whether Welles would have been able to save the film had he heeded the warnings of Lynn Shores, Phil Reisman, George Schaefer, and the Brazilian integralist camp, recasting it in a way that satisfied both studio protocols and the conservative bent of the winds of national politics.

I have tried to show that the suspension and abandonment of the film were not due to a single cause; Orson Welles could perhaps have overcome one or two sources of difficulty; however, compromising the integrity of what had been filmed and how it had been configured would not have been compatible with his nature.

Finally, we should not overlook the susceptibility of cinema to intense institutional oversight and censorship over the long term, when compared to radio and photography, in the context of inter-American representation. In the more ephemeral medium of radio, Orson Welles could propose new terms for inter-American dialogue without running the risk of being censored for presenting “racial miscegenation.” At the time, a person’s gender also affected their visibility in the face of censorship, and thus their vulnerability to it.

After feeling sorry for the extroverted and hyper-mediatized Orson Welles, who was working with the most influential media outlet, considered a reflection of the power and fragility of the modern nation-state, we cannot help but admire his colleague Genevieve Naylor, who, as a discreet photographer, without the burden of an overworked technical team, of painful long-distance negotiations with film studios and safe from the spotlight of the anti-Axis and pro-Hollywood media bombardment, was able to continue documenting, imperceptibly, the interior and urban masses of Brazil, in her moments of work and leisure, and to preserve the fruits of her expedition, which reached the coveted walls of the Rockefeller Museum of Modern Art before the end of the war.

Whether we want to interpret Orson Welles's uncompromising stance on the scale, methods, and sociocultural concerns of It's All True as courageous and dignified or uncompromising and counterproductive, for its inter-American message, its strategies for promoting transculturation, and its simultaneous exposure and softening of social inequalities through the light of the modern nation, It's all true remains a project that is very much “belonging to” its own space-time – and beyond it.

The raft as a cinematographer
They say that the person who discovered Brazil was Dom Pedro
[King of Portugal]. But it wasn't. … On February 23rd
Colombo de Souza [a fisherman] left Portugal.
He was going straight to India, but the wind was
against him, so he ended up sailing along the
coast. … When it was Easter Sunday, he arrived
here, in Brazil. What happened, then, to Columbus
de Souza? He died, poor thing, at the stern, with nothing.
With everyone the same thing. Dom Pedro was the only one
who won, because he was king.
(Joseph of Lima³)

In Chapter 2, I referred to the ways in which the raft, as a visual symbol, helped to add the epigraph of “deep history” to It's All True, a signal to the viewer that the foundations of the courageous gesture they had just witnessed went far beyond a fishing accident or the presidential signature that allowed the jangadeiros to be entitled to the benefits of national legislation. For the fishing communities of Fortaleza, Orson Welles' film was less decisive as an instrument that offered a modified vision of the reality they lived in than as an instrument that provided the historical possibility of expanding the geosocial horizon, so that the jangadeiros could continue to represent themselves to the world and initiate a dialogue with other communities.

As the montage of news reports in Tatá's scrapbook eloquently illustrates, the 1941 raid led first to a meeting with the president of Brazil, then to an encounter with the cameras of an RKO film crew that had traveled thousands of miles to bring a record of the trip to the United States, and from there to screens across the hemisphere.

Thus, the story of the film in this community emerges not only as a singular and decisive event, but as an integral part of a series of bold initiatives in which the raft virtually became a “cinematograph,” projecting a self-shaped image of the raft leaders into the external geosocial sphere, and taking home impressions of the metropolis, Rio de Janeiro, then the seat of national power, along with the trappings brought by modernization (including Coca-Cola). A similar dynamic was found at work in the cattle-ranching community of central Mexico, with the cowboy connecting the farm to the open spaces, and the bullfighter acting as a channel between the ranch rural and the collective urban spectacle, both with slightly conflicting investments in the bull's body and personality.

