F for Fake
For his final real completed film, Orson Welles found himself in France, creating a new type of film that was unlike anything else he’d ever done in his career. Of course, he never did make the same film twice, but by the time “F for Fake” was released, it was a miracle for the filmmaker to get a film completed at all.
As Welles’ biographer Peter Bogdanovich says in his Introduction on the Criterion DVD of the film, if you don’t get into the rhythms and cadences of Welles’ editing and storytelling in “F for Fake,” you won’t like it. Thankfully, as someone who has come to “F for Fake” after years of unorthodox films seen, Welles’ film has been eclipsed by some rare few films in storytelling finesse. That doesn’t make it less mesmerizing to watch.
Film was the only way Welles could tell this story, correction, series of stories. Editing is important, as is the sight of Welles himself, onscreen, relaying the stories of Clifford Irving, Elmyr de Hory, and later, Pablo Picasso and an encounter with Oja Kodar (who was Welles’ companion at the time, and is the credited co-writer on the film). Also onscreen is François Reichenbach, a French filmmaker who was making a documentary on Elmyr that was the jumping off point for Welles.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself- not hard to do with this film. I’ve introduced the major players, but not their context with each other. Such is the way of Welles’ exceptional film. The main individual in “F for Fake” is de Hory, who is considered to be the world’s greatest art forger. A man who’s sold countless of his fakes for a small fortune that has allowed him to live quite well over the years. We meet Elmyr through Clifford Irving, who is serving as his biographer. Irving is now notorious, and actually was at the time of Welles’ film, for his own fakery, when he sold a supposed autobiography of the famously-reclusive Howard Hughes for six figures. That story was told in the 2007 film “The Hoax,” but to see the elements here is to get caught up in the hysteria and questions of it in an immediate and, in a way, exciting fashion under Welles’ watchful eye.
For Welles, what does he make of Elmyr? Or Irving? Like any true documentarian, he doesn’t make any judgements, and just lets these two tell their own stories. He does have some intriguing thoughts, however, that make the viewer ask fascinating questions about what makes art, what makes a faker, and what does it say about the art world that commercial concerns get in the way of discovering the truth when presented with a fake.
The first images we see in the film is of Welles, on a train platform, performing magic tricks for children. He puts himself in league with Elmyr and Irving by calling himself a charlatan as well (and indeed, he reminds us of his infamous 1938 radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” which was so convincing the country was hysterical with worries of a real invasion), but only later do we realize that in fact, Welles is the most honest person in the film. Everything he has told us is “based on the available facts,” and when he comes clean later after his story of Picasso and Kodar (which is too inspired to give away here), we realize just how extraordinary he is as a storyteller. No wonder he fooled the world with his “War of the Worlds”- his is a voice we can’t help but believe.
He later did a documentary “essay” about bringing “Othello” to the screen, but most consider “F for Fake” as Welles’ last true film. Taken in that context, it’s wonderful to know that Welles- who lost his creative freedom in Hollywood after “Citizen Kane,” and his ability to fund projects there after his 1958 masterpiece “Touch of Evil”- was able, one last time, to tell a story that examines the reality of a showman and the showmanship of a larger-than-life character on his own terms.
