Reassembled Authors: Mr. Arkadin & Blood Bath – When the Cut Becomes the Text

Series Thesis: Some films are not finished objects but archives of struggle—between directors, producers, markets, and time itself.

This Maverick City College film studies series explores two perfect case studies of fractured authorship and recut cinema: Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955) and the Roger Corman-produced Blood Bath (1966). Both films exist in multiple competing versions – not as a neat “director’s cut” vs. theatrical cut, but as radically different edits that reflect power struggles, marketplace interventions, and belated reconstructions. In this series, we treat each cut of these films as a primary text in its own right. The guiding premise is that authorship can become a forensic puzzle: some films are essentially “archives of struggle” rather than fixed artworks, their very form the product of conflict and compromise. By dissecting Mr. Arkadin and Blood Bath, students will develop structural literacy – an ability to read films not just for story or style, but for the visible marks of editing-room battles and industrial pressures.

Both films are infamous for their tangled histories. Mr. Arkadin, a noir thriller directed by Orson Welles, had a difficult production and was released in several different versions. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum identified at least seven distinct edits of Mr. Arkadin, none of which can be called definitive. Likewise, Blood Bath’s journey through the exploitation mill resulted in no fewer than four distinct films emerging from the same footage. By examining these recut texts side by side, the series poses a provocative question: What happens when “the cut becomes the text”? In other words, when a film’s meaning and even authorship are determined less by an original screenplay or singular vision, and more by how it was edited (and re-edited) over time, how should we study and understand it? The series argues that in such cases the editor or re-editor is as much an author as the original director, and the film itself becomes a living document of negotiation.

Part I — Mr. Arkadin: Authorship as Forensic Reconstruction

Why Arkadin belongs here: Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report) illustrates authorship under stress. Famously, Welles did not simply “lose control” of Arkadin in the usual Hollywood sense – instead, control fractured. Welles never got to finalize his cut, leaving behind a puzzle of different edits assembled by various hands. The result is a film that survives only as multiple competing truths, with each version offering a different perspective on what the story is meant to be. This fractured state makes Mr. Arkadin an ideal candidate for recut-based pedagogy: it forces us to treat the film as a case file of evidence rather than a single finished narrative. As one scholar aptly noted, Mr. Arkadin is like a cinematic palimpsest – a manuscript with traces of several drafts, except that all we have are the traces. By comparing these traces, students act as film detectives, piecing together Welles’s intentions and the interventions of others.

Mr. Arkadin’s troubled production history directly feeds its mystique and pedagogical value. Welles himself lamented that it was one of the best stories he ever conceived and “should have been a roaring success… It was blown... by the cutting”. In other words, the way the film was edited (by various parties) “blew” its chance at coherence and success – a candid admission by the auteur that editing is destiny. Rather than a single authoritative cut, we have a contentious arena of fragments. As Rosenbaum observed, Arkadin exists only as “competing fragmentary glimpses of something that never assumed full shape”. This is key to why it belongs in our series: the film’s very textual instability becomes our syllabus.

Arkadin: Required Versions (treated as primary documents)

Students will watch and compare four versions of Mr. Arkadin, not to decide “which is best,” but to analyze what each version reveals about narrative, character, and the forces that shaped the film. Each cut is treated as a primary document – a piece of evidence in the larger Arkadin puzzle:

1. Confidential Report (1955 European cut) – Noir-as-parable. This was the version released in Europe by producer Louis Dolivet after Welles left the project. It has an episodic, almost fable-like structure, presenting Arkadin’s story as a morality tale in fragmented episodes. The atmosphere is thick with mystery and moral ambiguity. Gregory Arkadin (played by Welles) emerges as a mythic abstraction – a larger-than-life enigma with scant backstory, more symbol than man. The European Confidential Report edit is notorious for its patchwork quality, yet it contains moments of dark poetry. It’s as if the film’s noir elements (the high-contrast cinematography, the criminal underworld vignettes) were arranged into a cautionary parable about power and memory. Notably, this cut diminishes Welles’s intricate flashback structure in favor of a somewhat linear unfolding of Arkadin’s “confidential report” dossier, making it feel like a series of mysterious encounters recounted by various witnesses. Students will observe how Confidential Report withholds convenient explanations, contributing to a sense of Arkadin as an almost folkloric figure – a man without a past, haunting the present.

2. Mr. Arkadin (U.S. cut) – Linearized for clarity. The American release of Mr. Arkadin – which came later (early 1960s) – restructured the film to make the plot more straightforward. In this version, the story is told in a more chronological, linear fashion, ostensibly to avoid confusing the audience. The complex flashback frame that Welles envisioned is pared down or rearranged; as a result, the narrative focuses on plot over atmosphere. Scenes are re-ordered and some expository dialogue is added to ensure the audience understands the thriller mechanics. The effect is that Mr. Arkadin (US cut) plays more like a conventional noir mystery: clearer in cause-and-effect, but at a cost. By foregrounding what happens over how it feels, this edit tends to flatten the film’s meaning by explaining too much. Ambiguities present in Confidential Report are ironed out into explicit revelations. For instance, where the European version might leave Arkadin’s motives somewhat opaque, the U.S. cut inserts lines to spell out motivations or connections. Students often notice that this cut, while easier to follow, loses some of the “fever dream” quality that makes Arkadin unique. It is a case of simplifying a complex structure – a change that benefits commercial clarity but arguably diminishes thematic richness.

