F For Fake

Everything in this book is strictly based on the available facts.

Este livro ĂŠ dedicado a todos os docentes de Design GrĂĄfico.

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A S V E R D A D E S Um mago é um mestre da ilusão, um falsário, um actor que interpreta o papel de ilusionista. O mago Orson Welles, no seu filme F for Fake, cria a partir de imagens um discurso que versa sobre a magia, sobre truques, fraudes e sobre mentiras.

O impulso que nos leva a escrever sobre esse filme, e não sobre outro qualquer, parte da complexidade das imagens e dos sentidos por elas expressados que se relacionam com a questão da verdade, tão cara a filosofia. O nosso problema é pensar de que modo a experiência imaginativa deste filme é inseparável de uma experiência do próprio pensamento, que não pode deixar de se colocar num espaço que prescinde da verdade, ou melhor, faz-nos de outro modo que não o que ela foi na filosofia.

Um modo que suspende a eficácia de um pensamento voltado naturalmente para o verdadeiro e se faz segundo uma necessidade que deve forçar o pensamento a pensar algo que não se volta para a verdade.

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M a r c e l a T a v a r e s

C i n e m a “o Falso”

As grandes tradições filosóficas sempre buscaram a verdade, um conceito tal que qualifica o mundo como verídico, como real, como estável e confiável. É devido ao medo de ser enganado, ao perigo do erro, à ilusão nociva, que o homem, o filósofo, se presta à construção de verdades.

Em outras palavras, “eu quero a verdade significa não quero enganar e não quero enganar compreende, como caso particular, não quero enganar a mim mesmo.”1 A vida, no entanto, sempre se dissimula, enganando-nos, desviando a atenção, produzindo deliciosas ilusões, mas para aqueles que querem o verdadeiro essa potência do falso, esse elevado poder que possui a vida é depreciado, e o que era potência criadora, torna-se ‘erro’, mera aparência. O trabalho daqueles que querem o verdadeiro consiste em distribuir erros, nomear responsáveis, negar a inocência, acusar e julgar a vida, denunciar a aparência e corrigir suas faltas. No caso do atual mundo mercantilizado da arte, tal trabalho é desempenhado por críticos, especialistas e não artistas donos de instituições, que possuem o “poder” de dizer o que é arte e o que não é, o que é autêntico e o que é falso.

E

Entretanto, viemos apresentar uma outra concepção de verdade, de falsidade, de pensamento e de arte.

Uma concepção inaugurada por Nietzsche, tendo como árduo defensor Deleuze e como realizador e vivificador Orson Welles. Tais pensadores concebem a verdade como conceito totalmente indeterminado: para eles a verdade não é um elemento do pensamento, o que pertence ao pensamento é o sentido e o valor. A verdade criada, portanto, depende do valor e do sentido que pensamos. Neste sentido, o erro não é considerado como estado negativo do pensamento, mas é a tolice, a besteira e a estupidez que se configuram como uma maneira “baixa de pensar de um estado de espírito dominado por forças reativas”, como diria Deleuze.

Ao denunciar a baixeza do pensamento, a tolice, estes filósofos/artistas buscam fazer do pensamento algo agressivo, ativo, afirmativo, um pensamento que produz o falso e que afirma o alto poder do Fake, “que encontra na obra de arte a sua verificação. Ao filósofo cabe atacar a tolice e formar conceitos que não são eternos nem históricos, mas sim intempestivos. E ao artista, segundo Nieztsche, caberia dramatizar o conceito de verdade. A arte é, para eles, o meio mais propício para essa dramatização, já que a arte torna-se medida do conhecimento, por ser o oposto de uma operação “desinteressada” e por ser estimulante da vontade de poder, “excitante do querer”.

