F for Fake (1973) is the film I might have been looking forward to most in this series, as I'd heard more acclaim about it than any of the various other Welles misfires I hadn't gotten to yet, which this series has helped rectify. And the film did not disappoint -- with some important caveats thrown in.
F for Fake reminded me in structure of one of my favorite documentaries of the 21st century, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. Of course, it would be appropriate to reverse that order of causation and say that Exit reminded me of F for Fake, but I saw Exit a decade earlier, and subjective impressions all have to do with which film you see first.
Both films deal with the issue of what constitutes art and how we measure the authenticity of the artist compared to the acclaim/financial remuneration he/she receives for his/her work. Both films also feature two main characters who are kind of each other's foils, that being Thierry Guetta (a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash") and Banksy himself in Exit, and art forger Elmyr de Hory and the journalist who writes about him, Clifford Irving, in F for Fake.
Of course, if you know the history -- which I didn't -- Irving was also a faker, having written a book based on a meeting with famed recluse Howard Hughes that never actually happened. This was the basis for the Richard Gere vehicle The Hoax, but I didn't put that together until after I'd finished F for Fake and was going down various internet rabbit holes related to it.
The content that's here is very interesting, especially since Welles is in peak playful form as a kind of master of ceremonies throughout. We keep coming back to him for commentary and little sleights of hand to remind us that on some level, all film is an illusion. He doesn't seem as corpulent here as he had seemed in some of his more recent films that I watched for this series -- perhaps needing to retain a certain fitness level for his newish love interest, Oja Kodar, who has a significant role in this film -- and he doesn't at all strike you as a person winding down in his career. In reality, though, this was the final feature-length film he completed before his death in 1986.
(I should note that I am excluding for this series a documentary he made in 1978 called Filming Othello, which I suppose supplants F for Fake as the last completed feature. It runs 84 minutes. But because a film someone makes about their making of another film does not seem like an essential part of their filmography, more like a glorified "making of" feature as a DVD extra, I am comfortable excluding it from his official filmography.)
What I found disorienting about F for Fake, though, is the frenetic editing of the material, a shortcoming that I first noted in my least favorite film so far in this series, Mr. Arkadin. The way that film slathered on information with great rapidity really put me off, and some of that same feeling creeped in as I was watching F for Fake, even though the actual content of this film was something I enjoyed much better. It's like he's layering information in a montage, which is almost chronological in its progression, but loops back enough and is just abstract enough to push you off balance. After any particular five-minute stretch of F for Fake, you've consumed the information Welles wants you to take away from that section, but you feel like he's organized it in a deliberately roundabout fashion that's designed to tease you and troll you. To the extent that it ultimately achieves its goals, it seems sort of clever -- while at the same time remaining this close to causing you to question the filmmaker's competency.
It was interesting also to learn about this master forger, Elmyr (he's referred to that way rather than "de Hory"), who was capable of producing near perfect imitations of the works of various master painters -- not only producing them, but dashing them off quickly before lunch. He made lots of money selling these and fooling experts, though eventually, the police were only a few steps behind him. It's interesting content for me right now, having just come off of watching Tim's Vermeer, which involves a non-professional painting a Vermeer with a lot more time, labor and precision, and a lot less attempt to deceive.
It felt like the material on Clifford was considerably less well documented, such that it took me a long time to actually determine what he was guilt of, in part because the film holds that close to the vest for a while. As the two men are introduced as the film's dual focal points, the fact that Irving doesn't come to life the way de Hory (or Elmyr) does feels like one of the film's demerits.
In the end, though, the takeaway from F for Fake is a really thoughtful consideration of art and artifice, one which seems like a real extension of many of Welles' career-long interests. It's easy to see why he was intrigued by Elmyr de Hory, as he's a larger than life personality (like Welles and many of the characters he played) given to throwing lavish parties, while also containing an essentially unknowable quality.
There's also a bit of Welles the horndog in here, as the aforementioned Oja Kodar is ogled at by the camera in two different passages of the film, sometimes without any clothes on. It's not entirely clear how this relates to the other themes -- it's supposed to have something to do, I believe, with secretly observing people whose eye is drawn by the woman's curves, and how this has to do with the role of art on the observer. Neither does it really detract from the film, but it does contribute to it feeling more diffuse, more of a dump of similar subject matter than one cogent argument seen through from beginning to end.
Along those lines, I see F for Fake described more as a "film essay" than a documentary, though "docudrama" is often used in connection with it as well. (Because not everything in the film is actually true, though I will respect Welles' careful wording and not give away the parts that were fabricated to illustrate a point.) That term "film essay" also ecompasses its more free-form aspects, as the film is designed to promote thought about its themes more than it is designed to present a narrative that is easily tracked from point A to point B to point C.
The final film in this series comes in December, and it was the one that sort of prompted me to set out on this journey in the first place: The Other Side of the Wind, Welles' incomplete film that was patched together and released on Netflix in 2018.
No comments:
Post a Comment