3. Corinth/Spanish Version (variant) – Different rhythms; translation as transformation. Beyond the two above, Mr. Arkadin exists in variant forms that resulted from its international production. Welles’s project had Spanish co-producers, leading to at least two Spanish-language cuts (sometimes nicknamed the “Bob Harden” and “Mark Sharpe” versions, after the altered name of the lead character). These are rarely screened in full, but they provide crucial insights. One Spanish edit – the one actually released in Spain – is markedly different in rhythm and emphasis, with some scenes re-cut by the local editors in a cruder, almost abrupt fashion. Interestingly, this Spanish version includes one element Welles wanted: it opens with the image of a woman’s dead body on a beach, an evocative shot meant to foreshadow mystery. (In Welles’s notes, he intended to start the film with the corpse of Mily, a key character, but that close-up was lost in other edits; the Spanish cut’s use of a long shot of a body approximates this idea.) The Spanish-language Arkadin isn’t just Confidential Report dubbed; it is a transformation in its own right. Dialogue was translated (and in some cases, entirely new scenes were shot with Spanish actors replacing certain roles), altering character dynamics in subtle ways. We treat the “Corinth version” – a 99-minute English print discovered in 1960 and later distributed by Corinth Films – in tandem with the Spanish variant, since Corinth is thought to reflect much of Welles’s intended structure. The Corinth cut preserves Welles’s labyrinthine flashback structure more fully, albeit in a rougher edit, and closely resembles one of the Spanish versions. By examining these variants, students see how translation and re-editing for a local market can lead to creative divergence rather than simple loss. Each version has unique material – a line, a shot, an idea not found in the others. Rather than view the non-English cuts as footnotes, we approach them as alternate facets of the Arkadin “truth,” demonstrating that even a dubbed print can introduce new authorial choices (intended or unintended). In short, translation here becomes a form of re-authoring.

4. The Complete Mr. Arkadin (2006 Comprehensive Version) – Archival intervention as authorship. In 2006, a group of archivists and film historians undertook a radical project: to reconstruct Mr. Arkadin in line with Welles’s vision, as much as evidence allowed. The result, often called The Comprehensive Version or Complete Mr. Arkadin, runs 105–106 minutes and was compiled from all available footage by editors Stefan Drössler and Claude Bertemes, with input from Welles scholars. This version is an editorial palimpsest – effectively a new “cut” where the archivists become the final directors. They sifted through the Corinth print, Confidential Report, and surviving Spanish scenes to piece together what they believe comes **“closest to Welles’s original vision”**. For example, they restored the opening image of the body on the beach (albeit using the only existing long shot, since Welles’s close-up was lost). They followed clues from Welles’s interviews and scripts to re-order scenes according to his intentions. The team, however, is transparent that this is not a “director’s cut” – Welles never finished editing, so no version can claim definitiveness. The comprehensive cut is an approximation and an argument: it argues for a certain structure as being more “Wellesian.” By including this version, we confront questions of authorship: when historians alter another artist’s work in order to save it, who is the author? Students see how an archival rescue can itself be a creative act. The Complete Mr. Arkadin stands as a meta-commentary on the film – a version that explicitly declares itself an amalgam, illustrating how archival work and critical interpretation can produce a new text.

Through these four versions, students experience Mr. Arkadin as a mystery with multiple solutions, none of which completely resolve the riddle. Instead of asking “Which version of Arkadin is the real one?” we ask: What does each cut emphasize or hide? How does each reflect the agenda of whoever controlled the edit at that point – be it Welles, a producer, or later restorers? This leads naturally to deeper thematic analysis.

Arkadin: Key Dissection Themes

After viewing and comparing the versions, our discussion of Mr. Arkadin centers on several key themes that emerge from the film’s content and its fractured form:

1. Narrative as Surveillance

On the surface, Mr. Arkadin is structured like a detective story: Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) investigates the past of the mysterious tycoon Gregory Arkadin. But unlike a typical noir, Arkadin himself orchestrates the investigation. In an ingenious twist, Arkadin hires an investigator not to uncover a crime, but to cover one up. It’s often noted that Arkadin doesn’t hire a detective so much as he “hires history itself to erase him.” The act of investigation in this film is a form of surveillance and destruction: Arkadin uses Van Stratten to track down everyone who knows the secret of his past, only to silence those witnesses. Thus, the narrative device (the inquiry into Arkadin’s life) doubles as Arkadin’s scheme to rewrite his own story by literally eliminating chapters (people) from his biography. This theme resonates with Welles’s broader commentary on power: Arkadin wields narrative control as a weapon. Each version of the film, intriguingly, places different weight on this theme. For instance, in Confidential Report the episodic nature – hopping from one colorful informant to another – underscores how Arkadin’s life story is being pieced together from scattered sources, as if he’s under omnipresent observation. By contrast, the U.S. cut, in clarifying Arkadin’s motives, makes it more explicit that he is using the investigation for his own ends (spelling out that Arkadin has been trailing Van Stratten’s progress and “cleaning up” after him). In class, we explore how knowledge equals power in the film: Arkadin’s survival depends on controlling knowledge (his past), and once he loses that control – when the last piece of the puzzle (Jakob Zouk) is protected by Van Stratten – Arkadin collapses. This is a film where the detective story trope is inverted into a tale of self-surveillance: the only way Arkadin can feel safe is by spying on himself, via a proxy, and then annihilating any evidence. It’s a paranoid, looping narrative, and Welles uses it to comment on how the powerful rewrite history to suit their needs. Every cut of Arkadin we watch reveals this in a slightly different light, but the core remains: the “report” compiled in the film is less about discovery than deletion.