Ao filósofo cabe atacar a tolice e formar conceitos que não são eternos nem históricos, mas sim intempestivos. E ao artista, segundo Nieztsche, caberia dramatizar o conceito de verdade. A arte é, para eles, o meio mais propício para essa dramatização, já que a arte torna-se medida do conhecimento, por ser o oposto de uma operação “desinteressada” e por ser estimulante da vontade de poder, “excitante do querer”. Sendo a arte, pois, o mais alto poder do falso, “ela magnífica ‘o mundo enquanto erro’, santifica a mentira, faz da vontade de enganar um ideal superior.” Na arte o poder do falso é elevado até a vontade de enganar. É enganando e criando mentiras que Welles, em seu filme, rivaliza com o ideal ascético, com a concepção de mundo do homem verídico, com a verdade sobre a arte que é forjada do ponto de vista de um espectador cada vez menos artista, como o são críticos e experts. O que faz Welles é atribuir ao Fake (falso) o poder afirmativo mais alto de violentar o pensamento e produzir o Novo. Ao criticar uma imagem dogmática do pensamento, um pensamento que se volta naturalmente para a verdade por conter formalmente o verdadeiro – já que pensar seria o exercício de uma faculdade – o cineasta prepara o pensamento para um salto súbito em direção à crítica da verdade como ideal, em direção a uma Filosofia Intempestiva. Neste sentido, podemos dizer que Welles “dramatiza a verdade seguindo o método de Nieztche”.

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B I O G R A F I A

Muitos dos seus projectos permaneceram inacabados, como ‘’It’s All True’’, e ‘’Don Quixote’’, filme em que Welles trabalhou durante dez anos e que chegou a ser exibido em Cannes em 1986.Welles dedicou a sua vida ao mundo do espectáculo, sacrificando muito do seu tempo e a sua vida pessoa para conseguir escrever uma página na história do cinema.

George Orson Welles nasceu a 6 de Maio de 1915 no Wisconsin, EUA e morreu de ataque cardíaco aos 70 anos a 10 de Outubro de 1985 na Califórnia, EUA. Welles é considerado por muitos como um dos maiores cineastas americanos de sempre, no seu longo currículo cinematográfico constam obras como “Citizen Kane”, “Casino Royale” ou “Othelo”.

Realizou um total de 27 filmes entre os 113 que compõem a sua obra de vida, também composta por filmes onde participou como actor, guionista ou produtor. George Orson Welles conseguiu inspirar um grande número de admiradores a se tornar Realizadores de Cinema, marcando uma inteira geração de cineasta e fãs de cinema. Orson Welles ficou órfão muito cedo, a sua mãe morreu quando ele tinha apenas 9 anos e o seu pai faleceu uns anos mais tarde quando Welles tinha 15 anos.

Quando o seu pai morreu decidiu abandonar a escola de artes que frequentava para se dedicar à representação. Aos 18 anos, Welles já era um famoso actor no teatro experimental. Com 19 anos fez sua estreia na Broadway na montagem de ‘’Romeu e Julieta’’. Tornou-se amigo próximo do director e produtor John Houseman, para quem fez algumas colaborações. Da longa parceira de Welles com Houseman nasceu a companhia Mercury Theatre criada em 1937, uma companhia de teatro que originou vários projectos, destacando-se ‘’Julio Cesar’’, de 1937, em que Welles escreveu o argumento e ambientou a história na Itália fascista.

No dia de Halloween de 1938, a CBS transmitiu a notícia de que marcianos tinham chegado à Terra e vinham com a intenção de nos invadir, estando naquele preciso momento a atacar a cidade de New Jersey. Milhares de pessoas entraram em pânico e começaram a fugir das suas casas ao ouvir os boletins narrados.

um clássico da ficção científica de H.G. Wells.

A repercussão do evento foi tão grande que, logo a seguir, Orson Welles celebrou um contrato milionário com Hollywood para realizar dois filmes, com total liberdade para produzir, escrever os argumentos e actuar.

“Citizen Kane’’, de 1941, foi o primeiro filme desse celebre e famoso contrato. Uma obra de enorme qualidade que ainda hoje é considerada como um dos melhores filmes do século XX. Aos 25 anos, Orson Welles revolucionou as técnicas de filmagem com recursos até então inexploradas como profundidade de campo, acção entrecortada num mesmo ambiente, planos longos, movimentos de câmara e edição rápida. O resultado foi uma obra-prima, considerada unanimemente pelos especialistas como sendo um dos melhores filmes de todos os tempos, senão o melhor. Porém, com o sucesso, vieram os problemas. O realizador foi acusado de basear-se na vida de William Randolph Hearst, um dos mais poderosos homens da época e que durante 40 anos foi o maior magnata das comunicações nos Estados Unidos. O próprio Hearst encabeçou a campanha contra Welles e o seu filme. “Citizen Kane” acabou por ficar bastante aquém do esperado nas bilheteiras apesar da aceitação geral da crítica.

