Orson Welles Narrates Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner in an Experimental Film Featuring the Art of Gustave Doré

Around here we subscribe to the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Orson Welles. In years past, we gave you Welles narrating Plato’s Cave Allegory and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” and, before that, the Welles-narrated parable Freedom River, and the list goes on.

Now, we present The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a 1977 experimental film created by Larry Jordan, an independent filmmaker who tried to marry “the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles.” As Jordan describes it, the film is “a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.” You can watch above.

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Orson Welles Narrates Animations of Plato’s Cave and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” Two Parables of the Human Condition

Hear Orson Welles’ Iconic War of the Worlds Broadcast (1938)

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