Our articles about the LA-based pop band “Lights Over Paris” have attracted a lot of attention. Read the articles below to see why.
Rian Johnson’s Festival of Fakery: F for Fake
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
– Pablo Picasso
So what then, is art? The answer to that question today encompasses far more than it ever has — thanks to technology (which more and more helps us to synthesize reality) and the variety of media available to us (books, TV, the Internet, movies, music, radio, comic books, etc.). We have become so good at representing reality that sometimes we use the real to make a fake: should The Daily Show, for example, be considered art? Should this Kobe Bryant commercial? But then, the media themselves, by definition, are also fake: they are the conduits through which we see reality, and not reality itself.
In F for Fake, Orson Welles explores the nature of “truth in art” by telling the story of a highly successful art forger. That’s just his premise though. It’s in the presentation of ideas that makes this a rare, inventive, and truly post-modern film experience.
Collaborating with producer Francois Reichenbach, Welles was supposed to be making a film about Elmyr de Hory, one of the greatest art forgers of the 20th century. But, almost immediately, the film starts to twist and turn. One of Welles’ primary sources is writer Clifford Irving, who had written a biography about Elmyr de Hory. Turns out that, as Welles was editing the film, Clifford Irving was revealed to be a shamster himself — after falsely claiming to have written the autobiography of Howard Hughes. (Irving’s story is told in the movie The Hoax, with Richard Gere playing Irving.) So Welles includes the story of Irving’s hoax, as they together uncover the story behind the fakery of de Hory. Make sense?
That’s not all. Welles touches briefly on Howard Hughes, the super-secretive celebrity billionaire who went all-out for world fame, won it, and then got to be more famous trying for privacy. He talks about himself, and how he unexpectedly found fame through a fake of his own: his radio rendition of The War of The Worlds. Then we follow de Hory through his process of making a fake masterpiece. Elmyr de Hory started out as most artists do: imitating others. Then he made an art out of reproducing the art of others. He couldn’t sell his own art, but art dealers clamored for his fakes.
“If you hang them in a museum, or in your collection,” de Hory tells us, “and if they hang long enough there, they will become real.” And he’s right: it’s revealed in the film that some “prominent museums”, thinking they were buying a painting by Matisse or Madrigliani, had been fooled into buying his clever fake.
In an introduction to the film on the Criterion disc, Peter Bogdanovich describes F for Fake as “an unusual film”. Indeed, the film is an exhibition of filmmaking acrobatics by Welles. As director, he blends several storylines and footage from different formats into a coherent, nonlinear whole. His voice narrates the feature, and he appears throughout — not just as the host and star of the film, but also as a subject.
Throughout F for Fake, Welles uses a device to establish distance between the viewer, himself, and the subject — sometimes incorporating himself into it. He shows a shot from the film (over which sometimes we hear him in voiceover) — then cuts back to that same shot, as seen on a Moviola screen. It’s not a device I’ve seen often in feature documentaries — usually, the filmmaking is not the story; the subject is. But here, the subject is fakery, so the device promotes his theme, the game-like tone of the film, and reminds us that films themselves (especially this one) are all a kind of fake.
There’s a brief subplot at the end of the film that I think leads it astray, involving Pablo Picasso, Welles, and his then-girlfriend Oja Kodar. But maybe, somehow, it was meant to. F for Fake is more than your conventional documentary. It’s a film that poses a lot of interesting questions about what makes art, and what makes good art. The question is not, as Clifford Irving tells us, whether it’s real or fake. “It’s whether it’s a good fake or a bad fake.”
