by Jeremy Meckler
This review is our third entry in the Joyless Canon—our 100 favorite movies, from enshrined classics to guilty pleasures to left-field oddities, which (we hope) define our personalities as film-lovers. Every few weeks, we’ll analyze another of our canonical entries in-depth. Check out our Index page for other Joyless Canon (JC) selections.
This review is our third entry in the Joyless Canon—our 100 favorite movies, from enshrined classics to guilty pleasures to left-field oddities, which (we hope) define our personalities as film-lovers. Every few weeks, we’ll analyze another of our canonical entries in-depth. Check out our Index page for other Joyless Canon (JC) selections.
Orson Welles's filmography is rife with beautiful, formally ingenious films, so much so that his name has been uniformly canonized by cinephiles and the art world alike—from early breakthroughs Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons to later classics (Touch of Evil holds the title as the last real noir ever made and The Trial is, to date, the most intricate and maddening attempt to adapt Kafka to the screen). Welles's artistic ingenuity is almost as notorious as his troubles with the studios. Nearly every film he ever made was tinkered with, reedited, or drastically cut by studio heads worried that it wouldn't make them enough money. And maybe those studio heads were right—few of Welles's films ever made back their budget, but most made lasting and substantive impressions on the cinematic landscape. His films were all out of step with their era, and F for Fake—a film that would prove to be his last—is no exception. Though self-funded and drastically lower-budget than most of his more monumental works, F for Fake is a formally radical riddle that is at once documentary, autobiography, and a frenetically edited narrative enigma, its form as groundbreaking as Citizen Kane's deep focus and jumbled narrative.
F for Fake opens with a prologue, voiced by Welles in his sonorous radio baritone that sets the stage for what is to be an exploration into the slippery nature of truth. Welles, in a black suit, hat and cape, is doing a magic trick for two little boys in a train station and talking about the nature of magic. He quotes the legendary French magician Robert Houdin in saying, "A magician is just an actor—an actor playing the part of a magician." Casual viewers drawn in by Welles's skill as a stage magician may watch his hands while he transforms a key into a coin, but close viewers may notice that during this piece of "magic" Welles plays another trick on us; his booming voice doesn't synch with his mouth. This could be put down to accident or a result of the necessities of a shooting schedule if not for the other irregularities that surround it—two of which are carefully pulled out by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his essay F for Fake: Orson Welles’s Purloined Letter:
| 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. |
These little tricks and deceits are hidden throughout the film; Rosenbaum points to another in the credits sequence. Set over a faux-ethnographic study into the art of "girl watching," this sequence intercuts the sexualized sashay of Oja Kodar, Welles's partner and collaborator, with shots of dozens of men on the street gawking at her. The entire girl-watching sequence turns the camera on the male gaze in a way reminiscent of Under the Skin's on-the-street interviews, just 40 years ahead of time. The stylized sexy close-ups of Kodar when juxtaposed with the shots of men gaping give the former a predatory air, and the documentary nature of these shots (explained in voice over) only make that feeling more chilling. However, toward the end of this sequence we see (if we look in freeze-frame close-up) that this isn't Oja Kodar at all, but actually her sister Nina wearing the same dress. This deliberate (and truly unnecessary) piece of trickery does nothing to weaken the feminist critique inherent in the apposition, but it also enhances Welles's portrait of fakery.
The fact that this is such a finely tuned film, capable of hiding these little secrets, is particularly impressive given the film's bizarre provenance. F for Fake jumps back and forth from beautiful 35mm and a grainier 16mm picture, the latter coming from a series of interviews shot by François Reichenbach back when this film was his—a straight documentary. Somehow Welles got his hands on the footage and convinced Reichenbach (now a producer on F for Fake) to allow this "truthful" documentary footage to become part of a dizzyingly edited wave of images that goes by so quickly it's hard to keep track. The shots cut between formats, spaces, and times at a breakneck speed, making this a far cry from the seemingly bland documentary Reichenbach first envisioned.
Describing the plot traced by the documentary elements of F for Fake seems somewhat inimical since, as in most of Welles's films, the story isn't half as interesting as the way it's told. Suffice it to say that the impetus for this film was Elmyr de Hory, a friend of Reichenbach's who was an infamous art forger, and Clifford Irving, Elmyr's biographer, who would later commit a massive hoax of his own. Also involved are Oja Kodar, a series of Picasso paintings, Howard Hughes, The War of the Worlds broadcast, and Welles's melancholy reflection on his own life. On paper this may seem incongruous, but F for Fake carefully interpolates these various narrative threads and then scrambles them up until they are puzzlingly complex.
The whole editing structure seems engineered to confuse and alienate, something like the opposite of the traditional documentary structure, which carefully contextualizes images through voiceover, linear explanations, and medium close-up interviews replete with labels identifying the speaker. Here, Welles's narration (often delivered in front of a Moviola screen seeming to tell us that yes, the editor is manipulating the story) is delivered backwards; characters and plot points are introduced as if they have already been explained fully. The result is jumbled, with a lot of attempts to "start again from the beginning," but Welles continually frustrates that desire by referring to things that haven't been explained yet. The cutting itself is jarringly fast, with cuts coming quicker than you can think, and jaunty music—composed by legendary composer Michel Legrand—that seems to rush everything along while Welles's narration slows it down.
