ƒ
illusion, fraud and lies. Orson Welles
Is F for Fake? What exactly do we mean when we call an artist or writer a charlatan? I count no man a Philosopher who hath not, be it before the court of his Conscience or at the assizes of his Intellect, accused himself of a scurrilous Invention, and stood condemned by his own Judgement a brazen Charlatan. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
LADIES AND
Trust me, I’m a doctor... In his recent book Charlatan: The Fraudulent Life of John Brinkley (2008) Pope Brock tells the grotesque and exemplary tale of one of
the most audacious and fortunate fraudsters of the last century. In 1917 Brinkley, a physician of dubious credentials and few scruples, grafted a portion of goat’s testicle onto the genitals of one Bill Stittsworth, a Kansas farmer lately troubled with impotence. Within a decade Brinkley had built a glandular empire on the back of this clinically useless and frequently lethal operation, becoming in the process the most famous doctor in the USA. He died in 1942, his vast fortune untouched by the several scandals that had attended his rejuvenating procedure. Like many charlatans, Brinkley found himself shadowed throughout his career by a
GENTLE tireless sceptic whose single-minded aim was to expose his fakery. Morris Fishbein, of the American Medical Association, wrote, lectured and litigated against the countless ‘Cheap Jacks’, shams and quacks who blithely parted the ailing rube from his dollar. (This in a country where regulation of the medical profession was still looked on with democratic suspicion.) Fishbein became almost as famous as the wealthy targets of his truth-telling; he performed the exposure of the medical mountebank as though it were in itself a spectacle, even a kind of con. Brinkley was his ultimate catch. Fishbein, in other
words, came to resemble the surgical grifter himself: he learnt the methods of public exposure from the master of medical PR. The story of Brinkley and Fishbein is unexpectedly instructive for the history of art and charlatanry in the 20th century. It was also in 1917, one might recall, that Marcel Duchamp attempted to introduce some foreign matter, in the shape of his Fountain, into the precincts of the modern museum. In this instance the graft did not at first take: the Society of Independent Artists in New York rejected the rejuvenating tissue. But a curious relay was thus set up between the art04 05
ist-as-charlatan – who attempts, as it were, to put one over on the institution – and the artist-as-sceptic: the unmasker of institutional art as flagrant deception. Duchamp, of course, was both: he reminds us that charlatans and those who seek to expose them are secretly working in consort. Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real What exactly do we mean when we call an artist or writer a charlatan? An artist friend of mine, for example, worries about Andy Warhol: ‘I can never decide if he’s the greatest artist of the 20th century or a complete charlatan.’ (Why are charlatans always ‘com-
plete’? Are there partial charlatans?) Another friend, whose cultural forays are not unadventurous, complains: ‘I can’t get on with Joseph Beuys: I think he was a charlatan.’ It’s framed as a judgement of taste, but it is really no such thing: rather, the statement damns without appeal, allows of no counter-argument once the spectre of charlatanry has been summoned. (Perhaps that is its point: to put an end to the conversation.) Most pressingly, however, it raises the question of truth where we might not have thought it pertained. But what manner of truth is in question? Assuredly, an artistic or literary charlatan is
MEN, BY WAY not merely a fraud, a forger or an impostor. Such quasi-criminal categories – we might add the plagiarist to the list – have their own clear-cut logic: the perpetrator either is or is not what he or she purports to be. The memoirist James Frey, revealed in 2006 to have fabricated crucial portions of his book A Million Little Pieces (2003); the art forger John Myatt, whose approximations of the work of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti and Vincent van Gogh were sold for substantial sums by Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the early 1990s; the British television psychiatrist Raj Persaud, who in 06 07
June this year admitted cannibalizing the writings of other scholars for his books and articles – none of these is properly a charlatan. The accusation points to something far more fundamental than a simple waywardness with the facts. What it names, precisely, is a deficit of sincerity: this is what the critic Hilton Kramer was referring to in 1966 when he spoke of Duchamp’s ‘resplendent triviality’. The charlatan does not set out to peddle mistruths about the world, but rather does not really mean or does not really believe in the work she makes. This suggests a rather Romantic notion, a con-
ØF
ception of artistic being as truth-to-self, which has survived into an era otherwise attuned to auto-invention and to celebration of the type of the trickster in popular culture and the avantgarde alike. In a sense it’s an objection to style, to surface, to those artists who do things for effect. (As though there were some higher value in art than its effects.) But the charlatan–wrangler objects just as regularly to apparent depth: for him no profundity is deep enough to be safe from the shallows of insufficient sincerity. In fact, self-evident profundity would be almost a definition of obvious charlatanry: real depth is harder-won.