O r s o n Uma aproximação ao mestre da ilusão.

Em 1970, a academia distinguiu Welles com o Óscar honorário pelo conjunto da sua filmografia como actor e realizador. Em 1952, venceu a prestigiada Palma de Ouro de Cannes com o filme “Othelo” . Como actor venceu um Globo de Ouro e um BAFTA pela sua prestação em “Butterfly” (1981) e “Chimes at Midnight” (1965), respectivamente.

B I O G R A F I A

Muitos dos seus projectos permaneceram inacabados, como ‘’It’s All True’’, e ‘’Don Quixote’’, filme em que Welles trabalhou durante dez anos e que chegou a ser exibido em Cannes em 1986.Welles dedicou a sua vida ao mundo do espectáculo, sacrificando muito do seu tempo e a sua vida pessoa para conseguir escrever uma página na história do cinema.

W e l l e s

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J o n a t h a n R o s e n b a u m Mr. Welles was wondering if you could have lunch with him today?

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.

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. o manu

factured

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W e l l e s ’ s intonations, an d frenetic -hopping call to mind Mr. Arkadin.

T h e s even a clock n t a The Third Man. For all this elements that make F for Fake. f i l m s .

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. 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, and that its leading actors were Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving 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, everyone was thoroughly confused.

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 from the same waiter carrying off the remains of a gigantic lobster becomes a kind of mask, while his deepest emotions and intentions are o r fiddle, and a l l hidden away in his own pockets, just as min d Mr. Arkadin. firmly as our own private investments e remain in ours. na cucko o clo c k Those who decide that the exposés of various hoaxes are superficial and row n in at on obvious may be overlooking the degree point that s to which these very revelations are up b masking the perpetration of various a l l others, some of which are neither hi superficial nor obvious. regre t s his s e l Because we’re so preoccupied with following the unorthodox e direction of our reading imposed by the camera proceeding from r e n ta lity right to left and then from down to up most of us are apt to read

o ne of the practioners, a word existing in no dictionary, as practitioners.

And many elements given how loaded, tainted, and double-sided the word expert is

t ha t m soon to become in this movie, it’s possible to conclude that the real k e F collaborators and “practioners” the spectators of Welles’s magic

fo r Fake t who collaborate with him by putting it into practice are none other e than ourselves. In other words, we know best and h we know nothing. o s t Similarly, we should look very closely at what we’re being shown in

c el bra t ory the early “girl watching” sequence perhaps the most intricately edited

Welles’s films A s stretch in the film, especially in contrast to the more leisurely and h e conventionally edited late sequence devoted to Pablo Picasso’s.

“For the time being,” I concluded in Film Comment at the time, “I am content to call it The New Orson Welles Film, codirected 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.” 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 Hearst.

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s a my i s. , The reason that two very brief shots

pretending to reveal what many previous angles have concealed can readily fool is 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

a repository of public history intertwined with private injokes 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 m 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.

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.

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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.

D y l a n With F For Fake, Orson Welles invented a new form of filmmaking, G r a n t making it up as he went along. Too much fact to be fiction, too much fiction to be fact, the film is not quite a documentary, and it is not quite an essay, though it has elements of both. The opening credits give us a clue us in on what is to come. Printed on film cans, passing up and down, left and right, we get to the phrase “Expert Practioners.” “Practioners” (or, as we are likely to read, practitioners) is of course is a meaningless word that will not be found in any dictionary, and having it on screen with the word experts provides us a clue that will be answered as the film goes on.

Elmyr, as Welles aptly puts it, makes fools of the experts. He is the world’s greatest art forger, living in high society on the Spanish island of Ibiza and forging works by Picasso, Matise, Degas, Van Gogh, and others. Elmyr does not copy the works of the masters, he imitates their style, creating new works that one could easily believe were painted by the greats. The question becomes, what is art? As Welles later says, the important thing is that it exists.