Describing the plot traced by the documentary elements of F for Fake seems somewhat inimical since, as in most of Welles's films, the story isn't half as interesting as the way it's told. Suffice it to say that the impetus for this film was Elmyr de Hory, a friend of Reichenbach's who was an infamous art forger, and Clifford Irving, Elmyr's biographer, who would later commit a massive hoax of his own. Also involved are Oja Kodar, a series of Picasso paintings, Howard Hughes, The War of the Worlds broadcast, and Welles's melancholy reflection on his own life. On paper this may seem incongruous, but F for Fake carefully interpolates these various narrative threads and then scrambles them up until they are puzzlingly complex.
The whole editing structure seems engineered to confuse and alienate, something like the opposite of the traditional documentary structure, which carefully contextualizes images through voiceover, linear explanations, and medium close-up interviews replete with labels identifying the speaker. Here, Welles's narration (often delivered in front of a Moviola screen seeming to tell us that yes, the editor is manipulating the story) is delivered backwards; characters and plot points are introduced as if they have already been explained fully. The result is jumbled, with a lot of attempts to "start again from the beginning," but Welles continually frustrates that desire by referring to things that haven't been explained yet. The cutting itself is jarringly fast, with cuts coming quicker than you can think, and jaunty music—composed by legendary composer Michel Legrand—that seems to rush everything along while Welles's narration slows it down.
That strategy successfully draws out the story development and forces the viewer to pay close attention to it—the exact strategy used by magicians as misdirection. Like a magician's wiggling fingers, this choreographed editing strategy distracts as Welles slips in stories that are clearly ludicrous amongst the documentary action. He also adds personal biography—more intimate than in any of his other films. Like the thick cake of makeup Welles almost always wore on set (think of the huge fat suit he wore to play Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil) the frenetic, convoluted editing style serves to disguise the emotional honesty that he reveals in F for Fake. It's hard to know what is true—is Welles's somber monologue on the beauty of Chartres how he really feels or just another hanky-panky put-on?—but the wild ride of F for Fake's plot is what allows it to fit into a relatively unrelated story.
Beyond the form, the documentary story Welles is telling is also remarkably progressive, questioning the economy of the art world from a seemingly Marxist perspective. Welles, an admitted charlatan, paints a sympathetic portrait of art forger Elmyr de Hory and lovingly photographs his painting abilities, leaving no doubt about his tremendous talent. Welles returns again and again to a Kipling poem that ends with the line "It's pretty but is it art?," a question that Welles approaches with cheerful disdain. This question is not one of quality—no doubt Elmyr's indistinguishable Modigliani, Matisse, and Picasso paintings are pretty—but of value. Welles seems to be saying to those outraged at these "fakes" in the museum, who cares? The only reason we ascribe this value to the original paintings—rather than these identical duplicates—is because they are certified by the experts that Welles lambasts in his narration. Welles sides with Picasso—who makes an appearance in this film too—as he says, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
The frenzied pace of the editing and the apparent stream-of-consciousness structure have lead many to call this an essay film, but that term seems inappropriate. He does indeed present an argument, but most essays present that argument clearly and directly. F for Fake deliberately obfuscates that argument, hiding it behind layers of editing and cinematic tricks and obvious lies. If anything, it more closely resembles a riddle than an essay—like an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery with no solution. Clues and red herrings are buried throughout the cinematic text, ready to be unearthed. It is at once Welles's most personal film and his most manipulative and controlled, a thoroughly fake documentary about fakes, and a film unlike any other. As Welles said of it, "No, not a documentary—a new kind of film." And there really has been nothing like it before or since.
Beyond the form, the documentary story Welles is telling is also remarkably progressive, questioning the economy of the art world from a seemingly Marxist perspective. Welles, an admitted charlatan, paints a sympathetic portrait of art forger Elmyr de Hory and lovingly photographs his painting abilities, leaving no doubt about his tremendous talent. Welles returns again and again to a Kipling poem that ends with the line "It's pretty but is it art?," a question that Welles approaches with cheerful disdain. This question is not one of quality—no doubt Elmyr's indistinguishable Modigliani, Matisse, and Picasso paintings are pretty—but of value. Welles seems to be saying to those outraged at these "fakes" in the museum, who cares? The only reason we ascribe this value to the original paintings—rather than these identical duplicates—is because they are certified by the experts that Welles lambasts in his narration. Welles sides with Picasso—who makes an appearance in this film too—as he says, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
The frenzied pace of the editing and the apparent stream-of-consciousness structure have lead many to call this an essay film, but that term seems inappropriate. He does indeed present an argument, but most essays present that argument clearly and directly. F for Fake deliberately obfuscates that argument, hiding it behind layers of editing and cinematic tricks and obvious lies. If anything, it more closely resembles a riddle than an essay—like an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery with no solution. Clues and red herrings are buried throughout the cinematic text, ready to be unearthed. It is at once Welles's most personal film and his most manipulative and controlled, a thoroughly fake documentary about fakes, and a film unlike any other. As Welles said of it, "No, not a documentary—a new kind of film." And there really has been nothing like it before or since.
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