Portrait of Gina

Portrait of Gina was a 'documentary-essay' Orson Welles filmed in 1958 with funding from ABC TV; the film is about 30 minutes long, and was done in a style akin to "F For Fake" and "The Fountain of Youth", though it is not as innovative as those productions. It was intended to be the first of a series called "Around the World with Orson Welles", which is also the name of a series Welles did for the BBC in 1956. Actually, "Portrait of Gina" is only this program's informal name; it is actually called "Viva Italia", and this is a more accurate moniker, as it is about Italy, where Welles's 3rd wife, Paola Mori, was from, and where Welles lived and worked for about 20 years (roughly 1950-1970). The picture discusses both negative and positive aspects of Italian culture, and perhaps this is why Gina Lollabrigida, who is interviewed at the end of the film, has forbidden it's being publicly shown. Vittorio De Sica, Rozzano Brazzi, Anna Gruber and Welles's wife, Paola Mori, are also briefly interviewed, and the film moves along at a rapid speed: it's cut 'quick on the eye' in the style of Welles's film-making. In fact, the only time it calms down is when Lollabrigida is interviewed in her country home.

When Welles submitted the film to ABC, they complained that they only received one reel of un-showable material, and it was never broadcast. Looking at the production today, one sees a program which is cut very fast and which is eccentric in the Welles style, but one which is coherent and well planned; it seems it was the style which ABC objected to. Around the same time Welles did another TV program on Alexander Dumas: it was rejected as being incompetent, and "The fountain of Youth" met a similar fate. Perhaps, as with his theatrical films, Welles was just too far ahead of his time.

In the late 1950s, Welles left the only copy of "Viva Italia" in his hotel room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. The film cans were unmarked (!), so they ended up in the hotel's lost-and-found department and were eventually moved to a storage facility. The film was thought to be permanently lost until, miraculously, it was discovered in 1986. It was at that point that it was finally given a public showing at an Italian film festival, which is where Lollabrigida saw it and took legal recourse to have it banned, which it remains to this day.

Welles: "Now I'm going to finish a film on Italian cinema, on Lollabrigida...A documentary in a very particular style, with drawings by Steinberg, a lot of still photographs, conversations, little stories...In fact, it's not at all a documentary. It's an essay, a personal essay.

Bazin: An essay based on fact?

Welles: Not on fact. It's based on fact as much as any essay, but...it's not trying to be factual, it's simply not telling lies. It's in the tradition of a diary, my reflections on a given subject, Lollabrigida, and not what she is in reality. And it's even more personal than giving my point of view; it truly is an essay." (1)

And here's Bogdanovich and Welles, c. 1970:

Bogdanovich: "What was the television documentary you prepared about Gina Lollabrigida?

Welles: It was about the Roman movie world. She was the leading subject, but a lot of other people were in it- De Sica and so on. The film was made as a pilot for ABC of a proposed series, a sort of magazine- a serious one, not variety. And they hated it and that was that.

Bogdanovich: "Was it ever broadcast?

Welles: "No. They said it was technically incompetent and couldn't be shown. Had a lot of new ideas in it- done with Steinberg's drawings, many still photos, conversations, little stories- and they regarded that as technical incompetence. I spent a lot of time photographing movie posters. That bothered them too. It was made for that screen [TV], in the newspaper tradition. Me on a given subject, Lollabrigida, and not what she is in reality. An essay. Anyway, they hated it." (2)

1. Bazin,Andre: "Orson Welles: A Critical View". Foreword by Francois Truffaut; profile by Jean Cocteau; translated from the French by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Harper & Row, 1978.

2. Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich: "This is Orson Welles". Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich ; Jonathan Rosenbaum, editor. HarperCollins, 1992; reprinted by DaCapo, 1998.