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F for Fake
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As
the documentary-collage Orson Welles: The
One-Man Band (1995) by Oja Kodar & Vassili Silovic touchingly shows,
Welles carried an editing table with him wherever he travelled. In F for Fake, this tool of his trade is
deployed with the same childlike zest that Dziga Vertov conveyed in Man with a Movie
Camera (1929).
And F for Fake is not merely a dazzlingly
edited film, creating vectors of speed, energy and invention that put most
movies to shame. In a profound way, it is about editing – about the articulation, combination, collision, juxtaposition of
image and sound fragments – and thus, like every Welles film, about conjuring
and magic.
Perhaps
the very act of editing had a special, poetic meaning for Welles: that editing
table was clearly a kind of nest or life-raft, a safe place for him, where he
could sift and recast all the fragments both of his own work (finished or
unfinished) as well as that of his friendly collaborators.
In
cinema history, F for Fake stands
like a lighthouse between the grand old era of the montage film – the city symphonies, compilation films, experimental
collages – and the modern practice of the essay
film. Like Chris Marker or Aleander Kluge, Agnès Varda or Jean-Pierre
Gorin, Welles rigorously worked his material into the form of a personal
reflection.
Art,
fakery and authorship are the loose topics of this dancing essay, which was
triggered by a fortuitous conjunction of events. The celebrated documentary
filmmaker François Reichenbach (whose later life is retold with light
fictionality in Patrice Chéreau’s Those
Who Love Me Can Take the Train, 1998) had shot footage for one of his own
projects of an irascible old art forger, Elmyr de Hory. This material included
comments from his biographer, Clifford Irving.
However,
no one but Irving and his closest associates knew, at the time, that he had
just perpetrated his own superb hoax: a seeming autobiography by eccentric
billionaire Howard Hughes. Irving bet successfully on Hughes’ reclusiveness,
and the public’s willingness to believe any crazy story about him, as a cover
for his scam – an affair later fictionalised, with further fancy, in Hoax (2007).
All
this delightfully fortuitous stuff – unveiling ever more layers of hidden irony
– serves merely as Welles’ launching pad. He ranges far and wide through the
philosophy and politics of fakery, from personal coups (including, of course,
the War of the
Worlds broadcast of 1938) to the
paradoxes of aesthetic creation and the artist’s signature (culminating in a
beautiful sequence devoted to the “authorless” Chartres cathedral – a testament
to, among other things, the skill of Welles’ regular cinematographer in this
period, Gary Gravers).
Meanwhile
– since this is a film that plays on our own shifting levels of belief – Welles
is busy spinning his own little red herrings and hoaxes, at his expense as much
as ours. The extraordinary sound design is prominent in this dexterous sifting
of materials and levels: try to hear the number of voices that are, in fact,
provided by Welles himself.
F for Fake is a total treat,
and a key work in Welles’ filmography.
Note: These ideas
are developed at length on my audio commentary for the F for Fake DVD released by Madman (Australia) in 2009.
MORE Welles: The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Citizen Kane © Adrian Martin June 1996 |
