Orson Welles' F for Fake is not postmodern. He is certainly one of those artists who find favor with the next generation, but he is still a modernist, and like any self-respecting modernist, he challenges assumed conventions. But in terms of cinema, Welles is not a child of Marx and Coca-Cola. He is a brooding father.
F for Fake is, as IMDb so tersely describes it, "a documentary about fraud and fakery," but it is also more. It is a personal film. It is a filmic essay. It is a more than mockumentary since it could equally pass as an ontological statement.
More importantly, it is a documentary on fakes of all sorts. There is no single use for the term "fake," but rather a series of nuanced uses of the term. Gilles Deleuze put it this way: "...it is so difficult to define 'the' forger, because we do not take into account his multiplicity, his ubiquity, and because we are content to refer to a historical and ultimately chronological time." Hence, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving are fakes. Paintings are fakes. Art experts are fakes. War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane are fakes. Welles himself is a fake. Magic tricks are fake. Oja Kodar is a fake. Picasso is a fake. This documentary itself is a fake, but it adds at least one new dimension to being a fake. It is about "fake" itself in myriad forms.
The beginning of the film starts with magic tricks, quite literally, but the greatest feats are Welles' camerawork and editing. The reasons to notice the camerawork is Oja Kodar, who is filmed from the waist down, walking past men and never failing to gather a wanton look. Only after a while do we see Kodar's face. It is a powerful stretch of film, not only as a feminist commentary, but because it reveals a major theme of the film: that we often do not question an illusion because we want it to be true. To be sure, Kodar is beautiful. The beauty is no illusion, but she is definitely acting out a role.
With the editing, try finding a spot in the first fifteen minutes of the film where it seems like a good place to pause. There is not a place that seems to be right for the job, no place that the camera itself pauses as if to say "take a moment before the next scene." Even the freeze frames are misleading because as the frame stops, a voice is still finishing a sentence. The overlaps in these first fifteen minutes demand attention and hold our attention as a matter of craft.
The full effect of the film is realized fairly early on as we learn the stories of Clifford Irving and Elmyr de Hory. Irving is already famous for his fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes. At the time of the film, he is working on a biography of Elmyr de Hory who is possibly the world's most infamous art forger. What the scenes have to offer beyond fascinating anecdotes is simple, however. Irving and Elmyr have exposed museums and art dealers to be less than expert, and furthermore, in the world of painting, Elmyr may be the real expert since he can differentiate between one of his "fakes" and a "real" Manet, Matisse, or Picasso. Why is Elmyr not in jail, then? The art world may not want to know the truth as with Kodar earlier in the film. Also because if any art dealer or museum exposes Elmyr, their credibility would also be lost.
Lastly, Welles tells us a story about Kodar and Picasso. Describing the story would be a bit of a spoiler, but if one can imagine The Usual Suspects as having a memorable twist, imagine at least three sharper twists in a story. Imagine a brooding father, capable of War of the Worlds, telling it to you as a bedtime story.
IMDb rates this film 7.8 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film (an appalling) 3.5 stars out of 5
Other films in the Welles (directorial) oeuvre: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Trial, Othello, Mr. Arkadin, and A Touch of Evil.
With a critical eye towards the Criterion Collection, I applaud their two-disc version of this film. The supplementary material they provide with their edition of this film is exceptional.
