“Ladies and gentleman this is a film about trickery, about fraud, about lies...“
FAKE
1
“...For the next hour everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact”
2
FAKE
Orson Welles
The son of a concert pianist mother and wealthy inventor father, his parents initially channelled their energies into Orson’s older brother, Dickie. Dickie failed to live up to their demands, but Orson showed great early promise in many arts - piano, magic, painting, and, especially, acting. Upon his mother’s death in 1924, he travelled the world with his father, only to lose him in 1928. Turning down the chance of college in 1931, he went on a sketching trip to Ireland. Unsuccessful in his attempts to break onto the London and Broadway stages, he travelled further in Morocco and Spai. A big year for him, 1934 marked his first New York appearance, his marriage, the shooting of his first short film and his radio debut. He married actress and socialite Virginia Nicholson. They had one daughter, Christoph who became known as Chris Welles Feder, an author of educational materials for children. The couple divorced in 1939. After forming the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman, he produced ‘The Mercury Theatre on Air’. The show became famous for the notorious events their version of ‘The War of the Worlds’ as a Halloween prank, in which they changed to US. ‘Citizen Kane’, his first public release, which he both starred in and directed, was released in 1941. It proved a commercial failure, losing RKO $150,000.one of the greatest ever made. In 1943 Welles married Rita Hayworth. They had one child, Rebecca Welles, but divorced five years later in 1948. His following films, such as ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ and ‘Chimes at Midnight’, won many plaudits, but were also commercial failures. In retaliation for the amount of studio interference, Welles exiled himself to Europe in 1948. In 1955, he married Italian actress Paola Mori and they had a daughter called Beatrice, born the same year, who later became Welles’ sole. They were estranged for decades but never divorced. Welles’ long-term companion both personally and professionally from 1966 was Croatian-born actress Ojo Kodar. They lived together 24 years .
6
FAKE
In 1956 saw Welles direct ‘A Touch of Evil’, which failed in the US, but won a prize at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. He received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1971, the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975, and, despite his lack of commercial success. In 1972, he narrated the film documentary version of ‘Future Shock’ and then starred as Long John Silver in John Hough’s ‘Treasure Island’ the same year. This was followed by ‘F For Fake’, which was completed in 1973. It was a personal essay film about art forger Elmyr de Hory and the famous biographer Clifford Irving. Between 1973 and 1974, he took part in ‘Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries’, which he hosted and narrated season. In 1979, Welles completed his documentary ‘Filming Othello’ and filmed a pilot for his series ‘The Orson Welles Show’ which was never turned into a full series. He also appeared in the biopic ‘The Secret of Nikolai Tesla’ and made a cameo in ‘The Muppet Movie’. Spiralling into obesity, Welles suffered a heart attack in Hollywood, on 10 October 1985 and died.Welles’ prolific work rate and of many skills have placed him as one of the greatest artists of the century, with his film, theatr and acting work still influence. His use of nonlinear narratives and chiaroscuro lighting techniques in his early film noirs has been borrowed by many directors since, with innovative camera angles, deep focus shots and long takes. His background in radio also allowed him to excel at sound production on his films, raising the art to a new level. Welles’ insistence that he had complete creative control over his films has also inspired auteur theory in cinematic criticism, with the director often being seen as the ultimate creative visionary when it comes to films.Due to his perfection, many of Welles’ film projects were left abandoned, included a feature length version of Don Quixote Quixote, a TV adaptation of The Merchant of Venice and the self-penned script for a film titled ‘The Other Side of the Wind’. “The tragedy of my life is that I can’t get the Americans to like it…. Anyway, I think, “F for Fake” is the only really original movie I’ve made since “Kane.” You see, everything else is only carrying movies a little further along the same path. I believe that the movies—I’ll say a terrible thing— have never gone beyond “Kane.” That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been good movies, or great movies. But everything has been done now in movies, to the point of fatigue. You can do it better, but it’s always
8
FAKE
gonna be the same grammar, you know? Every artistic form—the blankverse drama, the Greek plays, the novel—has only so many possibilities and only so long a life. And I have a feeling that in movies, until we break completely, we are only increasing the library of good works. I know that as a director of movie actors in front of the camera, I have nowhere to move forward. I can only make another good work.” Orson Welles The “tragedy” of the poor reviews and box-office failure of “F for Fake” wasn’t just aesthetic but also practical and financial: “Because that would have solved my old age. I could have made an essay movie—two of ’em a year, you see? On different subjects. Various variations of that form.” Instead, Welles was forced to become a celebrity—a talk-show regular who had become better known for his commercials from the nineteen-seventies for Paul Masson wine than for any movie but his first. Instead, Welles was forced to become a celebrity—a talk-show regular who had become better known for his commercials from the nineteenseventies for Paul Masson wine than for any movie but his first. His genius, as the book shows, was fuelled with an energy that seemed, at times, tragically centrifugal: its torrent of ideas, opinions, memories, grudges, insights, theories, speculations, complaints, and pleas are the living trace of a mind born in overdrive and which, suspended in a kind of content-free fame, is reduced to spinning its wheels. Yet even here, on the subject of celebrity, he offers a moment of genius, one of the greatest and saddest anecdotes on the subject that I’ve ever heard. Yet even here, on the subject of celebrity, he offers a moment of genius, one of the greatest and saddest anecdotes on the subject that I’ve ever heard.
“I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money. “ Orson Welles
FAKE
9
WAR OF THE WORLDS 14
FAKE
“ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of the broadcasts, Orson Welles”. “ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better.The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.”
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 tireless sceptic whose singleminded 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.. 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 artist-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.
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 ‘complete’? 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
18
FAKE
Is F Fake
What exactly do we mean w er a charlatan? I count no man a Philosophe the court of his Conscience o lect, accused himself of a scu condemned by his own Judg
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melanc
F for e?
when we call an artist or writ-
er who hath not, be it before or at the assizes of his Intelurrilous Invention, and stood gement a brazen Charlatan.‘
choly (1621)
charlatanry has been summoned. (Perhaps that is its point: to put an end to the conversation.) Most pressingly, it raises the question where we might not have thought it pertained. But what manner of truth is in question? Assuredly, an artistic or literary charlatan is 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 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 that he or she makes. This suggests a rather Romantic notion, a conception of artistic being as truth-toself, 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 avant-garde alike. In a sense it’s an objection to style, to surface, to those artists who do thingsfor 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-
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 his art emerges from an authentic milieu, the force of his self-belief and the his message in the principle of reality. 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 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’sMy 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 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 opponents claimed, was in reality masked – he possessed, as the philosophical journalist A.C. Grayling put it recently, ‘a dishonest mind’.
20
FAKE
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 melancholic, even the charlatan himself – quasi-fictional 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’.
“ A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of poet” Orson Welles
Orson Welles, Clifford Irving, Elmyr de Hory If you’ve seen Orson Welles’ late period quasi-documentary F for Fake, then you know about the mysterious art forger Elmyr De Hory. In his cinematic essay, Welles explored the funhouse mirror life of de Hory, who found that he had an uncanny knack for being able to paint counterfeits of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir’s work. After some of his fakes were sold to museums and wealthy collectors, suspicions were raised and his legal troubles—and a life spent moving from place to place to avoid the long arm of the law—began. At the time Welles met up with Elmyr in the early 70s, he was living in Ibiza and had been the subject of Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time written by notorious “biographer” Clifford Irving, who himself figures prominently in the film. During the course of filming F for Fake, Irving (who was later portrayed by Richard Gere in The Hoax), was serendipitously revealed to have forged his own “autobiography” of Howard Hughes (not to mention Hughes’ signature). The resulting film, an essay on the authorship of “truth” in art, is a dazzling, intellectuality challenging masterpiece that can never quite decide if it’s a fake documentary about a fake painter of fake masterpieces who himself was the subject of a fake biographer… or what it is. (It’s no wonder that Robert Anton Wilson was such a fan of F for Fake, which figures prominently in his book, Cosmic Trigger II). F or Fake also calls into question the nature of “genius”: If Elmyr’s forgeries were good enough to pass off as Picasso or Modigliani’s work, or even to hang in museums under the assumption that they were the work of these masters, wouldn’t Elmyr’s genius be of equal or even nearly equal value to theirs? (Worth noting that it was ego that got in the way of Elmyr’s scam at several points in his life: He was often left apoplectic at hearing how much crooked art dealers were making from his paintings!) De Hory’s former bodyguard and driver, Mark Forgy, has kept Elmyr’s archive since his suicide in December 1976. Lately Mr. Forgy has been trying to make more sense of Elmyr’s odd life. From the New York Times: “I’m so far down the rabbit hole,” Ms. Marvin said in a recent phone
24
FAKE
From the New York Times: “I’m so far down the rabbit hole,” Ms. Marvin said in a recent phone interview, “I’m just not going to rest until I find out who this man is.” A few weeks ago, she and Mr. Forgy traveled to western France and unrolled a dozen de Hory paintings that had been discovered in a farmhouse’s attic. In Budapest, they found birth records, dated 1906, for Elemer Albert Hoffmann, son of Adolf and Iren. No one knows when Elemer upgraded his name, or how he financed art studies in Munich and Paris before moving to New York in 1947. He claimed that his father was a Roman Catholic and a diplomat, but the Budapest ledgers list Adolf as a Jewish merchant. The Nazis killed his entire family, Mr. de Hory said. But a cousin named Istvan Hont visited the artist’s villa on Ibiza, where Mr. Forgy was working at various times as a chauffeur, secretary and gardener. Mr. Hont, it turns out, was the forger’s brother. Mr. Forgy knew that his boss copied masterpieces but did not much question their life on Ibiza, in which they kept company with celebrities like Marlene Dietrich and Ursula Andress. “I accepted the amazing with a nonchalance,” Mr. Forgy said in a recent phone interview. Mr. de Hory was the focus of Orson Welles’s 1974 documentary “F for Fake,” and Clifford Irving breathlessly titled his book “Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.” After Mr. de Hory’s suicide, Mr. Forgy returned to Minnesota. “I went into deep seclusion” working as a night watchman and house restorer, he said. He held onto the papers and paintings. “I have schlepped them around endlessly,” he said. “The walls here in the house look like the Pitti Palace in Florence.” His wife, Alice Doll, encouraged him in recent years to examine the stacks of false passports, Hungarian correspondence and Swiss arrest reports. Ms. Marvin contacted him last year. She had helped organize a show about faked and stolen art at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, including a portrait of a pensive brunette by Mr. de Hory imitating Modigliani. The researchers are now raising money for the documentary, developing an exhibition for the Budapest Art Fair in November and preparing to interview a nonagenarian de Hory cousin in Germany. They also plan to send paintings for lab analysis. “We’re trying to create a forensics footprint of his work,” Ms. Marvin said. They already know that Mr. de Hory tore blank pages out of old books for sketching paper and bought paintings at flea markets to scrape and recycle the canvases. His fakes have become collectibles. Last fall, at a Bonhams auction in England, a buyer paid more than $700 for a seascape of crowded sailboats, with a forged Raoul Dufy signature on the front and “Elmyr” on the back.
FAKE
25
“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?
F for Fake “And now give me some time... What’s time? This is the time to pretend where the action gains wings and transported to another dimension. I give to you a piece of art, an authentic one.” Orson Welles
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. 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 to Howard Hughes’s. “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. 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.
28
FAKE
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. One of the many end results of his love of the theater of magic, its gimmickry and melodrama, but was indicative of a much deeper fascination with the workings of illusion, both in one’s art and one’s life. His films are permeated with deceptions and masks, disappearances and revelations where all seems fleeting and unknowable, the result of desperately trying to organize bits and pieces of half-recovered truths that in the end amount to a fragile collection of myths. It is a terrible loneliness that lingers in Welles’s films, a sense of evening closing in with little having been resolved; as he says with a certain theatrical eloquence in The Fountain of Youth: “The emptiness of one’s own home at midnight can seem like an injury.” Welles seems to hint, though, that it is precisely this inability to make the puzzle work that results in the necessary recognition of the flexibility of reality and experience. Never promising happiness, indeed often expecting pain and a near impossible sadness, Welles’s films grapple with this mystery and take comfort, though sometimes a cold one, in achieving aerial views of their own labyrinths. This image of Welles as the baroque storyteller is apparent in both his fiction and non-fiction films, although even that distinction would seem a bit misleading as the director’s fiction works are filled with many emotional truths and his non-fiction works—of particular note the fragments of
30
FAKE
of artfully elaborated and sculpted “facts.” F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery. How all the more appropriate that the film should deal with “actual” events, with biographical reality, considering Welles’s familiarity with the practice of weaving one’s own life story. As he told Jean Clay in 1962, “If you try to probe, I’ll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false…my work is what enables me to come out of myself…do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man—and not the contrary.” As an artist so suspicious of biographers and the truth they make a pretense of unearthing, Welles fittingly proceeds to challenge and complicate that most sacred of cinematic cows, the documentary. Sparring no one, least of all himself, the man who once convinced people that Martians had invaded New Jersey suggests that nothing is ever what it seems. F for Fake is about three hoaxers, Elmyr, the gentlemanly forger and “old emperor of the hoax,” Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, himself later caught in the act of faking a partnership with Howard Hughes to produce the reclusive multimillionaire’s life story, and Welles himself, the ringmaster. “Everything you will see in the next hour will be true,” he tells the audience near the beginning of the film, and yet the first sequence features Welles performing some slight of hand trickery for children in a railway station, mesmerizing them with his voice as much as with his hands, a classic example of the magician’s art of misdirection. The viewer is pulled into the act and becomes a kind of accomplice, a willing participant dazzled by the show and taken in by the banter. F for Fake is as profound a rumination on spectator involvement in the fabrication of a reality, the great trick of the cinema, as it is on the fakers themselves. The viewer is the willing rube in an elaborate con game and yet it is, at its best, a well intentioned deception from which both the audience and the creator take something away with them, a fragile truce, a bridge however tenuous hovering over an abyss that tells us that the “real” is an impossibility that defies representation. The attempt, however, even if doomed, is unavoidable, hence the melancholy of so much of Welles’s work, F for Fake included, although the film is far more a celebration of uncertainty than most of its director’s output. From this comedy of errors develops an interrogation of authorship: Hory flaunts his ability to make fools of the so-called experts by “authoring” paintings that hang in museums the world over
under more famous names while Irving is caught fabricating the Hughes book—at one point, Irving’s involvement in faking Hughes’s biography causes Welles to ask the viewer if we are then to believe anything that Irving says, even about Elmyr, and is the forger therefore a fraud as well, a “fake faker?” Welles, however, does not excuse himself from such charges. During one particularly beautiful sequence following Welles as he wanders through parks and country lanes near twilight, the director reflects on his own practiced deceptions. He recalls with bemused nostalgia how at 16 he conned his way into a job at a prestigious Dublin theater, having sold himself as a great American actor, and reminds us of his infamous broadcast of The War of the Worlds that caused a surprising amount of panic in otherwise seemingly stable listeners. “You just have to believe this,” he near whispers to the audience as he chronicles several examples of individual and group hysteria, of how people can convince themselves of anything. Welles continually calls attention to his own authorial presence, using footage from other films and repeatedly cutting back to show himself addressing the audience from within an editing suite. This borrowing and assembling is crucial to the film’s structure, a symbolic “revealing of the con.” Working, in part, with material from a previously existing documentary by Francois Reichenbach on Elmyr, Welles quite literally formalizes this theme by explicitly demonstrating how a film is “authored” in the editing room. By foregrounding his technique, Welles puts his artistry on display and makes a parallel between the painter’s use of color, shadow and line, and the filmmaker’s wielding of the editing blade. By brilliantly embedding and “fleshing out” the themes of forgery and originality in the formal structure of his text, Welles pushes cinematic representation to another level and suggests that there isn’t all that much difference between Elmyr and himself: in For for Fake he is, after all, just a painter using another filmmaker’s paints. This makes him a faker of sorts and yet, he urges us to believe, an essentially honest one. Unlike Irving, both Welles and Elmyr call their shots, drawing attention to their slight of hand, and one senses that that is the crucial distinction. Even the fantasy about Oja Kodar, Welles’s partner and a spectral presence throughout the film, and her encounter with Picasso is revealed in the end, much to Welles’s delight, as another trick. While it may be a con, it also provides one final lesson, the last achievement of a conjuring narrative. By subjecting the notion of “truth” to a madcap trial, Welles makes a revelatory statement on cinematic representation. F for Fake stands as an essential film because it is one of the most singularly poignant examinations of the essence of the medium itself, a dream, a document, a lie that is at times capable of becoming more real than reality, host to a wealth of paradoxes and contradictions, much like life. It might seem, though, that the final result of the film is an utter negation of meaning but Welles.
FAKE
31
32
FAKE
“ 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”
FAKE
33
34
FAKE
Produzido por: Tatiana Luís Tipografia: Univers LT Std Papel: Renovaprint, 100g Impressão: Color Show Encadernação: Ana & Carvalho
F for fake Dirigido: Orson Welles Produzido: François Reichenbach Dominique Antoine Richard Drewitt
Escrito: Orson Welles Oja Kodar
Casting: Orson Welles
Oja Kodar Joseph Cotten Elmyr de Hory Clifford Irving François Reichenbach Gary Graver
Data de lançamento: 1975
FAKE
35