We mean it, man! The crucible in which this notion of sincerity gets sublimed into purest dogma is popular music in the late 20th century. This may seem surprising, given the extent to which pop depends on the production of personae, the flame-into-being of a new self, pristine and self-evidently plastic. More exactly, it’s the split between pop and rock effected in the late 1960s that causes accusations of charlatanry to fly. Not that the latter merely conceives of the former as fake: instead, rock itself becomes a testing ground for the artist’s sincerity. What is judged is his willingness to pay his dues, the extent to which
INTRØDUCTIØ and stance of contemporary pop. But what really troubled his detractors – and unconsciously worried even those who embraced the newly electrified Dylan – was surely the suspicion that he had revealed the ‘old Bob Dylan’ as an act in itself. He seemed not to believe in himself, indeed to undo the idea of self-belief on which so much of the culture of the time depended. That this was also the moment at which Dylan most resembled Warhol, physically and artistically, is a clue to just how fundamentally he had unsettled the binary logic of rock sincerity – all that then remained was for David Bowie to fuse the
two personae in one and admit outright to being a self-created sham. My need is such, I pretend too much In the realms of art and literature it is either insouciance or (oddly) excessive labour that will earn the accusation of charlatanry. On the one hand – as with Duchamp’s ready-mades, Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) or Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off (2000) – the artist–charlatan is popularly accused of having done very little, almost nothing, to constitute the work in the first place, or of freighting a flimsy
his art emerges from an authentic milieu, the force of his self-belief and the embeddedness of his message in the principle of reality. To be found wanting in these categories means being branded ‘a hype’: a judgement that is somehow even worse than being dismissed as a frankly commercial pop phenomenon. (Most rock criticism still has not escaped this way of thinking.) The ghost that frets the sceptic in this scene is that of Bob Dylan, circa 1965. Dylan’s electric turn may have been cast by those who objected to it as a betrayal of his oeuvre to date, a move away from the authenticity of folk towards the commercial sound
ØN, THIS IS A F artefact with a weight of meaning it cannot bear. On the other hand, the charlatan works too hard, produces an elaborate opus – prodigious in terms of its size or scope, the time and effort expended in its making – that yields scarcely any significance. (James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939) remains the exemplary instance.) Sometimes, as in the case of Gertrude Stein’s experimental texts, both circumstances obtain: her novel-of-sorts The Making of Americans (1906) is both dauntingly long and apparently written with no care for sense. In philosophy the charlatan may also be
thought to have formulated an over-complex system, or to have coined a needlessly obscure vocabulary that hides an essential poverty at the level of the concept. This was certainly one of the charges levelled at Jacques Derrida by the many academics who objected to his being awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. But the more fundamental objection was that Derrida had undermined the very notion of philosophical truth. That he had done no such thing was really beside the point: what mattered was that his thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism was in itself perceived as a form of charlatanry. The unmasker, so his op-
FILM ponents claimed, was in reality masked – he possessed, as the philosophical journalist A.C. Grayling put it recently, ‘a dishonest mind’. The phrase is almost too telling. It suggests that Grayling – and those who point and shout ‘Charlatan!’ in general – values some occult level of philosophical sincerity above truth itself. He imagines there are other thinkers who really mean it and are therefore axiomatically better thinkers. This is a kind of willed ignorance of the extent to which philosophy has always relied on what Gilles Deleuze called ‘conceptual personae’: the idiot, the sceptic, the dandy, the melan010 011
cholic, even the charlatan himself – quasifictional stand-ins for the philosopher. It is to assume, as Brian Eno once put it, ‘that there is such a thing as the “real” people, and the pretenders. And the other assumption is that there’s something wrong with pretending.’ Here comes the mirror man The accusation of charlatanry is in one sense meaningless, in another essential to what it means to be an artist in the wake of Duchamp, Warhol and Beuys. The traditional tabloid charge of putting one over on the public, having a laugh at their expense, remains as popular as ever. Of course, in contemporary art the figure of the faker is in part just one persona among many that the artist may choose to deploy, a now canonical role to be embraced rather than disavowed. Abject sincerity is equally a career choice of sorts. How to tell the difference between the two? Why exactly would one want to tell the difference between the two? The charlatan, in fact, embodies both: he is the artist who convinces and infuriates in equal measure, who makes a spectacle of his sincerity, turns authenticity into pure performance. The ultimate trickster-theorist of the Modernist era was not an artist but an entertainer. Erik Weisz, known to the world as Harry Houdini, first amazed with his feats of escapology, then devoted the latter years of his career to the exposure of the fakery at work in contemporary Spiritualism. In the 1920s the magician was even suborned to a committee of the Scientific American magazine that was dedicated to exposing the
Spiritualist sham. His professional nemesis, strangely, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had perfected in the character of Sherlock Holmes the type of the perfect sceptic, but later (following the death of his son in World War I) succumbed to the consoling hope of communing with the dead. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, ‘the masked are always great unmaskers’. The sceptic and the charlatan formed the perfect partnership, because they both knew that ‘the honest, if they are to pursue the truth, must be sufficiently competent at dishonesty’. Brian Dillon Frieze (issue 118 October 2008)
ABØUT
TRICKERY, FR
RAUD, ABØUT
LIES.
An Illusionist’s Trick With Bogus Heroes and Expert Villains “I’m a charlatan,” says Orson Welles, looking very fit, his manner that of the practiced con artist who knows that if he confesses to everything, he will be held accountable for nothing. Or is it the other way around? This is the beginning of Mr. Welles’s latest film, F for Fake, a charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A. The opening sequence is set in a fine old European railroad station, the kind with a peaked glass roof that romantics cherish, that Mr. Welles used in The Trial and that urban renewal people tear down. On a colder, snowy day, Anna Karenina might throw herself under some wheels here, but now it’s sunny and warm. The mood is cheerfully skeptical. Mr. Welles, the master of ceremonies, the credited director and writer as well as star of F for Fake, welcomes us with some sleight of hand, turning a small boy’s key into a coin and back again. “The key,” says the charlatan, “is not symbolic of anything.” The warnings keep coming, and you may be reminded of the late Old Gold slogan: “It’s fun to be fooled, but more fun to know.” Perhaps sometimes. F for Fake is a documentary compounded of tricks, reversals, interviews with real forgers and re-creations of events that never happened. It’s as much magic show as movie, a lark that is great fun even when one wishes the magician would take off his black slouch hat and his magician’s cape and get back to making real movies. But did he really make
this one? And is F for Fake not a real movie? There are amused rumors to the effect that Mr. Welles did not actually direct a large part of F for Fake. This part is an extended sequence set in Ibiza involving interviews with Elmyr de Hory, the well-publicized art forger, and Clifford Irving, who wrote Mr. de Hory’s biography (Fake) and later went on to make his own name by attaching it to Howard Hughes’s. The rumors are that these scenes were shot by François Reichenbach, one of the first practitioners of cinéma vérité, who himself
TELL IT shows up throughout F for Fake, for which he receives credit as the production coordinator. F for Fake is so stylish in all its parts, in its editing and particularly in a final fiction sequence that, if it is a fake, it’s a marvelous one, and to hell with the signature on it. Which is one of the things that F for Fake is all about. Midway through the film, after we’ve listened to stories that may or may not be true about Mr. de Hory’s sucess in supplying the art world with fake Matisses, Picassos and Modiglianis, Mr. Welles reminds us that there are no signatures on the cathedral at Chartres. Chartres needs no “experts” to au014 015
thenticate its grandeur, he says. “Experts” are the villans of F for Fake – people who must tell us whether we should swoon when looking at a particular painting or turn up our noses in disgust. Mr. Welles, who has been the subject of a lot of such expertise and takes a dim view of it, has a grand time with the film’s final. This is the fanciful story of how Picasso was tricked by a ravishing Hungarian model, whose grandfather, an art forger, confesses on his deathbed to a furious Picasso that his dearest desire has always been to create “an entirely new Picasso period.” I have some minor reservations about F for Fake. I don’t share Mr. Welles’s affection for either Mr. de Hory or Mr. Irving. Unlike the generous Mr. Welles, they are small potatoes. When Mr. Welles asks, “Doesn’t it say something about our time that Cliff [Irving] could only make it through trickery?,” my answer is no. It says more about Mr. Irving, who as far as I can tell, hasn’t made it at all. Vincent Canby The New York Times (September 28 1975)
IT BY TH
HE FIRESIDE Ø
ØR
Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time. After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel. The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety. His first film was Citizen Kane (1941), which he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in as Charles Foster Kane. It is often considered the greatest film ever made. Welles was always an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career. While he struggled for creative control in the face of studios, many of his films were heavily edited and others were left unreleased. His
distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as “the ultimate auteur.” In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics, and a wide survey of critical consensus, bestof lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time. Well known for his baritone voice, Welles was also a well regarded actor and was voted number 16 in AFI’s 100 Years... 100 Stars list of the greatest American film actors of all time. He was also a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety shows in the war years.
018 019
IN A MARKET
TPLACE ØR IN
A MØVIE, ALM
Entre Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving e Orson Welles No início do filme, Orson Welles dirige-se ao espectador e num acto de privacidade confessional confirma-lhe a visualização de uma obra baseada em factos reais, convidando-o a aceder à montagem cinematográfica e às opções e determinações que esta implica, na elaboração e interpretação da narrativa. Para exacerbar, perante o olhar do espectador, a concepção do objecto fílmico como produtor de sentidos imaginários, Orson Welles transporta-o aos bastidores das filmagens, invertendo a sua posição com o espectador e afirma: This is a movie about trickery, about forgery, about lies.
Nesse sentido, a visualização dos bastidores do filme é determinante para a construção de uma ambivalência narrativa, já que desmente a estrutura ficcional proposta pela dimensão cinematográfica mas amplia, em simultâneo, a possibilidade do ficcional, ao desviar a atenção do espectador para a verdade do cenário. A fusão entre documental e ficcional revela a dificuldade de circunscrever o filme a uma única categoria: se por um lado documenta e adopta factos reais, como é advertido inicialmente pelo narrador, propõem-se no final, legitimado por essa
MØST ANY STØ advertência, inverter o labirinto documental para trabalhar duplamente a ilusão cinematográfica perante o espectador. Neste filme, parte da biografia destes três distintos ensaístas na condição do falso, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving e Orson Welles, é cruzada numa estrutura narrativa descritiva e factual que propicia uma leitura fiel às informações fictícias nela contidas. O registo documental do filme valoriza uma narrativa que se constrói pela multiplicação e fragmentação dos referentes que, através da colagem e alternância cronológica das biografias, intensifica o domínio da manipu-
lação e trabalha o fora de cena do documento e o seu potencial especulativo. O género do documentário não realiza um tratamento inventivo da realidade e dispensa por isso o recurso a actores ou a uma encenação ou reinvenção do espaço de acção. Em F for Fake, essa proposta é trabalhada perante o espectador e os limites das noções entre actuação e encenação, actor profissional e actor amador, entre simulação, imitação ou improvisação, tornam-se campos de ambiguidade que oscilam continuamente perante o olhar do espectador. O genérico inicial, em que se vê Oja Kodar
(n. 1941) a passear pelas ruas de Paris e a ser observada atentamente por uma série de transeuntes masculinos, filmados sem o conhecimento da presença das câmaras, revela uma das intenções que Orson Welles explora no decorrer do filme – o controlo sobre a capacidade do espectador percepcionar a condução do seu olhar no interior instável do filme. Orson Welles interessa-se pela suspensão perante a manipulação e montagem rápida dos dados biográficos das principais personagens, a dúvida sobre a veracidade desses dados e a importância em confirmar essa veracidade. O reconhecimento de que o desenlace do filme se encontra exactamente no prolon-
gamento dessa dúvida e na vontade em testar essa fusão entre verdadeiro e falso, é enfatizada pela própria ilusão cinematográfica que, neste filme, é ironicamente questionada. A visualização da montagem do próprio filme, que interrompe consecutivamente as sequências de planos em diversas cenas, é uma indicação explícita das condições de escolha e corte adoptadas, anunciando um momento de relacionamento com o espectador e uma proposta de perturbação da sua condição de receptor. Welles dá acesso à estrutura do filme, aos enganos da montagem, aos argumentos preteridos, elegendo propositadamente uma indumentária de ilusionista para apresentar e
ØRY IS ALMØS descrever as ligações entre as diversas personagens e os locais das filmagens. Harry Houdini (1874–1926), que Orson Welles enuncia no início do filme, era um protagonista da arte da fuga pela capacidade de manobrar e transformar as escalas do seu corpo. Acreditava que podia potencialmente escapar e, desse modo, interromper o registo do contínuo na exclusividade de um espaço mínimo e limitado, produzindo mais do que a ilusão, uma construção estética do desaparecimento. Para Orson Welles, falar de ilusão é perceber esse espaço ínfimo de fuga em que a própria ilusão trabalha e que se constitui como uma falha, um 024 025
espaço não preenchido que permite praticar o falseamento e onde se desvenda a persistente incerteza da ausência ou presença de manipulação, confrontando o espectador com a ironia dessa questão: When the authority says fake is real, what is real and what is fake? Susana Lourenço Marques retirado de Falso Acaso e Possível Coincidência, Dafne Editora (2009)
ST CERTAINLY
SØME KIND
ØF LIE.
Os Segredos de Orson Welles 1. Para a tal ilha deserta, onde só se pudesse levar os tais vinte filmes – ou mesmo os tais cinquenta –, eu nunca incluiria, na minha lista, um filme de Orson Welles. Como não levaria nenhum Eisenstein, para escolher cineasta de imensidão comparável. Num caso como no noutro, a minha admiração por esses realizadores geniais (e peso a palavra) não destinge para o meu gosto. Com a cabeça, tiro-lhes o chapéu. Outras partes do meu corpo não pulsam com a mesma irreverência. Quando não os tenho diante dos olhos, esqueço-me deles, embora raça eu fosse se esquecesse, só por um momento, que todos
sempre lhes devemos tudo, como do próprio Welles disse o próprio Godard. Sucede que nesta segunda quinzena de Novembro, como na primeira quinzena de Dezembro, tenho Welles diante dos olhos, por via do ciclo que a Cinemateca está a organizar. E quando a fantástica figura me entra assim pela casa dentro é impossível não ficar obcecado por ela. Como a boneca de Carlos Queiroz, arromba as portas de todos os armários, não cabe em nenhuma gaveta, está em toda a parte, a todos os cantos. Welles, Welles, Welles. Pela milionésima vez, me interrogo sobre o que nele é fake ou sobre o que nele é fuck, so-
BUT NØT que é cada vez maior o “outro lado do vento”, ou seja, a imensidão de imagens, registros fílmicos, material para obras incompletas, vestígios das suas incontáveis presenças na televisão ou no teatro, semidescobertos ou por descobrir. A arca de Pessoa é uma caixinha de costura comparada com os subterrâneos de Welles. The Other Side of the Wind. é o título de um dos muitos filmes incompletos de Welles, filmado entre 1970 e 1976 nos Estados Unidos, em França e em Espanha. O dia de anos de um aclamadíssimo realizador de Hollywood (John Huston fez desse realiza028 029
dor). A corte que o cerca, como os críticos que queriam escrever um livro sobre ele (Peter Bogdanovich e Joseph McBride, os mais persistentes exegetas de Welles, interpretam os críticos em caricatura feroz), as candidatas a vedetes, os amigos e os inimigos. “É um filme dentro de um filme”, disse Welles. “Tentativa do velho cineasta para fazer uma espécie de filme de contracultura, num estilo oninizante e surrealizante.” Seis anos a filmar é muito ano, embora seja pouco se comparado com os dezoito anos (19551973) consagrados ao lendário Don Quijote. Percebe-se o desespero dos produtores que
bre as suas negras magias, o seu “cortejo infernal de alarmes”, sobre os seus abismos, ações, desejos e sonhos. “Welles avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant”? Foram as suas asas de gigante que o impediram de andar? Baudelaire, tanto quanto Shakespeare, ajuda a percebê-lo? Continuo sem respostas que completamente me sosseguem ou inteiramente me desassosseguem. Mas este homem, que passou os filmes a falar de segredos (o Rosebud de Kane, o segredo do rei citado em Arkadin), guarda ainda um segredo, que ninguém se aproximou de revelar. Guarda ainda? Guarda cada vez mais. Dezoito anos depois da sua morte, aos 70 anos, sabe-se
THIS TIME. e sucessivamente pagaram, sem resultados finais, as sucessivas versões desses filmes, ou, ainda, de The Deep, The Dreamers, etc. Welles defendeu-se perguntando por que é que se admite que Proust tenha levado vinte anos a escrever a Recherche (também sem a acabar) e a ele lhe não deixavam tempo idêntico para filmar, refilmar, eliminar, incluir, as horas e horas de material dessas obras, inconcluíveis em filme, ou só concluíveis à custa de muita vigarice, como sucedeu com a versão do Quixote do espanhol Jess Franco, estreada, com pompa e circunstância, sete anos depois da morte de Welles, na Expo 92,
de Sevilha. Foi desculpa de mau pagador? Minado por dentro por muitos demónios, foi ele quem já não conseguiu dar sentido aos mil apontamentos contraditórios que foi filmando? Ou, deliberadamente, nunca quis concluir esses filmes, para deixar a lenda sobrepor-se aos factos? Ninguém me deu resposta que me convencesse, quer entre os seus defensores quer entre os seus detratores. Mas a história que mais se me aproxima da dessas sinfonias, que nem incompletas são, é a do velho conto popular, em que o Vento, personificado num ogro, se refugia a espaços na casa da velha mãe, sem nunca se saber quando vem ou quando parte, se volta para repousar, no limite do fôlego, ou se volta para destruir, quando o vasto mundo já não o pode conter. Welles foi esse vento (esse outro lado do vento) que soprou onde quis e não soprou onde não quis, jogando com a sua própria força, força da natureza em sentido próprio e figurado? Ou um maverick vencido, após essa obra imensa que é o Falstaff dele (1966) que, segundo McBride, foi o seu testamento, o filme a partir do qual só há obras póstumas? Oja Kodar, a última das mulheres de Welles e que esteve em Lisboa esta semana, contrariou a imagem varredora do homem que, durante os últimos anos da vida, pôs toda a energia num processo autodestrutivo. E disse que se há imagem de Welles, que corresponde ao personagem, é o último plano de Falstaff, no filme citado, quando Hal, o amigo a que Falstaff dera todo o amor, sobe ao trono sob o nome de Henrique V.
Lembram-se? Eu ajudo. Subir ao trono não é força de expressão, porque o jovem príncipe, que tanto parecera amar (ou tanto amava) Falstaff, sobe pelo plano acima, depois de rei, e se transforma num esguio boneco, quase sem formas nem contornos, em que a coroa é o único atributo visível, perdidos os olhos, a boca ou o coração, tudo quanto o caracterizava enquanto fora o inseparável amigo de Sir John. Mas Hal sempre foi uma espécie de Iago, o que era evidente para todos excepto para Falstaff, porque Falstaff, como o próprio Welles disse, “é a mais genial concepção de um homem bom, o melhor homem jamais representado em qualquer drama. Os pecadilhos dele são tão pequenos e tão fabulosas são as piadas que ele tira desses pecadilhos. A bondade dele é como pão, como vinho...”. Por isso, Falstaff nunca percebeu que Hal só é seu amigo enquanto ele lhe é útil para os seus instintos parricidas (primeira parte do Henry IV) mas, na segunda parte, tem que matar a sua libido, a sua narcisista auto-adoração (o próprio Falstaff). Por isso, Falstaff acredita até ao fim, contra todas as evidências, que o rei continuará a ser Hal e o continuará a amar. Nem acredita quando ouve Henrique V chamar-lhe “that old, white-bearded Satan”. Daí, o seu fabuloso discurso de defesa. Daí o seu último brado: “My King! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!” O rei volta-se para ele e, rígido que nem uma estátua, diz as palavras mais terríveis: “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” Só então Falstaff percebe, não
percebendo, e nada há de mais pungente do que esse plano silencioso do velho, como se não acreditasse no que lhe está a acontecer. É um plano mais de dor do que de desespero, mais de desabrigo do que de revolta, mais de desconjuntamento do que de ressentimento. Teria sido assim Orson Welles, sob as máscaras do wonder boy, da arrogância, do poder ou da vaidade? Como alguém já disse, ele, a quem tanto se censurou ter‐se sobreposto ao próprio Shakespeare, foi a mais complexa personagem inventada por Shakespeare, convertendo em si os destinos de Shylock e de Macbeth, de Falstaff e de Otelo, de Ricardo III e do rei Lear. “I indeed believe in the existence of evil (...). Evil is a force so great that it is beyond me to decide whether it’s generated entirely within man or whether it is (...) a contagion.” Como todas as doenças contagiosas, pega-se. 2. Num artigo que julgo inédito (Some minor keys to Orson Welles), Peter von Bagh acentuou a dimensão do fake sobre aquela que até aqui me levou. Recorda a lenda que diz que a carreira radiofónica de Welles começou quando ele foi o único a saber imitar o choro de cinco diferentes bebés, ao tempo do nascimento das famosas quíntuplas Dionne. A partir daí, foi convidado regular do famoso programa The March of Time, bizarra combinação de “real” e “falso”. No Citizen Kane, o jornal de actualidades do início (sobre a morte de Kane) chama-se News on the March e é um “fetiche” ainda mais profundo do que o programa da rádio em que se inspira. “Fake of a Fake”, na expressão de von Bagh, vai ao ponto de juntar
na mesma imagem Kane e Hitler, num paroxismo de ficção. Mas se, desde aí até F for Fake (1973) ou até ao abortado projeto (mais um) de The Magic Show, essa dimensão é capital para outra aproximação ao segredo de Welles, de tudo o que vi agora o que mais me comoveu (a rima mais profunda com a derradeira aparição de Falstaff) é um pequeno filme de três minutos e de um só plano fixo, chamado The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh. Foi a última aparição de Welles no ecrã. Poucos meses antes de morrer, já sem brilho nos olhos, Welles “escreve” uma carta a um amigo, também moribundo: Bill Cronshow. E escolhe uma passagem do diário de Lindbergh, na sua célebre travessia do Atlântico. “I want to sit quietly in this cockpit and let the realization of my completed flight sink in.” Sem sons nem dor, o único desejo é que Paris esteja mais longe do que está e que a viagem dure mais tempo, mais tempo. Mas todas as viagens têm que acabar e nunca há o tempo que ao tempo pedimos e que do tempo esperamos. Como Lindbergh, Orson Welles chegou ao fim numa noite muito clara e com gasolina para uma viagem muito maior. Como todos nós, mas quase nenhum de nós o sabe. João Bénard da Costa Os Filmes da Minha Vida, Ed. Assírio & Alvim (2003)
THIS IS A
PRØMISE.
Purloined Letter There were plenty of advantages to living in Paris in the early 1970s, especially if one was a movie buff with time on one’s hands. The Parisian film world is relatively small, and simply being on the fringes of it afforded some exciting opportunities, even for a writer like myself who’d barely published. Leaving the Cinémathèque at the Palais de Chaillot one night, I was invited to be an extra in a Robert Bresson film that was being shot a few blocks away. And in early July 1972, while writing for Film Comment about Orson Welles’s first Hollywood project, Heart of Darkness, I learned Welles was in town and sent a letter to him at Antégor, the editing studio where he was working, asking a few simple questions – only to find myself getting a call from one of his assistants two days later: “Mr. Welles was wondering if you could have lunch with him today.” I met him at La Méditerranée – the same seafood restaurant that would figure prominently in the film he was editing – and when I began by expressing my amazement that he’d invited me, he cordially explained that this was because he didn’t have time to answer my letter. The film he was working on was then called Hoax, and he said it had something to do with the art forger Elmyr de Hory and the recent scandal involving Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes. “A documentary?” “No, not a documentary – a new kind of film,” he replied, though he didn’t elaborate. This sounds like a pompous boast, though, like most of what he told me that afternoon about other matters, it turned out to be ac-
curate. He could have said “essay” or “essay film,” which is what many are inclined to call F for Fake nowadays. But on reflection, this label is almost as imprecise and as misleading as “documentary,” despite the elements of both essay and documentary (as well as fiction) employed in the mix. Welles’s subsequent Filming “Othello” (1978) clearly qualifies as an essay, and this is plainly why Phillip Lopate, in his extensive examination of that form (in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies), prefers it – citing in particular its sincerity, which the earlier film can’t claim to the same degree. But in qualifying as Welles’s most public film and his most private – hiding in plain sight most of its inexhaustible riches – this isn’t a movie that can be judged by the kinds of yardsticks we apply to most others. When I wound up getting invited to an early private screening more than a year later, on October 15, 1973, the film was then called Fake. I was summoned to Club 13 – a chic establishment run by Claude Lelouch, often used for industry screenings – by film historian and longtime. Cinémathèque employee Lotte Eisner, whose response to the film was much less favorable than mine. When I ventured, “This doesn’t look much like an Orson Welles film,” she replied, “It isn’t even a film.” But neither of us had a scrap of contextual information beyond what Welles had said to me, and it wasn’t until almost a decade later that he noted to Bill Krohn, in an interview 034 035
for Cahiers du cinéma, that he deliberately avoided any shots that might be regarded as “typically Wellesian.” The following year, the International Herald Tribune reported him as saying, “In F for Fake I said I was a charlatan and didn’t mean it...because I didn’t want to sound superior to Elmyr, so I emphasized that I was a magician and called it a charlatan, which isn’t the same thing. And so I was faking even then. Everything was a lie. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t.” To complicate matters further, the film’s production company sent me a fiche technique a few days after the screening, saying that the film’s title was Question Mark, that it was co-directed by Orson Welles and François Reichenbach (presumably because of the outtakes of his documentary about art forgery that were used) and written by Olga Palinkas (the real name of Oja Kodar), and that its leading actors were Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving (but not Welles). Clearly a “new kind of film” creates problems of definition and description for everyone, not merely critics, and by the time the title mutated one last time into F for Fake (an appellation suggested by Kodar – who truthfully can also be credited with the story about her and Picasso, which Welles adapted), everyone was thoroughly confused. “For the time being,” I concluded in Film Comment at the time, “I am content to call it The New Orson Welles Film, co-directed by Irving and de Hory, written by Jorge Luis Borges, and produced by Howard Hughes.... As Welles remarks about Chartres, the most important thing is that it exists.” 036 037
It would be comforting to say my early appreciation of F for Fake included an adequate understanding of just how subversive it was (and is). But leaving aside the critique of the art world and its commodification via “experts” – which is far more radical in its implications than Citizen Kane’s critique of William Randolph Hearst – it has only been in recent years, with the rewind and stopframe capacities of video, that the sheer effrontery of many of Welles’s more important tricks can be recognized, making this film more DVD-friendly than any of his others. It’s also taken some time for us to realize that his methodology in putting this film to-
FØR TH gether gave him a kind of freedom with his materials that he never had before or since. For a filmmaker who often avowed that the art of cinema resided in editing, F for Fake must have represented his most extended effort. According to Dominique Villain, who interviewed the film’s chief editor for her 1991 book Le Montage au cinéma, the editing took Welles a solid year, working seven days a week – a routine suspended only for the length of time that it took Michel Legrand to compose the score – and requiring the use of three separate editing rooms. The key to Welles’s fakery here, as it is
HE NEXT HØUR
throughout his work, is his audience’s imagination and the active collaboration it performs – most often unknowingly – with his own designs, the kind of unconscious or semiconscious complicity that magicians and actors both rely on. (“A magician is just an actor...playing the part of a magician.”) It’s what enables us to accept Welles as Kodar’s Hungarian grandfather and Kodar as Picasso in the final Orly sequence, when they’re both dressed in black and moving about in the fog. And the key to this key can be found both literally and figuratively in the first words Welles speaks in the film – initially heard over darkness that gradually fades in to the window of a train compartment in a Paris station: “For my next experiment, ladies and gentlemen, I would appreciate the loan of any small personal object from your pocket – a key, a box of matches, a coin....” This proves to be a literal key in the pocket of a little boy standing in for the rest of us. Welles promptly turns it into a coin, then back into a key inside the boy’s pocket, meanwhile offering us brief glimpses of and exchanges with Reichenbach’s film crew, then Oja Kodar as she opens the train window. “As for the key,” he concludes, “it was not symbolic of anything.” One sees his droll point, but I beg to differ. By virtue of being personal and pocketed, then taken away and eventually returned to its owner, the key is precisely symbolic of the viewer’s creative investment and participation solicited in Welles’s “experiment” over the next eighty-odd minutes. And distinguishing between what’s public and private
in these transactions, both for the viewer and for Welles, is much less easy than it sounds. A movie in which Welles can’t resist showing off the beauty and sexiness of his mistress at a time when he’s still married seems downright brazen, especially in contrast to the tact he shows in alluding to de Hory’s homosexuality, yet he can’t simply or invariably be accused of wearing his heart and libido on his sleeve. In some ways, the self-mocking braggadocio – such as ordering steak au poivre from the same waiter carrying off the remains of a gigantic lobster – becomes a kind of mask, while his deepest emotions and intentions are hidden away in his own pockets, just as
EVERYT side another can labeled “PRACTIONERS.” Because we’re so preoccupied with following the unorthodox direction of our reading imposed by the camera – proceeding from right to left and then from down to up – most of us are apt to read practioners, a word existing in no dictionary, as practitioners. And given how loaded, tainted, and double-sided the word expert is soon to become in this movie, it’s possible to conclude that the real collaborators and “practioners” – the spectators of Welles’s magic who collaborate with him by putting it into practice – are none other than ourselves. In other words, we
firmly as our own private investments remain in ours. Those who decide that the exposés of various hoaxes (including those of de Hory, Irving, and Welles) are superficial and obvious may be overlooking the degree to which these very revelations are masking the perpetration of various others, some of which are neither superficial nor obvious. For an immediate example of this process, consider the word clusters in the title sequence that we’re asked to read on the sides of film cans as the camera moves left from “a film by Orson Welles” to “WITH THE,” then up in turn to “COLLABORATION,” “OF CERTAIN,” and “EXPERT,” which sits along-
THING YØU HE know best and we know nothing. Similarly, we should look very closely at what we’re being shown in the early “girl watching” sequence – perhaps the most intricately edited stretch in the film, especially in contrast to the more leisurely and conventionally edited late sequence devoted to Pablo Picasso’s ogling of Kodar. (Both sequences incidentally feature a tune that Legrand calls “Orson’s Theme,” though Welles’s placements of it suggest it might more fittingly be called “Oja’s Theme.”) If we freeze-frame in the right places toward the end of “girl watching,” we’ll discover that a couple of full-frontal long
shots of “Oja Kodar” approaching us on a city street don’t actually show Kodar at all but another woman (her sister) of roughly the same size in the same dress. Given the whole sequence’s elaborate peekaboo tactics – a mosaic of almost perpetual fragmentation – it stands to reason that two very brief shots pretending to reveal what many previous angles have concealed can readily fool us by hiding in full view, just like Edgar Allen Poe’s “purloined letter.” As Finnegans Wake was for Joyce, F for Fake was for Welles a playful repository of public history intertwined with private in-
jokes as well as duplicitous meanings, an elaborate blend of sense and nonsense that carries us along regardless of what’s actually being said. For someone whose public and private identities became so separate that they wound up operating routinely in separate households and sometimes on separate continents, exposure and concealment sometimes figured as reverse sides of the same coin, and Welles’s desire to hide inside his own text here becomes a special kind of narcissism. When Welles made his nevereleased nine-minute F for Fake trailer three years later, he even avoided having his name spoken or seen (“Modesty forbids”) – except
for when Gary Graver, his cinematographer and partial stand-in as host, prompts him with, “Ten seconds more, Orson.” For a filmmaker who studiously avoided repeating himself and sought always to remain a few steps ahead of his audience’s expectations, thereby rejecting any obvious ways of commodifying his status as an auteur, Welles arguably found a way in F for Fake to contextualize large portions of his career while undermining many cherished beliefs about authorship and the means by which “experts,” “God’s own gift to the fakers,” validate such notions. It has often been asserted that this film
HEAR FRØM was his indirect response to Pauline Kael’s “Raising Kane” and its (subsequently discredited) suggestion that practically all of Citizen Kane’s screenplay was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz. It’s worth adding, however, that his most direct and immediate response to Kael’s screed was his masterful semiforgery of “The Kane Mutiny,” a polemical article that deceptively ran in Esquire under Peter Bogdanovich’s byline, included many quotations from Welles, and cogently responded to Kael’s essay on a point-by-point basis – a remarkable display of Welles’s gifts as a writer that paradoxically had to conceal this fact. In her writing on Welles, 040 041
University of Michigan professor Catherine L. Benamou has noted the echoes of the fire consuming the Rosebud sled in the burning of a couple of forged canvases, and one could also cite the way that various “conversations” manufactured through editing reproduce aspects of the community chatter about the Ambersons in The Magnificent Ambersons, or the way a Gypsy-like fiddle, Welles’s Slavic intonations, and all the frenetic plane-hopping call to mind Mr. Arkadin. There’s even a cuckoo clock thrown in at one point that summons up both Arkadin and The Third Man. For all his regrets, this self-referentiality is one of the many
elements that make F for Fake the most celebratory of Welles’s films. As he puts it while distant views of Chartres nearly replicate our first views of Kane’s Xanadu: “Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing.” Jonathan Rosenbaum The Criterion Collection (April 25 2005)
US
The Ultimate Mirror In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness – and transcends them A key image in Citizen Kane appears after Susan Kane leaves Xanadu forever. First, Kane destroys her bedroom and, at the end of his eruption, he discovers the glass ball that evoked the film’s opening line and enigmatic coda: “Rosebud.” He walks from the room past stunned servants and, seconds later, a pair of mirrors in which he’s briefly reflected infinitely into nothingness. A key image for the film because it limns Kane’s elusive real self, but also a key moment in film and literature for the transition from the modern to the postmodern. “Postmodern” is a slippery concept, so much so that the difficulty in defining it touches the very essence of its meaning. The transition from the modern to postmodern world represents a move from irony (which suggests some comprehension of our beliefs, as well as involvement in our present circumstances) to deadpan (a lack of surprise to, and increasing remoteness from, our world). Postmodern literature, art, and film detach the audience from the content of the artistic subject, with little or no pretense to re-engage the two. As a result, the individual’s place in the world, as well as in the artistic work, diminishes to a cipher as one gets lost amid a plenitude of realities – “realities” because, they increase in proportion to our inability to resist them (from our stance of weakened beliefs). The postmodern world, thus, has little tragedy left in it – tragedy needs a heightened 044 045
if not embarrassing measure of belief. Things must matter gravely. Charles Foster Kane nearly takes on a tragic dimension when we view his potential for greatness. Yet the more we ponder his greatness in Citizen Kane, that is, the more the film’s other characters reflect on Kane’s life, the less tangible his greatness becomes. At his most dynamic and grave, Kane shapes the news that people pay attention to; the Spanish-American War becomes “his” war; he collects great art from all over the world; and he becomes so important that he can run for governor (possibly on the way to a presidential bid). Paradoxically, his trivialization of the news (a prominent headline reads: SPANISH GALLEONS FOUND OFF THE JERSEY COAST) underlines the diminution of his character. While much is made of his inability to love, combined with a pursuit to replace or win back his mother’s love, the real tragedy may be that he’s creating a world that has no room for tragic men or gestures! Amidst the scandal of his love affair with Susan Kane, his losing the governor’s race, and his divorce, Kane’s character calcifies into a controlling, self-centered monster, beyond giving and receiving love, beyond all tragedy, at the entrance to postmodernity. The infinite mirror images of Kane recall the many Kanes we had heard about throughout the movie, the many Kanes that would never coalesce into the substantial tragic figure he imagined himself as, complete with the key to the mystery of his ultimate failure. Indeed,
IS
many of the characters played by Orson Welles in his movies – Michael O’Hara in The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Franz Kindler in The Stranger (1946), Sheriff Quinlin in Touch of Evil (1958), Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1965) – collapse upon themselves psychologically as their last illusions are stripped away. They aren’t the men they supposed themselves or had others believe them to be; their moral centers have weakened and don’t maintain the authority or power they once had. When we get to a late film in Welles’ career, the documentary F for Fake (1976), he formulates his most explicit statement about contemporary reality, leaving little room for greatness, let alone
tragedy. And if F for Fake seems a superficial film, we will then have experienced the first lesson of postmodernism: playfulness, conscious illusions, and an undisguised reflexiveness about making movies. Put another way, what is seen in the film that seems real is not as real as it appears – but most especially we can’t trust the filmmaker Welles himself, he will lie to us and deceive us, if only to get at the heart of the movie’s main contention: you cannot trust anyone, especially anyone who asserts his or her authority without any basis or proof. And what seems at first glance an obvious point, we discover in practice that the more obvious it is the less we’ll get the point (precisely the
REALLY lesson of the last part of the film, which deals with a story about Picasso and one of his mistresses). We are just watching a film, a bunch of moving images that represent a certain reality. The problem with movies as an art, the most difficult thing to understand, is that what we are shown and how we see what we’re shown have never been the same. However, the authority of the giant screen image is such that audiences have tended to view what they see literally. The image on the screen overwhelms us (Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie, and other books by culture critics, have cited the movie image as the turning point for the preoccupying of the American mind), and Welles
both takes advantage of this situation and tries to make us conscious of it. The film image is only an image, and on this subtly unobvious premise Welles frames F for Fake and validates the fakery of film artistry by evincing the fakery of life/people, suggesting that movies have become the art of the 20th century precisely because of this innate mechanism to handle the unreal, the fake (again, Gabler rightly shows that the preponderance of movie fakery has been uncritically accepted by Americans; whereas artistic fakery might well be the antidote). The structure of F for Fake also plays out the
TRUE
meaning of the mirror imagery from earlier films. At its center, the film portrays two great fakers. If you’re over forty years old, you will remember Clifford Irving, who claimed to have had recorded interviews with Howard Hughes and published a biography based on these tapes. The hoax was finally exposed when Hughes allowed himself to be interviewed over the radio to disclaim any knowledge of Irving and the interviews. The episode caused a worldwide sensation, and Irving went to jail for a few years. Coincidentally, Irving had written a book called Fake dealing with an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, the original subject of Welles documentary, the perfect living metaphor for Welles’ design: an artist who recreates artwork by the modern masters that few people if anyone can distinguish from the original work of that master. Elmyr was never prosecuted for selling many of his art works to major museums around the world; no museum could risk the humiliation (and subsequent loss of belief in their institution) of admitting that they had bought fake Manets, Cezannes, and Picassos. Elmyr lived in relative peace and opulence on the island of Ibiza, which also happened to be a Welles haunt. The challenge that Elmyr presented to experts and authorities (civil and artistic) must have infatuated Welles greatly. The fragile basis on which all authority in society rests and how easily it can be undermined couldn’t have been more poignantly developed. Also, Welles understood the average person’s distrust for artistic and intellectual experts and critics, and that nothing would
cause him greater satisfaction than finding out that experts couldn’t tell fakes from real works. This might seem passé in a world that produces movies like The Matrix (1999), which bases its entire save-the-world plot on the fact that nobody can tell the real from an illusion. Welles delights at the proposition that a great faker, like Elmyr, is being written about by another faker, Clifford Irving. Further, Welles not only hammers home this point but starts to undermine his own sincerity (for instance, calling his acting vocation the ultimate fakery). Chance and coincidence are also hallmarks of postmodern life, and one cannot but hesitate to believe Welles when he suggests that Howard Hughes, not William Randolph Hearst, was the initial model for Charles Foster Kane in an early script. It seems hard to believe because Welles co-writer Herman Mankewicz was a friend of Hearst and spent much time at Hearst’s Xanadu-like estate at San Simeon. How convenient that we should find out that Kane was originally based on the life of Howard Hughes after the Irving/ Hughes scandal was exposed. Yet one must recognize these titillations: Welles and Hughes did have contact with each other before 1941; Hughes had distinguished himself as a film director (there’s also much of Welles in the Kane character, although Hearst was bitten by the Hollywood bug through his relationship with longtime mistress Marion Davies); Hughes was a recluse and saved and stored many objects from his life in many warehouses much like Kane does. Through serendipity
