It is such a simple film. The images carry the story, the music enhances the images, and the dialogue is almost non-existent. The Red Balloon shows and does not tell, and because of that the audience is allowed to have their own reactions to it.

It is an historical artifact and a fantasy. As Doc Salvatron pointed out, The Red Balloon showcases a part of Paris that does not exist anymore. But not only that. In its 34 minutes, the film succeeds in portraying the brevity, the fragility, the innocence of childhood. By the end of it, the balloon’s death leaves the boy forever changed, and seemingly stuck on earth — until all the balloons in the whole city gather round him, Up-style, to carry him away from the source of his pain, to places we do not see.

But what does the film mean? Should that question be asked?

Many viewers have already asked it. They cannot help themselves, like the child who asks, “Why is the sky blue?” And since The Red Balloon is an allegory, a cinematic fable, it welcomes those kinds of questions.

The big question I would ask is “Why are those other boys so mean?” One fact is clear after watching the film: not everyone has a balloon. Why is that?

Maybe everyone gets a balloon, but through bad circumstances in life the balloon is lost. So when these kids see another kid with a balloon, it reminds them of the one they once had, and so they react with sadness and anger and jealousy, and try to take that kid down.

Or maybe some people don’t get to have a balloon, or get balloons that aren’t as shiny and happy and healthy as the one the little boy has. Their balloons aren’t as good, and they don’t last. So when they encounter this boy, they see him as being superior to them because his balloon is cooler. They’re threatened by the grace and ease of the boy’s friendship with his balloon and, unable to find that feeling for themselves, they decide to destroy his balloon. Only with that balloon out of the way can they feel better about their misery.

There are many other interpretations. Some have said that The Red Balloon symbolizes Christianity. Some have said it is an argument for socialism. Maybe the red balloon is like healthcare in this country: not everyone has it, but when someone loses it he has to take away from everyone else to pay for it.

The Red Balloon is a film that can be enjoyed without asking these questions. It can transcend meaning because it connects viewers, children and adults alike, with something we all experience: the unfairness of life. All of us identify ourselves with the little boy, and not with the mean adults, or the other mean kids. The film is magical in that way, and at the same time, like a childhood friend, does not ask too much of us in return.

]]> http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/08/03/le-ballon-rouge-part-deux/feed/ 0 http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/08/02/la-ballon-rouge/ http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/08/02/la-ballon-rouge/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:27:41 +0000 Dr. Salvatron http://www.plaidcreature.com/?p=2160 Continue reading]]> Finally, after seven days of living sans computer, mine has returned with a new fully functional graphics card. Enabling me to view and enjoy Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 film, La Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon).
For this week, Dr. Hyperbolus and I are swapping days.

Not even a minute into this shit it’s already proven itself an award-winner. Did other films in the 50s list their accomplishments before the main title card? Hubristic?

We open on a little boy in Paris… petting a stray cat.

So this kid climbs a lamppost to save the entangled red balloon.

He asks a groundkeeper to hold his balloon while he’s at school.

I assume the groundskeeper did his job, because in the next scene the kid is leaving his class with it in pristine condition.

To protect his sentient-like bloodred dustinhoffmansharonstone-esque floating sphere, he sequesters the help of an old man by getting permission to share his umbrella.

The old man makes his destination and can no longer assist. So the boy starts piggybacking on pedestrians.
A lady.

A couple of nuns.

Another dude in a trench coat.

French police? or Spartan army in Fascist leather coats?

No matter, they pass on by. No harm done.

This film has some beautiful shots of Paris.

So the boy returns home. His housekeeper shoves the balloon out the window, but it stays and floats nearby.

NEXT DAY.
A shopkeeper opens his business.

A woman receives the mail.

Some dude carries a giant sheet of glass on his back.

The boy makes it a point to establish supreme dominance.

Yelling at the balloon to come down, the Balloon decides to fuck around and stay just out of reaching distance.

Whose the supreme dominator now, bitch!

Holy balls, watch out for that fucking stray dog! Jesus H Macy!

No worries, the next scene it’s as if it never happened.
Unable to board the bus the balloon chases it.

Actually making it to school on time this day, the boy and his balloon are met with a feisty mob of classmates, hell bent on gaining control of the red balloon.

The balloon tries to follow the boy into the school but is caught by the headmaster.
The headmaster (aka Hitler) punishes the boy for it and locks him in a confined space.

For the next couple minutes, the red balloon stalks and tortures the headmaster until he lets the boy out.


The buddies are back. Fuck tha police.

After a short stint at a street market where they almost lose each other because the balloon identifies itself in a mirror and can’t look away, they pass a girl carrying a blue balloon.

Blue tries to follow red.

FUCK. NO. YOU LITTLE SHITS! WTF ARE YOU DOING?!

YOU MOTHER FUCKERS! NOOOO!

Whew! They make it home. The mob follows and waits outside. You little shits.

I imagine this is later in the day or the next day, but this is the longest couple of shots we’ve seen without the balloon. I feel a slight sense of nausea.  The framing is kept in such a way that the open gate remains in view.

The balloon slowly makes its way into the church.

After some rustling noises, the boy emerges with the balloon followed by an armed guard. What the hell kind of church is this?!