The story of how Jacaré and his companions managed to secure an audience with an authoritarian leader like Getúlio Vargas in 1941 was indeed worth telling: the journey and arrival were recorded not only by the Press and Propaganda Department and the national press, and reenacted by Orson Welles, but also by members of the jangadeiro community, who gathered newspaper clippings to compose their own historical montages of Welles’s project in relation to the original event. At the time, the fishing communities of Iracema and Mucuripe perceived the incursion in the same way that we perceive the fissured and fractured, but still surviving, text of It's all true: as an effort that must be renewed to remain historically effective.

During my work with oral history, I discovered that the story of It's all true was inseparable from the story of how, in 1951, five raftsmen (Jerônimo de Souza, Manuel Preto “Pereira” da Silva, Raimundo “Tatá” Correia Lima, Manuel Frade and João “Barrão” Batista) set sail on a raft for Porto Alegre, in the southern territories of Brazil, provoking a cultural exchange with the local cowboys.

In April 1959, four jangadeiros, Jerônimo André de Souza, Luiz Carlos “Garoupa” de Souza, José de Lima and Samuel Egídio de Souza, arrived in Buenos Aires after an exhausting five-month journey to establish diplomatic ties with the Frondizi government.

In the early 1960s, Jeronimo was discouraged by Fernando Pinto from making another foray, this time to Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro, although Tatá was supposedly building a new raft that would take him and others through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles to visit Orson Welles. Later, in late April 1993, after the filming of documentary footage for a reconstructed version of It's all true, four young raftsmen, Edilson Fonseca, Francisco Ferreira, Mamede Dantas and Francisco Valente, set sail from Canto Verde beach, near Fortaleza, on a raft called SOS Survival.⁴

They took their protest against the destruction of fishing grounds and communal living areas by industrial fishing and real estate interests along the Brazilian coast to Rio de Janeiro, seeking to preserve a way of life that is on the verge of extinction. Orson Welles’s fears about the future of these artisanal practices due to modernization were indeed confirmed when the jangadeiros left the coast and began to take up less rewarding and more precarious activities. Despite the many transformations that have occurred in the jangada culture—the transition to lighter, more compact wooden rafts, the advent of the jangadeiras—the commercial fishing industry, now besieged by coastal tourism, poses an enormous challenge to the livelihood and well-being of those who choose to fish.⁵

However, in 1993, it was only after facing enormous difficulties that the heirs of the journey of São Pedro they managed to speak with local authorities, and a request for an audience with the president at the time, Itamar Franco, was solemnly ignored.⁶ The recognition of the ethnic identity of the Brazilian coastal peoples and the Mexican indigenous peoples and their general emancipation, in the Enlightenment sense, continue to be hampered by the restrictive terms that define citizenship in the national and international spheres.

It was with this emancipation in mind that Orson Welles proposed a dialogical model of cultural exchange in It's all true. In this context, one is tempted to ask what the nature and extent of the film’s long-term effectiveness might have been had it been released in the early 1940s. One might also ask whether this other strand of reparative “historiography”—a collective and ongoing reconstruction of historical experience, coupled with an assemblage of collector’s items—is any less valid, instructive, or transformative than the kind of historiography taken up in this and other accounts of Orson Welles’s expedition.

In any case, with so many generations personally involved in cultural survival, and with so much material waiting to be preserved, it is likely that this book will not be the last word on the subject. It's all true.

*Catherine L. Benamou is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Author of, among other books, Transnational Television and Latinx DiasporicAudiences: Abrazos Electrónicos in Four Global Cities (Palgrave MacMillan).

Reference

Catherine L. Benamou. It's All True – Orson Welles's Pan-American odyssey. Translation: Fernando Santos. New York, New York, 2024, 504 pages. [https://amzn.to/4biKHvB]

Notes

1 See Welles; Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, p.189.

2 See Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, p.19-36.

3 Interview with the author, cassette recording, Fortaleza, Ceará, November 2, 1990.

4 The new incursion It was supported mainly by the non-governmental community development organization Amigos da Prainha do Canto Verde, founded in August 1991 a few kilometers east of Fortaleza, on the coast of Ceará.

5 See “Women in the crew of Ceará rafts”, The People, Fortaleza, June 11, 1983, p.21.

6 See “Caymmi welcomes raft that denounces threat to fishing”, Newspapers in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, June 17, 1993, p.15.

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE