F
FOR
FAKE Orson Welles
F for Fake ORSON WELLES
Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in
a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. This is a promise.
For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.
I’m a charlatan.
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An Illusionist’s Trick With Bogus Heroes and Expert Villains Vincent Canby The New York Times (September 28 1975)
“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.
It’s fun to be fooled, but more fun to know. 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 wellpublicized 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 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 authenticate 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.
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 ground‑ breaking 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 twen‑ ties, 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 report‑ ed 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 rocket‑ ed 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, un‑ usual 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 sepa‑ rate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics, and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of 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.
The Ultimate Mirror In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness - and transcends them Robert Castle Bright Lights Film Journal (issue 45/2004)
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 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, 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 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 meaning of the mirror imagery from his 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.
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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 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
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!
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 journalists had known
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.
Hughes twenty or twenty-five
Purloined Letter Jonathan Rosenbaum The Criterion Collection (April 25 2005)
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 accurate. 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 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.”
As Welles remarks about Chartres, the most important thing is that it exists.
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 stop-frame 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 together 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 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 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 alongside 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 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 never-released 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 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, 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.”
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 Widoff synopsis Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles’s free-form documentary, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career - the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of worldrenowned 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.
I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over.
For the past seventeen minutes, I’ve been lying my head off.