| F for Fake | |
|---|---|
| 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 |
F for Fake (French: Vérités et mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in the film. 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. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres and has been described as a kind of film essay.
Far from serving as a traditional documentary on 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.
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Several narratives are woven together throughout the film, including those of de Hory, Irving, Welles, Howard Hughes 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' 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', it became known that Irving had perpetrated a hoax of his own, namely a fabricated "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes (the hoax was later fictionalized in The Hoax). This discovery prompted the shooting of still more footage, which then got woven into F for Fake. Blurring the lines even more, there are several pieces of footage in the film showing Welles at a party with De Hory, and, at one point, De Hory even signs a painting with a forgery of Welles' signature. Some of Hughes' career is outlined in the form of a parody of the "News on the March" sequence in Citizen Kane.
Exactly one hour before narrating Kodar's story, Welles promises that everything in the next hour of his film will be true. Exactly one hour later, the film tells a story where Kodar sits for a series of nudes for Pablo Picasso after getting him to agree to give her the finished portraits, and then selling not those very portraits but fake Picassos in their place. The story climaxes with Welles and Kodar re-enacting a tense exchange between Picasso and Kodar's grandfather, the alleged forger of the paintings, before Welles reminds the viewer that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour and that "for the last 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off."
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 streets while rubbernecking male admirers (unaware that they are being filmed) stop and openly stare. This sequence is described by Kodar as inspired by her feminism.
F for Fake faced widespread popular rejection in the United States upon its 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. 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 1950s-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.[3] F for Fake is now sometimes referred to as a "film essay."
F for Fake is often judged as a masterpiece of the art of film editing[4] — 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, working seven days a week[3]—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). Some have even argued that after Citizen Kane, F for Fake is Welles's most influential film, for it invented the MTV style of editing.[5]
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. Interestingly, while the basic facts of the War of the Worlds incident are correctly given, the apparent excerpts from the play featured in the movie are complete fabrications, including a scene in which President Roosevelt meets the Martian invaders—something which did not happen in the original (fabricated) broadcast.