2. Power Without Origin

Gregory Arkadin is terrifying to the other characters (and to the audience in an existential sense) not just because he’s ruthless, but because he is a man without a past. He claims to have awakened with amnesia, no memory of who he was, yet possessed of immense resources. Arkadin is an originless force, all consequence and no known cause. This absence of origin is deeply unsettling – “systems that require traceability” (like law, society, or even narrative logic) are terrified by a figure who cannot be traced. We discuss how modern structures (police, governments, financial systems) rely on documentation and backstory; Arkadin defies that by erasing his tracks completely. Thematically, this connects to Welles’s frequent exploration of powerful figures with enigmatic pasts (cf. Citizen Kane, where Thompson seeks “Rosebud” to explain Kane). But in Arkadin, the enigma is never satisfyingly solved – even when we learn Arkadin’s secret criminal past, it doesn’t fully explain the man. Arkadin remains a kind of myth – a “man who came from nowhere” but dominates everywhere. Each version of the film handles this slightly differently. For example, the Corinth and Spanish versions, by including the eerie opening of an empty airplane on Christmas day (and/or the body on the beach), emphasize Arkadin’s story as a modern legend: an oligarch literally vanishing, leaving behind a riddle. The European Confidential Report makes Arkadin even more abstract – a series of anecdotes about an unknowable person. The U.S. edit attempts to pin him down by adding a rationale (saying Arkadin wants to secure a military contract, hence concerned about his reputation), but even that is a thin pretext. In class, we frame Arkadin as “power without origin”: a self-created man (or monster) who highlights the anxiety societies have about unaccountable power. There is a chilling notion that if someone can sever themselves from their past, they become ungovernable – a law unto themselves. Arkadin’s lack of origin also terrifies him, we could argue, because it means there is nothing to anchor or redeem him – he is only the sum of his sins. Authorship of the self is at stake: Arkadin tries to author his own life story retroactively by deleting chapters, essentially attempting to write a new origin for himself (or maintain the official story that he has no past). Thus, the film becomes a meditation on identity: is a man defined by his origins, or can he obliterate them and thrive? Mr. Arkadin suggests the latter is a dangerous illusion; eventually the past catches up, and the weight of not having an “origin story” drives Arkadin to self-destruction.

3. Welles as Structural Saboteur

Finally, Mr. Arkadin can be seen as Orson Welles’s most daring experiment in narrative structure – one that actively refuses the comforts of a conventional film. Welles, often called an auteur who “broke the rules,” truly sabotaged structural norms in Arkadin. The film (in its ideal form, closest to the Corinth cut) refuses a stable point-of-view – it bounces between Van Stratten’s perspective (flashbacks narrated by him) and omniscient sequences, and even within flashbacks the tone and vantage can shift. We are never allowed a consistent narrator we fully trust: Van Stratten is a hustler with his own agenda, Arkadin is deceitful, and other characters relay stories that might or might not be true. This patchwork of perspectives is by design: Welles constructed Arkadin like a puzzle-box with pieces deliberately missing or misleading. The film also denies us moral resolution. Unlike a classic noir where the bad guy gets justice or the moral order is restored, Arkadin ends on an equivocal note. Yes, Arkadin dies (a suicide as his schemes fail), but our nominal hero Van Stratten doesn’t get a triumph or a tidy romantic ending – in fact, he loses the girl and is left with nothing but knowledge. There is no celebratory moment of truth uncovered; the final feeling is bleak and unresolved. Furthermore, Arkadin offers little narrative comfort: the plot is complex and at times intentionally confusing (Welles even uses disorienting editing and grotesque camera angles to keep us uneasy). Scenes like the grotesque flea circus or the carnival-like masquerade ball add to the sense of a world off-kilter. Welles essentially withholds the standard rewards from the audience – a choice often criticized at the time as chaotic storytelling. However, as we explore, this is not chaos for its own sake; it is designed instability*. Welles was sabotaging the structure to make a point: the very form of the film embodies the idea that truth is elusive and control is illusory. One commentator noted that Confidential Report (Arkadin) achieves a kind of “indetermination” – it gives different emotions each time, never pinning down a singular meaning. In our structuralist analysis, we celebrate how Welles basically deconstructed the detective genre and biographical narrative form. This theme is driven home when we consider the multiple cuts: even the film’s physical structure in cinema history is unstable. Welles’s sabotage extends beyond the screen into the editing room struggles – the film literally refuses to settle into one form. We discuss how perhaps Welles anticipated – or at least later embraced – this instability (he famously said a director’s ideas are in the editing, and if he didn’t edit it, it’s not his film). With Arkadin, Welles gave us a blueprint of a movie that could never be “finished” in a traditional sense. The refusal of closure, both in story and in production, is what makes the film challenging but immensely rich for study. Students come to see Mr. Arkadin as a deliberately un-stable text, one that forces us to question the very notion of a “complete film.”

This is not chaos. It is designed instability. Each version of Arkadin is like a different attempt to stabilize that instability – the producer’s cut tries to impose order, the comprehensive version tries to honor Welles’s controlled chaos, etc. But in every case, the film resists full coherence. We embrace that in class as a feature, not a bug: Welles has effectively made the viewer an active participant in assembling meaning from the pieces.

