F for Fake
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| F for Fake | |
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| Directed by | Orson Welles |
| Produced by | François Reichenbach Dominique Antoine Richard Drewitt |
| Written by | Orson Welles Oja Kodar |
| Starring | Orson Welles Oja Kodar Joseph Cotten Elmyr de Hory Clifford Irving François Reichenbach Gary Graver |
| Music by | Michel Legrand |
| Cinematography | François Reichenbach |
| Editing by | Marie-Sophie Dubus Dominique Engerer |
| Distributed by |  Specialty Films |
| Release date(s) | September 25, 1975 |
| Running time | 85 min |
| Country | France / Iran / West Germany |
| Language | English / French / Spanish |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
F for Fake (French: Vérités et Mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art.
Far from serving as a traditional documentary of Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving, and Orson Welles himself, in an autobiographical role. In 2005 The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD.
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[edit] Synopsis
Several narratives are woven together throughout the film, including those of de Hory, Irving, Welles, and Kodar.
About de Hory, we learn that he was a struggling artist who turned to forgery out of desperation, only to see the greater share of the profits from his deceptions go to doubly-unscrupulous art dealers. As partial compensation for that injustice he is maintained in a villa in Ibiza by one of his dealers. What is only hinted at in Welles's documentary is that de Hory had recently served a two-month sentence in a Spanish prison for homosexuality and consorting with criminals. (De Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles's film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities.)
Irving's original part in F for Fake was as de Hory's biographer, but his part grew unexpectedly at some point during production. There has not always been agreement among commentators over just how that production unfolded, but the now-accepted story [1] is that the director François Reichenbach shot a documentary about de Hory and Irving before giving his footage to Welles, who then shot additional footage with Reichenbach as his cinematographer. In the time between the shooting of Reichenbach's documentary and the finishing of Welles's, it became known that Irving had perpetrated a hoax of his own, namely a fabricated "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes (the hoax was later dramatized — some say fictionalized — in The Hoax). This discovery prompted the shooting of still more footage, which then got woven into F for Fake.
Exactly one hour before narrating Kodar's story, Welles promises that everything in the next hour of his film will be true. By the time of Kodar's story the viewer has naturally forgotten the letter of Welles's promise — and gets duped. The clever yarn has Kodar sitting for Pablo Picasso after getting him to agree to give her the finished portraits, and then selling not those very portraits but fake Picasso's in their place. In the commentary to the Criterion Collection DVD release of F for Fake, Kodar claims the idea for this segment as her own. She also claims credit for the movie's opening sequence, which consists of shots of Kodar walking down French streets while rubbernecking male admirers stop and openly stare — all the while being surreptitiously filmed, according to the narration. This sequence is described by Kodar as inspired by her feminism.
[edit] Reception
F for Fake faced widespread popular rejection in the director's home country upon its release, though it fared better commercially in Europe.[citation needed] Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be indulgent or incoherent.[citation needed] F for Fake has, however, grown in stature over the years and is now often considered not only a film classic, but a precursor to modern editing techniques as well as a popularizer of more avant-garde methods. As the film embraces everything from self-conscious notation of the film process, to ironic employment of '50s-era B-movie footage, Welles in essence was creating not so much a documentary as a "new kind of film," as he once told writer Jonathan Rosenbaum.
[edit] Style
F for Fake is often judged a masterpiece of the art of editing [2] — a key subject of the film itself, which at many points shows Welles sitting at his 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 a series of near-wordless shots of Irving and de Hory seemingly in debate as to whether de Hory ever signed his forgeries (the shots of Irving and de Hory were in fact taken at different times).
Welles's autobiographical asides in the film reflect on his 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which caused a nationwide panic with its fake news broadcast. In introducing this chapter of his life, Welles declares his uncertainty as to his own authenticity, as he believes he too has engaged in fraud.
[edit] Cathedral of Chartres
In perhaps the most celebrated segment of the film, treating the power of art and the nature of authorship, Welles narrates a montage sequence of the medieval French landmark, Chartres Cathedral:
- "Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. 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."
[edit] Quotes
- Orson Welles (narration): "It's pretty but is it art? How is it valued? The value depends on opinion, opinion depends on the expert, a faker like Elmyr makes fool of the experts - so who's the expert? Who's the faker?".
- Orson Welles (narration): "I must say I'm honored - my signature forged by a real Elmyr."
- Elmyr de Hory (of his forged masterpieces): "If they are hanged long enough in the museum they become real."
- Elmyr de Hory: "I don't feel bad for Modigliani, I feel good for me."
- Elmyr de Hory: "I never signed any painting."
- Narrator (from trailer): "And what about the tiger?!"
[edit] External links
- Welles' Chartres monologue
- F for Fake at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- 'F for Fake' Is an Illusionist's Trick With Bogus Heroes and Expert Villains by Vincent Canby, New York Times, September 28, 1975
- New York Review review of F For Fake DVD
- F for Fake: The Ultimate Mirror of Orson Welles article by Robert Castle, August 2004.
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