F for Fake

Orson Welles' F for Fake is a wild, experimental film — not a narrative, kind of a documentary, yet more of an essay on fakery put to film in which the filmmaker fools you, too.

Here, Welles contemplates illusion, forgery, fraud, and other forms of deceit, focusing on the infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory, but also spending time on Clifford Irving, who gained notoriety after he wrote the fake autobiography of Howard Hughes (and went to prison for same).

Welles shows the connection between de Hory and Irving — they were friends, spending time on the island of Ibiza in the 1970s.  Irving even wrote Elmyr de Hory's biography.

So, once Howard Hughes got wind of the "autobiography," he was forced to come out of seclusion — sort of.  Hughes held a phone press conference with reporters in order to deny any involvement with the book and any connection to Irving — or did he?  Hughes himself was a faker, having hired body doubles of himself.  The recording of Hughes' voice sounds more like Woody Harrelson's impression of Larry Flynt.

They also interviewed Clifford Irving by phone.  But was that him on the phone?  What's up?  What's down?  Black?  White?  This film is astonishing, peeling away layer upon layer of trickery, flipping filmmaking on its ear in the process, and taking a place among Welles' most innovative and interesting works, and a masterpiece of editing.

Let's not forget, even Welles started out as a fake.  He spent a career spinning tales and playing roles in the grand illusion of theatre and film.  His Mercury Radio version of "The War of the Worlds" fooled people into thinking that Martians were invading.  Beautiful!

Welles does some wild stuff with perspective here.  He frequently goes from the camera's perspective to the editor's, moving back and forth from the footage and Welles looking at and commenting on the footage playing in front of him on a Steenbeck.  He cuts together a variety of film stocks, changes frame rates, drops in still photographs, freezes the film and provides direct-address monologues, and generally creates a disorienting viewing experience of asides, interviews, B-roll, and personal reflections.  This article provides a much more detailed explanation of what Welles was doing here.

I'm a big Welles fan; for me, Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and even Carol Reed's The Third Man are some of the finest films ever made.  F for Fake is not like any other film; Welles seems at his most comfortable here, though, often smiling and laughing along with the revelations of the film.  I went through a serious Orson Welles appreciation phase a few years ago, picking up this film and several others before giving up in my attempts to locate quality versions of his minor films.

Most of Welles' other films are either not available on DVD (The Magnificent Ambersons) or feature transfers so poor as to render them nearly unwatchable (The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight), which makes F for Fake even more rewarding — not only is this film on DVD, but one of two Criterion Collection releases (the other being The Complete Mr. Arkadin — a set that includes three versions of the same film).  Ironically enough, the two Criterion releases of Welles' work are easily obtainable yet stand as the most impenetrable works of his career.

Sadly, Welles almost always had trouble raising money for his projects.  In his later years, he bemoaned having to spend so much time trying to find funding instead of, you know, actually getting to create something.  He was known as a creative tyrant.  He was so direct, so demanding, so dissatisfied with the mediocrity of others, and to some, so arrogant, that he turned people off and/or turned them away.  People misinterpreted and resented his intensity.  People didn't understand him.  He wasn't good at schmoozing.  He wanted to create.  So many people didn't take him seriously, and in the end, Welles sort of brought that on himself.

Even though Welles, left to his own devices, could create the greatest films ever made, he was always fighting off studio meddling and trying to find money to fund his eccentric efforts.  When I imagine what Orson Welles could have accomplished in this age of digital cinema, nonlinear editing, and independent filmmaking on the cheap, I am overwhelmed at the possibilities.  He needed people to get out of the way and let him do his job.

Filmmaking isn't like that, though.  If Welles were solely a painter or solely a writer, he could have done anything he wanted, but because filmmaking is such a collaborative medium of experts, egos, sharks, and know-nothings, he languished for years trying to get project after project off the ground.  That's not to say that his own hubris didn't play a role in his failings — on the contrary, Welles' hubris is the stuff of legend, detailed in books and cinematic depictions — but he had some seriously terrible luck, too.  His story is by turns sad and triumphant, and I find the whole of his career absolutely fascinating.

By 1975 and F for Fake, Welles' film career was largely over.  Afterward, he resorted to schilling Paul Masson California wines and, in one of the cruelest ironies of his or any other career, playing a gigantic, planet-eating robot at his largest and unhealthiest — indeed, not long before he died.  He became a parody of himself, and then other people parodied him.  When you're larger than life, you're easy to hit.

According to Bogdanovich, Welles wanted to do more "essay documentaries," like this one, but he never got the chance.  F for Fake is Orson Welles' last completed film (he later finished a ho-hum television documentary called Filming Othello, which has never come to DVD).  F for Fake stands as a bizarre, multilayered meditation, and a fascinating postscript to an illustrious, puzzling career.