In-class exercise (Arkadin): One practical way students grapple with these themes is by performing a comparative dissection of a single scene across three different cuts of Mr. Arkadin. For example, we might take the scene of Van Stratten’s first encounter with Arkadin at the grand Christmas costume ball. Students break into groups, each group analyzing the scene in a different version (say, Corinth vs. Confidential Report vs. Comprehensive edit). They map out what information is revealed, altered, or omitted in each version of the scene. Perhaps the European cut omits a line that the U.S. version includes explaining Arkadin’s motives; or the ordering of shots is different, affecting point-of-view. The students then come together and compare their findings, essentially reconstructing how the scene mutates from cut to cut. Crucially, they ask who benefits from each alteration. Does a change make the narrative more sympathetic to Arkadin, or to Van Stratten? Does it serve the producer’s need for clarity, or Welles’s preference for ambiguity? By identifying the beneficiary of each edit, the class teases out the power dynamics behind the versions. This exercise turns a passive viewing experience into an active investigation – mirroring Van Stratten’s quest in the film, we investigate the film itself. Through this, students gain a visceral understanding of Mr. Arkadin’s core lesson: a film’s meaning can shift drastically when recut, revealing the fingerprints of whoever wielded the scissors.

Part II — Blood Bath: When a Film Is Rewritten by the Marketplace

If Mr. Arkadin was fractured by battles of ego and artistic control, Blood Bath was outright colonized by marketplace demands. In this part of the series, we move from an auteur’s troubled vision to a B-movie Frankenstein assembled by producers to chase popular trends. Blood Bath (1966) is a notorious example of a film that was “rewritten” by the industry itself – a low-budget horror whose very identity kept changing to satisfy producers, distributors, and the cold logic of commerce.

To put it plainly: If Arkadin is a puzzle created by power struggles, Blood Bath is a patchwork created by profit motives. In Arkadin, Welles’s personal vision got distorted; in Blood Bath, no single personal vision ever takes hold. Instead, the film mutates through multiple hands and purposes, ultimately becoming what one critic called a “crazy stitched-together patchwork of a film”. The process was so convoluted that Blood Bath is often described as “one of Corman’s craziest ventures”, a film that started as one thing and ended up as four different things. This makes it ideal for our study: it’s a film you don’t just watch – you investigate it.

Blood Bath: Version Lineage (taught as mutation, not canon)

Rather than a simple director’s cut vs theatrical cut scenario, Blood Bath has an almost biological lineage of versions – like mutations in a gene. We present the key versions in the evolution of Blood Bath, treating each not as a “true” version or a “lesser” version, but as a mutation shaped by specific pressures. This flips the idea of a film “canon” – there is no canonical Blood Bath, only variations that tell a story of transformation.

1. Origin Version – Operation Titian to Track of the Vampire (Jack Hill’s initial footage) – The saga begins in 1963 with a Yugoslavian-produced crime thriller called Operation Titian. Producer Roger Corman invested in this film, intending to release it to English-speaking audiences. Operation Titian was a museum-heist murder mystery set in the art world of Dubrovnik – more of a noirish thriller than a horror film. Corman, however, found the finished product unsatisfactory and not marketable in the U.S. (it was deemed “lame” and lacking suspense). Enter Jack Hill: in 1964, Corman hired this young director (fresh off Spider Baby) to repurpose the footage. Hill conceived an entirely new angle: he shot additional scenes in California, transforming the movie into a “beatnik horror” tale. Hill’s footage (set in Venice Beach, Los Angeles) introduced a mad artist named Antonio Sordi (played by William Campbell) who kills women and immerses their bodies in wax, turning them into sculptures. The tone here was existential and macabre – the SoCal bohemian art scene portrayed as an “existential trap,” with beatnik characters commenting on art and death. Violence in this version is tied to alienation and artistic madness: Sordi is essentially a serial killer artist, perhaps a statement on the isolating world of art. Jack Hill’s cut (which, confusingly, was also initially titled Blood Bath in production) did not yet include any vampires – it was more of a psychological horror thriller. However, Corman still wasn’t fully satisfied with Hill’s version either; it was considered too odd and perhaps not horrific enough for the drive-in crowd, so Hill’s cut was not released. At this point, the project already had a split personality: an Eastern European art-theft story on one side, and a Californian beatnik slasher on the other. Much of Jack Hill’s “original” footage survived only by being incorporated into later cuts. In our course, we represent this phase by examining Track of the Vampire (1967) – a later television edit which preserves a lot of Hill’s material. Track of the Vampire can be seen as a window into the original concept, because it’s an extended version that still contains the beatnik characters, the waxing murders, and other Hill contributions largely intact (just combined with later additions). We emphasize to students that this “origin” version is a construct we’re teasing out: it’s basically Jack Hill’s Blood Bath before the vampires. Key elements here include the nihilistic beatnik dialogue (Sid Haig and others as penniless artists cracking jokes and dancing through life’s futility) and the idea of art literally consuming life (Sordi turning humans into art installations). The theme of violence as alienation is front and center – Sordi’s killings are linked to his inability to connect normally, except through art (and murder). By studying this stage, students see a film that could have been: a quirky horror-noir about a killer artist, reflecting perhaps Cold War era angst and beatnik disillusionment. It’s crucial to note that already, authorship is muddled: the Yugoslav director Rados Novaković made the base film (Titian), Jack Hill repurposed it radically – two different creative visions colliding. And yet, the film’s journey was just beginning.

