American. Orson Welles, il mito, la letteratura

Though "American" was the title originally intended for his dazzling screen debut, Orson Welles has always been considered the most European of American filmmakers. Following the now-classic studies of Leslie Fiedler, and moving via Richard Chase and Leo Marx to Edward Said, this volume revisits Welles' variegated body of work in the light of the literary tradition of the United States, impregnated with the gothic and melodramatic moods of romance, threatened by the spectres of the irrational and haunted by a mythological loss of innocence. A tradition that Welles, a strongly political artist, does not hesitate to use against itself when necessary, denouncing its falsity.