Learning on ScreenTouch of Evil
2011. GB. Blu-Ray (Region B). Eureka ‘Masters of Cinema’. ‘Preview Version’ (109 minutes), ‘Theatrical Version’ (96 minutes), ‘Reconstructed Version’ (111 minutes) + extras. £19.99
About the author: James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of nine books including The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945 (I.B. Tauris, 1998), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (I. B. Tauris, 2005) and War and Film (Reaktion, 2008). He is a Council member of IAMHIST and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
There has always been a tension within film studies between critics whose preference is for close analysis of the film text and historians who are often as interested in the story behind it as the film itself. Touch of Evil (1958) is the perfect example of why both approaches are necessary, and how they can enrich one another. The film text is the residue of the production process: the different creative agencies involved, the economic and artistic compromises, the interventions of the studio, or of censors, and so forth. Orson Welles’s career included many films that did not turn out as he wanted: the butchered release of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), for example, or the uncompleted film of Don Quixote. Touch of Evil – widely regarded as one of Welles’s three undisputed masterpieces alongside Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons – is another example of how the finished film is the outcome of social and industrial processes as much as the ‘vision’ of its director.
The relationship between film text and film history is brought sharply into focus by those films which exist in different versions. Take Napoléon (1927), for example: Abel Gance seems to have re-edited the film after many of its early screenings to the extent that even following its painstaking reconstruction by Kevin Brownlow we will probably never have a definitive version. On another level George Lucas has tampered with the first trilogy of Star Wars films by adding new footage with enhanced special effects and twice changing his mind about the cantina scene in the original film: does Greedo get off a shot before Han Solo shoots him? Here there is a tension between what we might call the ‘historic’ Star Wars – the film that made such an impact upon its release – and the ‘special edition’ that Lucasfilm now tells us is the definitive version. And Blade Runner (1982) – like Touch of Evil released in one version and followed by two different reissues – not only demonstrates how the entire meaning of a film can be changed by the addition of one small but significant scene but also provides a bizarre instance of a ‘director’s cut’ that the director had not approved.