(that the Irving biography of Hughes should collapse in the midst of the filming of F for Fake) and artfulness, Welles creates another succession of mirrored reflections that purposefully blur the real and the fake until we can no longer see which is which. The illusions proceed to a human vanishing point, Elmyr himself. Elmyr also represents a most dangerous person. An original fraud. (In many ways, a mirror image himself to the celebrity: a person known for being known!) A criminal whose crimes don’t resemble real crimes; moreover, his crimes once detected must go unpunished. Or nearly unpunished. He must
AND promise to make no more fakes. Although, Welles hints that the circumstantial evidence shows that when Irving needed a forged signature, Elmyr was the best candidate to provide it. In fact, I detected a melancholic (not quite tragic) note in F for Fake when Welles reflects on the fate of Elmyr’s talents being absorbed by his forgeries, as if his “real” talent suppresses real talent, possibly a talent Elmyr is afraid to test. Welles further tweaks those in a position of expertise when journalists listen to Howard Hughes over a radio receiver telling them that he has never met Clifford Irving. The journal048 049
ists had known Hughes twenty or twenty-five years before and were there to “authenticate” his voice. With great authority they inform the world that they were listening to the real Howard Hughes. (And one can’t help but think how fraudulent journalism has become lately as the news devolved into entertainment.) Yes, it probably was Hughes; yet, this “real” Howard Hughes had descended many steps into his personal unrealities and (according to the book Citizen Hughes by Michael Drosnin) addressed the media sitting naked with a long beard and fingernails several inches long. His reality was more bizarre than the story of real artistic forgeries! Throughout F for Fake, Welles sustains a lightly detached air, as if the film were an artistic exercise or game, which might disappoint those anticipating the tragic failings of Welles’ “great” men; indeed, this film seems to be more of Welles coming to terms with everyone’s (including his own) expectations of his own greatness since Citizen Kane. Welles himself succumbed to celebrity in his later years, his girth beyond even Hank Quinlin proportions. Only within the infinity of mirrors that’s emblematic of his own artistic themes, Welles could at once deflate the expectations but also finally transcend them.. Robert Castle Bright Lights Film Journal (issue 45/2004)
BASED ØN
SØLID FACT.
AND NØW GIVE SØME TIME... WHAT'S TIME? THIS IS THE
TIME TØ PRET WHERE THE A WINGS AND TR TØ ANØTHER I GIVE TØ YØU ART, AN AUTH
TEND... ACTIØN GAINS RANSPØRT US DIMENSIØN. U A PIECE ØF HENTIC ØNE.
ANDREIA ØLIVEIRA 1991
ALEXANDRA MEIRELES 1991
DENIZ TASAR 1990
CLÁUDIA CARDØSO 1991
ANNE KETTUNEN 1981
SARA PØNTES 1991
FÁBIØ BRITØ 1990
KATRIN TAVARES 1991
RITA RØCHA 1991
PAULA CARVALHØ 1991
GABRIELA ARAÚJØ 1991
JØANA MØREIRA 1990
ANA MØREIRA 1991
DIØGØ DIAS 1988
JULIANA CARVALHØ 1989
ISABEL TAVARES 1989
SÉRGIO ALVES 1989
JØÃØ MATØS 1991
MANUEL SERRA 1989
DIANA MØRAIS 1991
MARCELINA GAJDA 1986
I DID PRØMISE THAT FØR ØNE HØUR, I'D TELL YØU ØNLY
THE TRUTH. T LADIES AND G IS ØVER. FØR SEVENTEEN M I’VE BEEN LYI HEAD ØFF.
THAT HØUR, GENTLEMEN, R THE PAST MINUTES, ING MY
THERE'S NØ WAY BACK, IT'S LIFETIME... ABØUT THE AUTHØR.
João Matos nascido a 26 de Junho de 1991, desde muito cedo desenvolveu o seu gosto pela música, contando com a participação em alguns projectos musicais. Começou a sua formação específica em Artes Visuais em 2006, e a partir deste ano desenvolveu algum interesse pelo design gráfico e projectos multimédia. No ano de 2009, validou a sua entrada na ESAD, Escola Superior de Artes e Design, estudando a área de design de comunicação, desenvolvendo paralelamente alguns projectos na área. Destaca o primeiro semestre do último ano da sua licenciatura muito importante para sua formação, com a experiência ERASMUS. Dirigiu-se assim para Barcelona, onde teve a oportunidade de completar um semestre da sua formação académica na prestigiada escola catalã BAU, Escola Superior de Disseny. Neste período de intercâmbio, teve a oportunidade de desenvolver um leque de projectos que lhe conferiram uma maior amplitude e alargamento de conhecimentos no design. Completou algumas disciplinas de audiovisual neste período, que lhe deram a oportunidade de manipular também esta área, e assim poder combinar as duas. Actualmente encontra-se a acabar a licenciatura em design de comunicação na ESAD, continuando paralelamente com projectos musicais.
CØNCEPTS MAKE PRØJECTS GRØW.
F for Fake, um filme que gira paradoxalmente sobre dois polos: a verdade da mentira, e a mentira da verdade. É assim um documentário que nos coloca questões sem as responder. Para a execução deste livro F for Fake, pretendeu-se escolher um pequeno formato de fácil manuseamento, contendo todo o material do filme no livro. Ao folhear este livro o espectador dá conta da presença de duas narrativas, a sequencia dos textos com as imagens e a adição de 2 citações que marcam profundamente a narrativa do filme. Citações estas que percorrem o texto, e no seu conjunto fazem o transporte do espectador para o mundo espacial do filme na forma bidimensional de um livro.
F for Fake France / Iran / West Germany 1973 89 min / 35 mm / color language: english / french / spanish directed and written by Orson Welles directors of photography: Christian Odasso and Gary Graver production coordinator: Francois Reicheubach editors: Marie-Sophie Dubus and Dominique Engerer music: Michel Legrand with Orson Welles, Clifford Irving, Oia Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Edith Irving, Francois Reichenbach, Joseph Cotten, Richard Wilson, Paul Stewart, Sasa Devcic, Gary Graver, Andres Vicente Gomez, Julio Palinkas, Christian Odasso, Francoise Widof
Synopsis Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles’s free-form documentary, the legendary filmmaker (and selfdescribed charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career - the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving. Welles embarks on a dizzying cinematic journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes - not the least of whom is Welles himself.
Impressão Digital Nº de exemplares: 1 Papel: 135g mate, 250g mate Tipografias utilizadas: Didot HTF, Gotham Rounded light, light italic, book, book italic, bold, Glypha Lt Std 35 Thin UC: Projecto II Design Comunicação ESAD, Escola Superior de Artes e Design Maio2012