VIDEO FESTIVAL OFFERS SURVEY OF ORSON WELLES

One of the highlights of the 1986 National Video Festival, which runs Thursday through Sunday at the American Film Institute in Hollywood, is its comprehensive survey of the work Orson Welles made for TV, most of which has never been seen before in the United States.

Along with marathon screenings of new work in every genre from around the world, including the American premiere of a challenging Jean-Luc Godard TV movie, the festival will present “In the Land of Don Quixote,” nine half-hour segments Welles made for Italian television in 1964; “The Orson Welles Sketch Book,” five 15-minute programs made for the BBC in 1955; “The Fountain of Youth,” a half-hour drama Welles shot in 1958 as a series pilot, and a brief interview with Welles in Paris in 1983, which captures the vibrancy of his personality.

“In the Land of Don Quixote” (screening Thursday at 2 p.m.) should not be confused with Welles’ “Don Quixote,” a film he worked on for 30 years and came close to completing before his death last year. “In the Land of Don Quixote” is essentially a travelogue of Spain, in which Welles, his wife and daughter occasionally appear on camera as they tour the country in a dark Mercedes. It was never intended to be seen all in one sitting, and in this format it frankly grows tedious.

Yet how stunningly everything has been shot, in a high-contrast black-and-white, punctuated with recurring shots of the windmills with which Welles himself tilted as nobly as Quixote. It’s quite likely that no one has caught the danger and excitement of the running of the bulls at Pamplona so vividly; Welles viewed the bullfights themselves as rituals of life and death and not at all romantically, sparing us none of the blood. (There’s a busy Italian narration, which hasn’t been translated because Welles disavowed it.)

The five segments of the “Sketch Book,” which screen at 2:30 p.m. Friday, attest to Welles’ consummate powers as a storyteller. Each one is a “talking head,” but what a spellbinder Welles is as he draws us in with that resonant voice, that compelling gaze and that peerless command of the language as he reminisces about John Barrymore and Harry Houdini (from whom he learned his first magic tricks) and losing his fake nose while playing the King of Persia in Dublin, one of his earliest professional acting jobs.

He also tells us the tender story of the little boy and the brave bull he had intended to include in “It’s All True” and gives us a timelier-than-ever essay on the evils of the invasion of privacy.

With its use of stills and of Welles’ own witty narration, “The Fountain of Youth” (screening Friday at 4 p.m.), which Welles wrote, produced and directed from a story by John Collier, was clearly too innovative for TV in 1958, resembling as it does a kind of “Citizen Kane” in miniature in its concern with the temptations of power and passion. Veteran character actor Dan Tobin stars as a scientist enamored of a blond bombshell actress (Joi Lansing), who eventually throws him over for a handsome, much-younger man (Rick Jason); Tobin devises a revenge with a twist that Alfred Hitchcock would have admired.

Godard made “Grandeur et Decadence” (screening Thursday at 8:30 p.m.) for French TV’s “Serie Noire”--and it’s a very safe bet that none of the other films in the series were anything like it. It is similar to his “Contempt” and his “Passion” in its depiction of the grinding difficulties of getting a film off the ground, but in this instance he focuses on the casting and raising funds to shoot a James Hadley Chase thriller rather than on the actual shooting of a film. Highly elliptical and shot very tightly, “Grandeur et Decadence” verges on the surreal and is thick with Godard’s trademark references, quotes from other people’s films, chapter headings and dark humor.

There’s an overlaying of the Orpheus-Eurydice legend as a director (Jean-Pierre Leaud) tests the beautiful but troubled wife of his producer (Jean-Pierre Mocky), who’s trying to raise the money. Casting calls, in which the auditioners each utter a word or two of a sentence, become the film’s key motif; Godard’s best words of wisdom are these: “What is essential is not our feelings or our past experiences but our silent tenacity in confronting them.” As deliberately fragmented (and tough going) as “Grandeur et Decadence” is, it attests to the enduring power and beauty of Godard’s images.

Among the other offerings in the National Video Festival are a tribute to the Canadian Broadcasting Co., a survey of provocative British TV programs, a student competition/exhibition, a history of rock video, regional video-making and panel discussions.

For full schedule, including programs to be repeated, and screening locations: (213) 856-7787.