View of the exhibition 'My Name Is Orson Welles' at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, October 2025. STÉPHANE DABROWSKI
A polystyrene patriarch: His beard is white, yet his fake whiskers recall those of a fake plastic orange rotisserie chicken. This is how the exhibition "My Name Is Orson Welles" at the Cinémathèque française in Paris – and its meticulously curated catalog, both conceived by Frédéric Bonnaud, the institution's director – begins. The show features the May 1938 cover of Time magazine, featuring a color portrait of Welles (1915-1985). At the time, the 23-year-old had yet to make a film, but his feverish theatrical activity electrified Broadway. He appeared here in the aged guise of the main character in George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, the play he was then directing. Everything was already in motion. Above all, this curious urge to always make himself appear older, to disguise and puff himself up, like popcorn.
In My Lunches with Orson, a 1969 book of interviews with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022), reissued for the occasion in a richly illustrated edition, his interlocutor observed: "Would you want to return [to childhood]?"
– "To childhood? I've been back there ever since I left."