2. Blood Bath (1966 release cut) – The version known as Blood Bath, which gives the series its name, is the approximately 69-minute theatrical horror film that resulted after Stephanie Rothman joined the effort. By 1965-66, Roger Corman decided to lean fully into the horror/exploitation angle to ensure the film’s profitability. He tasked Rothman, one of the few women filmmakers in the Corman orbit, to further reshoot and re-edit Hill’s material. Rothman’s mandate was essentially to add vampires and punch up the horror quotient. In this final theatrical cut, the narrative shifts yet again: now Antonio Sordi is explicitly a vampire (or believes himself to be). Rothman introduced a whole new subplot about Sordi being possessed by the spirit of his vampire ancestor, and a ghostly witch named Melizza haunting him. Because William Campbell (the actor) was no longer available for reshoots, Rothman made a creative workaround: when Sordi “transforms” under his curse, he physically becomes another actor – an ancestor returning – allowing new scenes to be shot without Campbell. The resulting Blood Bath is a brisk, jarringly eclectic horror film. It splices together at least three layers of footage: (a) scenes from Operation Titian (e.g. a subplot with an art thief, certain Yugoslav-shot scenes), (b) Jack Hill’s beatnik murderer scenes, and (c) Rothman’s vampire and witch scenes, plus some new characters like a woman who starts uncovering Sordi’s secret. The tone of this version is pure exploitation “tonal whiplash”. One moment we have a jazzy beatnik party with dark comedy, the next a gothic vampire stalking a victim. The film was marketed with lurid taglines and played in drive-ins, often double-billed (in fact, it ran with Corman’s Queen of Blood on the circuit). In our class analysis, Blood Bath (1966) exemplifies how meaning can be replaced with sensation. The deeper themes or character studies from earlier iterations are largely sacrificed for horror thrills. Scenes of women being chased down alleys or strangled are inserted for shock, not because the story logically needs a vampire, but because the market needed a vampire movie. The coherence suffers: students often remark how Blood Bath feels “cobbled together” – which is accurate, as it literally was. But far from dismissing it as a bad movie, we consider it a fascinating artifact of necessity. It solved one problem (lack of horror) by creating another (lack of sense), which was acceptable in the exploitation context. A contemporary reviewer might say it has “tonal incoherence,” but as evidence, it reveals what was considered bankable content in 1966. We highlight moments like the abrupt dream sequences of the witch Melizza or the sudden vampire POV attacks, and discuss how these were meant to satisfy an audience’s appetite for the supernatural and violent, even if they subvert the film’s earlier logic. Blood Bath is where the marketplace takes control of authorship: the “author” of this version is not really Jack Hill or Stephanie Rothman individually, but Roger Corman’s commercial instincts. It’s cinema by committee and calculation. Yet, it is the most widely known version for decades – an instance where the exploitative cut became the canonical release.

3. Later Hybrid Edits (Track of the Vampire and others) – The story doesn’t end even with the theatrical release. When Blood Bath had to be sold to television, new constraints emerged – notably, a TV slot required a longer runtime (around 80 minutes) and certain content adjustments. Thus came Track of the Vampire (1967), a TV edit that further mutated the film. If Blood Bath was a Frankenstein’s monster, Track of the Vampire added extra limbs. In this version, the distributors (with Rothman’s involvement or perhaps an editor under Corman’s orders) cut some material and shot new footage to pad the length. Added were scenes such as a vampire chasing a girl along the beach to the ocean (an extended, somewhat trippy sequence) and a prolonged dance scene of a character named Dorean on the beach. Intriguingly, Track of the Vampire also reincorporated footage from the Operation Titian days that hadn’t been used in Blood Bath: for example, a subplot with an artist’s model Linda (played by Marissa Mathes) and her jealous husband. In Operation Titian Linda’s husband was a criminal after a painting; in the Track edit, through dubbing, he’s turned into a jealous spouse who tries to kill Sordi for personal revenge. This means the TV version creates yet another story out of the existing pieces. It’s slightly more coherent in some ways (tying up a loose end about Linda), but mostly it’s about filling time with whatever material was at hand – even if that meant altering character motivations via overdubs to make disjointed scenes fit. The result is what we call an “industrial chimera”: by Track of the Vampire, the film no longer has any singular authorial voice at all. It’s purely the product of aggregate decisions by distributors, each seeking to satisfy a checklist (run time, content standards, market appeal). We also note there were earlier hybrid versions like Portrait in Terror (a shorter recut of Titian with minimal horror added, used for some TV or drive-in showings). However, in class we focus on Track of the Vampire as the apex of the mutation. Students watching Track after Blood Bath often feel déjà vu – scenes repeat with slight differences – and new confusion – sequences appear that contradict the earlier narrative (e.g. characters alive who died, or new characters with little introduction). We encourage them to approach Track of the Vampire as if arriving at a crime scene: identify the fragments, trace them back to their source (is this from the 1963 footage? The 1964 shoot? The 1966 shoot? Or new 1967 inserts?), and deduce why they were put together that way. It becomes clear that by this stage, “no single author remains”; the film is an ensemble of compromises. What survives is largely fragments – scenes that individually might be effective (some atmospheric coastal shots, creepy vampire stalking) but collectively don’t add up in a traditional story sense. And yet, studying this is revelatory: it shows concretely how far a film can drift from its starting point when pulled by different industrial needs.

To summarize this lineage in the simplest terms for students: Operation Titian begat Portrait in Terror (minor changes), which begat Jack Hill’s unreleased Blood Bath (major changes, new footage), which begat the released Blood Bath after Rothman’s vampire overhaul, which begat Track of the Vampire for TV. We don’t expect students to remember every detail of who did what in 1964 vs 1966, but by engaging with at least three incarnations (Jack Hill’s concept via surviving scenes, the 1966 theatrical cut, and the 1967 extended TV cut), they experience first-hand that films can evolve like folklore – retold and reshaped until the original is barely recognizable.

