F for Fake: Criterion Collection DVD Review
May 1, 2005
At the beginning of “Citizen Kane”, before the much written about faux News on the March newsreel, and even before Charles Foster Kane’s deathbed “Rosebud” whisper, is the most amazing use of dissolving and cinematic trickery even committed to celluloid. After a close-up of Xanadu’s No Trespassing sign, Orson Welles slowly dissolves numerous times on different landmarks of Kane’s huge, unfinished estate, each time getting the camera closer to the building, while keeping the lighted window of Kane’s bedroom in virtually the same spot, despite differing sizes, in every cut. The trick is that the light is constantly shining in the same spot, though each dissolve is itself a new piece of film, space, and time, so it’s not a continuous image, yet an illusion created by perfectly designed models, and edited film, to elude to the death scene forthcoming. Throughout the movie Welles uses such tricks, be it with miniatures, like the great rising camera move in the multi-layered Chicago Opera House sequence, or overlapping matching film, like the decades spanning two-piece dissolve from Kane’s firing of his best friend, to said friend’s recollection as an old man, “Citizen Kane” is the product of a genius happily toying with Hollywood’s magic chest. It would be the only time in his career Welles would have such freedom to perform his cinematic tricks unquestioned, and as seen in his last completed work, “F for Fake”, 35 years later, the master’s touch for invention and manipulation was still present, even if the financing and audience never were. It is a film all about authenticity, fraud, accusation, and creativity, for which Welles battled his whole career, and with the great bonus material collected by The Criterion Collection’s new, surprising DVD release of the neglected free-form documentary, it paints the portrait of an artist as charlatan and self-reflexive prankster, as if the man behind the camera, in front of the camera, and behind the famous, oft-ridiculed, broken-down name, had more to say about his career, in symbols and radical editing, than most would allow him in his final years of life.
“Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much,” he says, sadly, ironically, and prophetically, of the subjects of “F for Fake”, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, and ultimately, Orson Welles. The story goes that after years of struggling to secure funds for the new, experimental kinds of films he wanted to make (like “The Trial”, and “Chimes at Midnight”), Welles decided to make a documentary on famed art reproducer Elmyr de Hory, using existing interview footage composed for French TV by his friend Francois Reichenbach. Halfway into editing the documentary, de Hory’s biographer, Clifford Irving, in the film by way of interview, was caught in the middle of a scandal involving an expensive book he wrote claiming to be the authorized biography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, to which Hughes refuted, rightfully, as bogus tripe. Welles, ever the savvy storyteller, realized the potential of a film about forgery, where an art faker’s biographer was himself a literary conman, and to pad the film into feature length, he could tell a tale of his own career as a magician, of cinema and radio, by way of the famous Mercury Theater ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, and to complement the three stories, he’d stage a strange bookend involving his mistress Oja Kodar, Pablo Picasso, and 22 nudes that may or may not have been burned by Kodar’s grandfather. The result is a documentary (Welles called it a “film essay”) of many levels, about deceit, fame, illusion, expertise and pretensions, cinema, editing, history, and the price of confidence in a morals-devoid high society. “Ours, the scientists keep telling us,” says Welles in his uncanny ability to narrate the absurd through metaphor, “is a universe that is disposable.”
“F for Fake” is as much a straight documentary as “Citizen Kane’s” News on the March segment is a character study of a great American. In ‘Kane’, the fake documentary serves as a narrative devise to launch the detective story of “Rosebud”, in turn giving us nearly every important piece of information about Charles Foster Kane’s life we need, at that point, but is a Red Herring that haunts the film’s clues and revelations, for the smart viewer anyway, where, years later, the hour-long portrait of the charismatic fakers de Hory and Irving in “F for Fake” leads a road straight to Welles’s career, the ultimate trick he has in store for the audience concerning those 22 Picasso’s, and how the lives can easily to jumbled together like so much spliced, and different, film stock, perhaps a subconscious editing trick to better understand why so many of his career masterworks (“The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Touch of Evil” especially) were hacked to bits by ignorant studio cronies concerned with marketability and the bottom line. Where ‘Kane’s’ docu is a highly stylized encore to the masterful opening Xanadu dissolves, sandwiching Kane’s death scene with slick cinematic bread, the often rambling, rapid-fire jump-cutting portrait of de Hory and Irving, before running off track to Welles and staged fiction, is part of a structure that eschews convention, and dares the viewer to try and figure out what it is doing. The comparisons between Welles’s first, and his last, from Hollywood’s golden boy, to it’s pathetic has-been, an avant-garde poet lost in an industry of phonies and misunderstood “genius”, is entirely appropriate, because if “Citizen Kane”, cinematic tomfoolery and all, is representative of a pinnacle in the manipulation of Hollywood’s magic toolbox, than “F for Fake”, which never saw the light of day on an American movie screen, is it’s petulant, impossible bastard child. That it’s a brilliant mishmash of Welles’s leftover talents, after years of unfinished projects, that would continue to go unfinished until his death in ’85, is unquestioned; it’s the freshness that it holds in it’s radical editing and free-form narration that makes it such a valuable relic to an unfairly uneven career.
Among the embarrassment of riches on Criterion’s double-disk edition of “F for Fake”, is a remarkable 87-minute documentary about Welles’s lost projects, a 60-minute cohesive documentary on de Hory and his mysterious life and suicide, and an audio commentary track by Welles’s brilliant cinematographer Gary Graver, whose jumpy images match Welles’s kinetic love for disjointed narrative. By all accounts, this is a must-have for Welles fans, and film buffs alike.
by Adam Suraf