Above all, F For Fake is about the nature of authorship. Welles adds layers to this himself. The film itself was taken from another documentary by French filmmaker Francois Reichenbach, reedited

by Welles. Welles stated in interviews that he deliberately avoided any shots that were “typically Wellesian.” The layers of fakery pile higher and higher as the film goes on. Elmyr’s biographer, Clifford Irving, finds himself in the middle of a scandal after he writes a fake biography of Howard Hughes.

With F For Fake, Orson Welles invented a new form of filmmaking, making it up as he went along. Too much fact to be fiction, too much fiction to be fact, the film is not quite a documentary, and it is not quite an essay, though it has elements of both. The opening credits give us a clue us in on what is to come. Printed on film cans, passing up and down, left and right, we get to the phrase “Expert Prationers.” “Practioners” is of course is a meaningless word that will not be found in any dictionary, and having it on screen with the word experts provides us a clue that will be answered as the film goes on. Elmyr, as Welles aptly puts it, makes fools of the experts.

He is the world’s greatest art forger, living in high society on the Spanish island of Ibiza and forging works by Picasso, Matise, Degas, Van Gogh, and others. Elmyr does not copy the works of the masters, he imitates their style, creating new works that one could easily believe were painted by the greats. The question becomes, what is art? As Welles later says, the important thing is that it exists.

Above all, F For Fake is about the nature of authorship. Welles adds layers to this himself. The film itself was taken from another documentary by French filmmaker Francois Reichenbach.Welles stated in interviews that he deliberately avoided any shots that were “typically Wellesian.” The layers of fakery pile higher and higher as the film goes on. Elmyr’s biographer, Clifford Irving, finds himself in the middle of a scandal after he writes a fake biography of Howard Hughes. The layers of fakery pile higher and higher as the film goes on. Elmyr’s biographer, Clifford Irving, finds himself in the middle of a scandal after he writes a fake biography of Howard Hughes.

The layers of fakery pile higher and higher as the film goes on.

Elmyr’s biographer, Clifford Irving, finds himself in the middle of a scandal after he writes a fake biography of Howard Hughes.

Interestingly, Irving says at one point in the film that he turned to writing biographies because his fiction did not sell, but it is his fiction that eventually landed him in federal prison. Irving watched his subject well, learning some simple, important tricks.

Like all of Welles’s films, no matter how it might look on the surface, F For Fake is ultimately about Welles himself. The film is rife with references to all of Welles previous films, the most obvious being the scenes of Elmyr burning his paintings, harking back to the last shot of Citizen Kane, where Rosebud goes up in flames. There are several examples. In the opening scene in the train station, where Welles does magic tricks for the boy (who was Kodar’s real life nephew): when Welles was a boy, his father took him to see Houdini, fostering an enchantment that would last a lifetime.

F For Fake plays like a retrospective of Welles’s life and career, all the more so considering that this was the last film he completed.

The viewer must discover this film for himself. Welles spent a solid year editing F For Fake, working seven days a week in three different editing rooms, and the montage tricks come fast and furious; it takes several viewings to notice many of them. Welles left his personality all over this film, perhaps more than any of his other works.

Orson Wells

As Verdades 08 - 11 O Cinema e o Falso 12 - 15 Orson Welles 16 - 19 Sobre Falsidade 20 - 21 A Carta Roubada de Jonathan Rosembauh 22 - 25 A CrĂ­tica de Dylan Grant 26 - 31

F For Fake, 2012 Uma publicação da Escola Superior de Estudos Industriais e de Gestão, exclusiva, apenas um exemplar.

Editor Marina Mota Revisão Catarina Vieira Diana Lopes Fotografia capa e contracapa “The Lady from Shanghai” Colaboradores Marcela Botelho Tavares Jonathan Rosenbaum Dylan Grant Agradecimentos Pedro Serapicos Rita Coelho Miguel Freitas Produção Eseig, Unidade Curricular de Design Gráfico, Novembro 2012 Apoios Olívia Mota Manuel Mota Impressão e Acabamentos XecPrint e Minerva Tiragem 1 exemplar Preço Portugal 80€ Depósito Legal 242516/07 ESEIG Escola Superior de Estudos Industriais e de Gestão Rua D. Sancho I, 4480-876 Vila do Conde, Portugal www.behance.net/portfoliomarinamota www.eseig.ipp.pt