Blood Bath: What Students Learn

From the chaotic evolution of Blood Bath, we derive several major lessons about film and media that we highlight in class discussion:

• Genre as an Override Protocol: Blood Bath shows that when commercial pressures mount, genre tropes can override narrative logic or original intent. In this case, the horror genre was essentially an “overlay” applied to a crime story. The addition of vampire and witch elements was not to deepen the story’s meaning, but to make the film marketable as a horror flick. This teaches students that genre conventions (vampire attacks, gothic imagery) can be almost modular. Producers like Corman used genre like a toolkit – “add vampire here” – to hit the right marketing notes. We connect this to a broader pattern in exploitation cinema: content is often determined by what sells (be it monsters, gore, nudity, etc.) rather than what the story organically calls for. As an override protocol, genre can completely change a film’s identity. Students learn to spot these impositions: for example, we analyze how the vampire elements in Blood Bath are largely non-sequiturs relative to the original plot (why is a vampire also an artist who dips bodies in wax? the film itself has trouble reconciling this!). The key insight is that the needs of the marketplace – to advertise a “vampire movie” – took precedence over story coherence. This point is reinforced with evidence: Roger Corman was legendary for ensuring no film lost money, even if it meant “turning a dismal turd into a passable screen-filler” by shamelessly adding exploitable elements. Blood Bath embodies that philosophy: it’s a film bent to fit a profitable genre mold. So, genre is revealed not just as an artistic category, but as a business strategy. Understanding this helps students critically evaluate other films – recognizing when romance or action or horror beats might be there because of commercial formula more than storytelling necessity.

• Authorship Erased by Aggregation: In auteur theory, we often celebrate the singular vision of a director. Blood Bath is the counter-example: it is a film where authorship is distributed and eroded by multiple contributors. Each version of Blood Bath was essentially solving a different problem: Jack Hill’s cut tried to solve Titian’s dullness by adding shock and black humor; Rothman’s cut solved the “not horror enough” problem by adding monsters; the TV cut solved runtime issues by adding filler, etc. The result is a film that has no auteur in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a collage of decisions by committee. We stress that this doesn’t mean the film lacks purpose—rather, its purpose is purely functional at each stage (e.g., “make it 80 minutes,” “make it scarier,” “make it sellable in America”). This is a prime example of “industrial art”, shaped more by industry constraints than by personal expression. Students learn that many films, especially in genre cinema, are effectively authored by producers and editors as much as by the nominal director. In the case of Blood Bath, directors Novaković, Hill, and Rothman all contributed, but none had final say. Roger Corman’s producer role looms largest – and it’s telling that he could cobble multiple movies out of one investment (indeed, Corman turned one movie into four here, and did similar recycling tricks elsewhere). The phrase “the result is not failure, it’s evidence” comes alive here: rather than ridicule Blood Bath for being incoherent, we examine it as evidence of the 1960s exploitation film production logic. It’s almost a paper trail of how to monetize a failed film. For instance, the odd detail that in one version the killer is an artist, in another he’s a literal vampire, demonstrates how characters can be bent to different genres. Each aggregate change leaves seams – and those seams are instructive. We cite how Blood Bath contains roughly “4 minutes of Operation Titian, 37 minutes of Jack Hill’s work, and 30-odd minutes of Rothman’s additions” – a true patchwork. By recognizing this, students come to appreciate the editor’s and producer’s roles in filmmaking. They become aware that sometimes the person who “authored” what we see on screen is not the director at all, but an uncredited editor splicing unrelated footage to hit a quota. It’s a humbling lesson in media literacy: the “author” of a film can be a composite entity, or even a financial imperative. We draw parallels to other “multiple version” situations (for example, the various edits of horror films for different markets, or studio recuts of directors’ films) to show this is not an isolated case. Blood Bath is just an extreme and gleefully bizarre instance, making the normally hidden process of aggregation very visible.

• The Film as a Crime Scene: Perhaps the most fun – and profound – lesson is treating Blood Bath as a crime scene to be investigated rather than a story to be passively watched. By necessity, when watching Blood Bath (especially in its Track of the Vampire form), viewers find themselves asking why things are happening – not in a narrative whodunit sense, but literally “why does this scene not seem to fit?” or “where did this character come from?” These questions lead directly to production history answers. For example, why does the vampire suddenly look like a different person in some shots? Because the actor changed – production history explains it. Why does a certain sub-plot (the jealous husband) appear and disappear? Because it was in one version and not in another, spliced back in for TV. We encourage students to comb through Blood Bath with that investigative eye: each incongruous detail is a clue to the film’s assembly. In doing so, they practice a form of media archaeology – digging through layers to understand how and why something was constructed. They come to see the finished film not as a smooth narrative delivered to entertain, but as a palimpsest of edits like an archaeological site with layers of artifacts. This approach demystifies the filmmaking process. Students gain a concrete sense of how films can be re-cut and repurposed, which in turn fosters skepticism of the idea of a film as an inviolate text. In essence, Blood Bath trains them to see any film as potentially having hidden versions and untold stories behind it. Moreover, viewing a film as a “crime scene” flips the power dynamic: the audience is not subservient to the film’s storytelling; instead, the audience is empowered to interrogate the film. In the context of Maverick City College’s ethos, this is key – we’re not here for passive appreciation, we’re here for active analysis. And few films reward active analysis as much as Blood Bath, because the more you dig, the more wild stories you uncover (quite literally – dig into Blood Bath and you find a whole other film called Operation Titian, etc.). By the end, students often express that watching Blood Bath was like solving a puzzle or performing an autopsy on a movie. Exactly! That investigatory experience is what we aim for – it’s where structural literacy is born.

