F for Fake
d. Orson Welles, 1976
F for Fake is the fourth film I've seen by Orson Welles (the other three being Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil), and it is my favorite. It was the last film Welles was to make, and it succeeds brilliantly as a desconstruction and meditation on the very nature of art.
Welles presents his film in such a way that I was not sure if I was watching a documentary, a mockumentary, straight fiction, or even an "essay film," which is the term many people choose when describing F for Fake. I don't think it's necessary to put the film into any genre, because it is that mysteriously undefinable quality that makes it so great. It is important to note, however, that there is no other film like this one. By that I don't mean that it finds originality within a boundaries, as all great films do, but that it reinvents cinema as a whole to create something new and, ironically, to make a statement about art.
The film starts off with Welles as a magician, asking the audience (kids at a bus station) for an object from their pockets. The boy reaches it out fot a key and Welles goes on to make it turn into coins, and then promptly back to the key ("I'm a charlatan," he says to a woman on a bus named Oja Kodar.)
It is at that point that the self-proclaimed charlatan says to the camera that he will go on to tell the truth for an hour. He then begins to tell the story of art forger Elmyr as well as that of his biographer Clifford Irving. Elmyr has made a living out of forging the works of Modigliani, Picasso, Monet, and so on. He is seen saying different things about the nature of his work, my favorite being "you put one of my paintings on the wall of a museum. If it is there long enough, it becomes real." Welles, through brilliant editing, begins to draw parallels between the art forger and the author, Irving, that is supposed to be writing a true account of Emyr's life. The film suggests that Fake!, the name of the book, is as distorted and false as the forged paintings.
Through F for Fake, Welles argues that every story is false in some way or another. More importantly, however, he also discusses the fact that truth may not be the most as important as it appears to be. It is my personal opinion that Welles, who made what is considered the greatest film of all time with Citizen Kane by telling a fictionalized account of William Randolph Hearst's life, relates to and understands the forgers in this movie.
After the part of the film mainly dealing with Emyr and Irving, F for Fake becomes about Irving's dealings with Howard Hughes. Irving wrote the "authorized" biography of Hughes that was later discovered to be a hoax. Welles continues to layer perspectives and draws on the earlier segments to create a stronger arguement about the duplicity of art and, in turn, life.
Then there are the last 20 minutes of the film, where Welles brings back Oja Kodar and tells the story of her encounter with Picasso and, more importantly, Picasso's encounter with her Hungarian grandfather. As the story Welles tells goes, Picasso painted Kodar 22 portraits that she kept. When Picasso heard that there was a gallery of his work in Paris, he flew there outraged only to find that the portraits were not done by him. Kodar then takes him to her dying grandfather, who has a conversation with Picasso about what he has done and the way he looks at his own line of work.
Ultimately, Welles reveals that the whole story was a lie and that Kodar's grandfather has never painted in his life. Brilliantly, he recalls the earlier statement that he was to "tell the truth for one hour" and it becomes evident that that hour has ended (the movie is 88 minutes long).
So far I've only been talking about what the film deals with and some of my reactions to it. However, the film's effect is in no small part due to its technical achievements. Visually, the film is astonishing. Welles manages to bring a mystical appeal to every shot that is hypnotic and intoxicating. The editing is as good as any I've seen and the sound design is only topped by The Conversation.
F for Fake is, in my opinion, one of the absolute masterworks of the cinema. I am tempted to say that his heartfelt, complex, and brilliant meditation on art and lies is more relevant and entertaining than Welles' Citizen Kane.
