F for Fake

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F for Fake (1974) (original French title, Vérités et Mensonges) is the last film completed by Orson Welles. (His later Filming Othello is so rarely seen, it counts as one of his unreleased projects.) It features Elmyr de Hory as he recounted much about his work in art-forging and how easy it was for him to create what professionals considered originals. It also features Oja Kodar, Welles's companion, and Clifford Irving, de Hory's biographer and himself the hoaxer who created the purported biography of Howard Hughes. Welles's story takes place during the Irving affair. In 2005 The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD.

Much like Welles's legendary film debut Citizen Kane, F for Fake was a film that faced widespread popular rejection in his home country at the time of release, though it fared better commercially in Europe. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be indulgent or incoherent. But again like Kane, F for Fake has grown in stature over the years and is now often considered not only a film classic but a precursor to now-common techniques and a further popularizer of more avant-garde ones. With the film embracing everything from self-conscious notation of the film process to ironic use of fifties-era B-movie footage, his defenders feel Welles in essence was creating not so much a documentary as a "new kind of film," as he once told writer Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Perhaps more than anything else F for Fake is often judged a masterpiece of the art of editing -- a key subject of the film itself, which at many points shows Welles sitting at his preferred editing desk as he narrates. Welles and his assistants worked on the final cut for an entire year -- shots are rapidly intercut almost by the second throughout, lending the film a quick-paced touch. One of the examples considered to be among the best is also one of the quietest, stitching together near-wordless shots of Irving and de Hory seemingly in debate as to whether de Hory ever signed his forgeries.

Some of Welles's wittiest work appears throughout F for Fake, in keeping with the archly playful tone of the whole film. At the same time, he is often both nakedly autobiographical and in one particular sequence incredibly moving about the power of art, narrating a montage sequence of the medieval French landmark, Chartres Cathedral:

"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

While F for Fake is seen primarily as Welles's film, two key elements were initially created by Kodar. The first, described by Kodar years later as growing out of her own beliefs in feminism, consists of shots of Kodar walking down French streets while rubbernecking male admirers stop and openly stare -- all while being surreptitiously filmed -- according to the narration, anyway; viewers may have their own opinions on whether most of the men we see in the film are in fact looking at anything in particular. The second is a concluding story about Kodar's supposed encounter with Pablo Picasso -- who, while alive at the time, not only did not appear in the film but knew nothing about it. Picasso's appearance is provided by a series of retouched still photographs, leading to one notable sequence where Picasso, who supposedly observed Kodar walking in his neighborhood for many days, seemingly watches her from behind endlessly closing and opening blinds.

External link

[Jonathan Rosenbaum essay at criterionco.com]

{| style="margin:0 auto" align=center id=toc width=600 !style="background:#CCCCCC" align="center"|Orson Welles |- |- |align="center" | Citizen Kane (1941) • The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) • The Stranger (1946) • The Lady from Shanghai (1947) • Macbeth (1948) • Othello (1952) • Mr. Arkadin (1955) • Touch of Evil (1958) • The Trial (1962) • Chimes at Midnight (1965) • The Immortal Story (1968) • F for Fake (1974) •

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