Comparative Core: Arkadin vs Blood Bath

After deep-diving into each film’s versions and themes, the series culminates in a comparative analysis of Mr. Arkadin and Blood Bath. Placing them side by side, we examine how very different causes of recutting (artistic power struggles vs. market-driven reinvention) yielded different kinds of films. We summarize the comparison in a chart for clarity:

Axis	Mr. Arkadin (Welles, 1955)	Blood Bath (Corman/Hill/Rothman, 1966)
Source of fracture	Creative power & ego clashes (director vs. producer, Welles’s control fracturing)	Market demand and exploitation formulas (genre requirements, runtime needs)
Resulting narrative	Mythic ambiguity – a fractured but haunting story with elusive meaning; multiple versions add to its mystique.	Tonal incoherence – a patched-together narrative that can feel disjointed or campy; continuity sacrificed for shocks.
“Who” ultimately edits	Archivists/critics (reconstructing Welles’s vision post-facto). The final “author” role is partly taken by those who compile versions.	Producers & distributors (Corman & co.) calling the shots. The effective authors are those who re-cut for drive-ins and TV, not the on-set directors.
What survives best	Atmosphere and theme: Even in different cuts, an eerie atmosphere, Wellesian visuals, and core themes (power, memory) persist, giving Arkadin a consistent soul.	Fragments: Memorable bits and set-pieces (e.g. stylish murders, quirky beatnik dialogue) survive, but they feel like shards of different puzzles. No singular “atmosphere” – it shifts scene to scene.
What is revealed	Anxiety of control: The multiple versions reveal how an auteur’s anxiety over control plays out on screen – Arkadin’s content literally is about controlling narrative, mirroring Welles’s behind-the-scenes struggles. It exposes the fragility of auteur authority.	Logic of capital: The film’s metamorphoses lay bare the capitalist logic of mid-century B-cinema – i.e., if it can make money, reshape it until it does. Every change in Blood Bath was driven by profit motive, making the film a ledger of commercial decisions.

Through this comparison, students grasp that there’s no single way that films “fall apart” – they can break in different directions. Mr. Arkadin’s versions deepen its enigma (it becomes more intriguing as a puzzle the more cuts you see), whereas Blood Bath’s versions create a kind of absurdist object lesson in filmmaking pragmatism (it becomes more of an eccentric mess the more you know, yet more fascinating for that very messiness). In both cases, the struggle behind the film becomes the film: Arkadin’s struggle = auteur vs. lost control, Blood Bath’s struggle = art vs. commerce.

We emphasize that neither film should be seen as “bad” because of its troubled text. On the contrary, each film’s value is enhanced by its multiple versions. They are teaching tools for understanding editing, context, and the notion that a film is not a static piece of art but a negotiation in celluloid. By studying them, one develops an eye for the hidden story behind the story – the boardroom deals, ego trips, or budget constraints that shape what ends up on screen.

Final Assignment – Recontextualization Project: “What This Cut Is Trying to Hide”

To cap off the series, students undertake a creative-critical project that forces them to synthesize everything we’ve explored. Each student (or team) will choose one scene from Mr. Arkadin and one scene from Blood Bath – ideally, scenes that exist in multiple versions – and reframe them through a chosen analytical lens. They can choose to reinterpret the scenes as one of the following:

• A political allegory,
• A piece of media archaeology, or
• An industrial artifact.

In other words, they might take a scene and imagine it as commentary on Cold War politics, or treat the different edits of the scene as archaeological layers revealing historical production conditions, or focus on how the scene exemplifies industry practices (censorship, marketing, etc.). They will then write a short essay (or present a video essay) with the provocative title “What This Cut Is Trying to Hide.” The idea behind this title is that every recut or change was done for a reason – often to hide something (be it a plot point that didn’t test well, a subtext that was too risky, or a flaw in continuity). For example, a student might pick the scene of Arkadin’s death: compare how one version might “hide” the brutality of his suicide (perhaps by omission or different editing) to soften the impact, whereas another version shows it more starkly – what agenda is at play in each cut? Or a student might take a murder scene in Blood Bath and show how the TV cut hides gore (to meet television standards) by substituting a long shot or an awkward cut, thereby revealing the censorship constraints of 1960s TV. Conversely, maybe the theatrical cut hides a plot inconsistency by excising a confusing line that still exists in another cut. By digging into these differences, the student’s essay will articulate how each version of a scene carries implicit motives – some narrative, some commercial, some ideological.

This capstone assignment encourages students to be both analytical and inventive. They aren’t just comparing for continuity’s sake; they are generating a thesis about motive and meaning. Essentially, we ask them: if a film cut is an act of rewriting, what is being written out or written in – and why? For instance, framing a scene as a media archaeological artifact might lead a student to discuss how the physical limitations of film stock, or loss of footage, forced certain cuts (e.g., why a missing close-up in Arkadin changes the scene’s focus). As a political allegory, maybe a student argues that Arkadin’s erasure of his past can be read as an allegory for post-WWII amnesia in Europe (and one version emphasizes this more than another). As an industrial artifact, a scene from Blood Bath might illustrate how drive-in movies required an action beat every 10 minutes – thus the pacing of added vampire attacks.

Titled “What This Cut Is Trying to Hide,” the essays will inherently deal with the tension between what the filmmakers (or re-makers) wanted audiences to see and what they did not want them to see. It’s a playful inversion of the detective work we’ve been doing: now the students become the ones exposing secrets – the secrets behind editorial choices.

