"What the camera does, and does uniquely, is photograph thought."
-- Orson Welles
From the first (legendary) shot, four minutes in length, Welles's Touch of Evil explodes with loathing, weirdness, and disgust as it heroizes the lonely fascist cop (in this case, literally a pig) over the organization man, he with the beautiful wife and the fetish for doing all things by the book. Not for a moment do we experience the world as does Mike Vargas. It is all Hank Quinlan: a Goya-like vision of an infected universe.
Good Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich and great Welles scholar James Naremore discuss the work.
Touch of Evil (1958)