Through this project, students consolidate their learning: they must reference the different versions, use evidence from our discussions and readings (perhaps even cite the DVD commentaries or essays like those in the Criterion set), and ultimately demonstrate how adept they’ve become at reading films structurally and contextually. The best student projects turn out to be genuinely original insights – because with films as under-studied (academically) as Blood Bath or as famously convoluted as Arkadin, there’s room to discover new angles.

Why This Series Is Pure Maverick City College

In closing, we underline how this series embodies the Maverick City College spirit and pedagogical philosophy:

• No canon worship: We deliberately did not choose safe, universally acclaimed classics with a single “masterpiece” cut. Instead of worshipping at the altar of the film canon, we tackled films that some might consider “failed” or marginal. Mr. Arkadin and Blood Bath are decidedly un-canonical (Arkadin is a cult Welles film often overlooked; Blood Bath is pure B-cinema). This frees us to analyze without reverence, treating the films as subjects of inquiry rather than untouchable art. It also signals to students that insight can come from unlikely places, not just the usual curriculum of canonized films.

• No “director’s intent” fetish: Traditional film studies sometimes fixate on honoring the director’s singular intent (the so-called “auteur theory” in its worshipful mode). In our series, that notion is joyfully thrown out. We embrace the fact that director’s intent is often moot here – Welles didn’t get to finalize his intent; Blood Bath had too many cooks to even talk about a singular intent. By letting go of the fetish of “what the director wanted,” we open the door to multiple interpretations and acknowledge the role of collaborators, circumstances, and even accidents. This is a much more democratic and realistic way to study film. It’s not that we disregard Welles or Hill or Rothman – we certainly discuss their aims – but we don’t treat any one person’s intent as the film’s “gospel.” Instead, we ask whose intent is manifest in each version, and what does that tell us.

• Films treated as living systems: We approach Arkadin and Blood Bath as living, breathing entities that changed over time and continue to spark debate. They’re not static reels locked in an archive; they have multiple lives (festivals, theatrical, home video reconstructions, etc.). This mindset – a film as a living system – means we consider how films interact with audiences, markets, and archivists long after initial release. Arkadin lived on through critics’ reconstructions; Blood Bath found new life when Arrow Video restored all its versions for cult fans. Such a perspective is inherently Maverick: it challenges the idea that a film’s text is fixed in 1955 or 1966. It’s evolving, much like literature in an open textual tradition. Our students, therefore, learn to appreciate the dynamics of film history, not just the static analysis of a single cut.

• Failure becomes curriculum: Rather than shy away from the notion that these films were “messed up” – a word often associated with Arkadin’s editing or Blood Bath’s incoherence – we embrace those very qualities as educational gold. The so-called failures (studio interference, low-budget chaos) become the centerpiece of learning. This is pedagogically powerful: it removes the stigma from failure. Just as these films turn chaos into art, we turn their troubled histories into a curriculum. Students see that a lot can be learned from projects that don’t go according to plan. In fact, sometimes you learn more from them than from flawlessly executed productions. This resonates with students’ own creative processes too – they see how outside forces shape outcomes, and how one can respond creatively to setbacks (e.g., Rothman’s clever solution to William Campbell’s absence by using another actor and making it a plot point). The message: failure is not the end; it’s data. In these classes, every problem Arkadin or Blood Bath encountered is reinterpreted as an opportunity for insight.

• Editors become theorists: We place a spotlight on editors – including uncredited ones – and treat their work as theoretical contributions. For Mr. Arkadin, the Criterion editors and scholars who assembled the Comprehensive Version are essentially doing film theory through editing: they posed a hypothesis of how Welles’s structure should be, and then executed it. In Blood Bath, the unsung editors who spliced footage for Track of the Vampire were, perhaps unintentionally, commenting on what is dispensable or necessary in a narrative (their choices teach us about 1960s TV standards, for instance, when they cut a “cleavage” shot for broadcast). By foregrounding editing and re-editing, we assert that the edit IS the argument. This teaches students to think like editors (hence, to think about structure, pacing, emphasis) when analyzing films. It’s a form of structuralist thinking: the meaning is in how it’s put together. Maverick City College’s ethos of structuralist instinct finds perfect material here – the editing room, normally invisible, becomes the arena of intellectual debate.

Finally, the series reinforces that this isn’t film appreciation; it’s structural literacy. We are not here to simply admire movies – we are here to dissect them, understand their inner workings, and read them against the grain. By grappling with Mr. Arkadin and Blood Bath, students practice critical skills that go beyond these two films. They learn to ask who is telling the story (and who re-telling it), to notice when something doesn’t fit and ask why, to recognize the hand of the market or the state in a film’s content, and to appreciate the fluidity of media texts. In a world where director’s cuts, extended editions, remixes and memes constantly reshape content, this kind of literacy is vital.

Both Arkadin and Blood Bath ultimately empower our students to never take a film at face value. After this Maverick series, when they see a film, they’ll always have a little voice wondering: What might have been cut or changed? What struggles am I not seeing on the screen? They become active, maverick readers of film. And that is exactly the goal of Maverick City College’s film program – to produce savvy analysts who can look at even the wildest, “failed” film and extract profound insights about art, power, and industry.

In sum, Reassembled Authors is an apt title: in studying these films, we are reassembling the very notion of authorship and text. When the cut becomes the text, every viewer must also become a bit of a detective, a historian, and a theorist. By the end of this series, our students have become exactly that. And they’ll never watch films the same way again.