They run away.
Into another beautiful shot.

The boy Tony-Danza-Style reminds the balloon who the boss is as he goes into a pastry shop to get some sweets.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. These little fuckers are back.

WHAT THE FUCK?! They’ve tied the balloon to a rock and are beating the balloon with a stick as they travel to god knows where.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOUR FUCKING BALLOON WENT?! YOU STUPID BASTARD! YOU DUMB BASTARD!

THEYRE PELTING IT WITH ROCKS!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!

This boy has NO FUCKING CLUE WHATS GOING ON! Get the FUCK OVER THERE!

The fucking door won’t open so he calls the balloon to come down to him.



YOU PIECES OF SHIT!


THE ROPE BROKE! IT BROKE! IT BROKE!
RUN MOTHA FUCKA RUN!!!

….

SURROUNDED!!

The boy pleads for the balloon to escape as they hold him down.


Another hit with the slingshot. The balloon is dazed, injured.

Balloons across the city gather.

This film was an emotional rollercoaster. Showcasing a range of human states, from indifference to joy to cruelty.
Only the children in this film have a strong reaction towards the balloon.
All of the adults either find it a nuisance or don’t notice it at all. And, unfortunate for us, the children who are unable to capture the balloon end up wanting to destroy it out of jealousy.
The cruelty of kids.
While the film dabbles in the fantastic throughout, the ending is of course, the most fantastical. And why not make it the most fantastical! For this film is a dedication to, and a reminder of, the kid we have in each of us. Our sense of curiosity, playfulness, and wonderment.

In the end, we watch him float away with our innocence
our childhood.

Wikipedia – Sidenote: the 1956 Oscar Winning short film “Le Ballon Rouge” also known as The Red Balloon was shot in Belleville and featured many parts of the region which were subsequently demolished in the 1960s.
IMDB Side Note: (from User Comment by Nicholas Rhodes) “This truly magical and picturesque film is the colour record of the Belleville area of Paris which was razed to the ground during the late 1960′s and left as waste land for 20 years.

Ninety-five percent of what you see in the film exists no more, the bakeries, the famous Y-shaped staircase situated just beyond the equally famous café “Au Repos de la Montagne” , the long-gone steep steps of the rue Vilin where Pascal finds the balloon initially etc, the waste ground where all the battles took place. All this has gone for ever, disappeared into another dimension, and has been replaced by a featureless modern-day park surrounded by ugly high-rise blocks built in the seventies and where it is not always safe to walk alone – the kids there certainly aren’t running about after balloons these days, they’re more interested in throwing stones at passers-by ! I personally visited recently on several occasions the site of where this was filmed and couldn’t believe my eyes – it was like two different worlds !

One or two shots are taken in Montmartre and there is a brief glimpse of the Seine but be advised that the quasi-totality of the film was shot in Belleville and the adjacent “quartier des Pyrenees”. Only the large church ( Notre-Dame de la Croix, between the Place Maurice Chevalier and the Place de Ménilmontant ) remains today, dwarfed by the high rise blocks I mentioned earlier. Only when you look to the top flats of the houses in the rue des Envierges and the sky beyond, can you maintain the illusion that time has stood still! The opening scene in the film where Pascal is just about to go down the staircase cannot be reproduced today – both the bakery to his left – and the “Maison du Meunier” to his right (as well as the staircase) have been completely demolished!”

Dark Night
Hellboy 2
Harry Potter
Quantum of Solace
…all the way back to Pitch Black in 1998

During my time there I did effects work for Angels & Demons and 2012.  I was also on the company softball team.  The thing about London is that they don’t have any real baseball fields so we just played at the park and did our best not to hit people sleeping in the middle of the field.  This was hindered a bit by the fact that you can drink in all the parks.  So we did and it makes the game much more interesting but also makes people pretty much terrible at sports.  I would also recommend playing with bottles, rather than beer in cups, so that it doesn’t spill when you run to catch a ball.

So back to the movie stuff.  Below are a few of the shots I worked on for Angels & Demons.  In the first two I did the smoke, atmospherics and embers.  In the last two I did the dust and debris flying at the large screens and covering up the bad acting of the extras.

To give you an idea of how long some of this stuff takes, in the Vatican fly-by with the large smoke plume it would take three days just to do a simulation of the smoke.  The final version that’s in the film is four separate simulations.  In all I spent about a month just on that one effect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hey, balloon!  Come here.  Are you coming?
Come on.  Are you listening?
If you come… I’ll give you something.
Something bigger than you can imagine.
I’ll give you a hundred candies.  Two million caramel bars.
Anything you want if you come.
It’s not listening.

Balloon, are you coming or not?  You heard me.
So you’re coming with me?
One more time.  Are you coming back to my place or not?
No answer.  So that’s a “no.”
You’re so stupid.

So begins Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2007 film, inspired in part and paying homage to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon — a film that, with any luck, Doc Salvatron and I will be discussing next week. I haven’t yet seen the original, but from what I’ve read it seems to be about childhood innocence, friendship and love. HHH’s feature length expansion updates those themes in a modern context, making the film about something more sad, fleeting and distant.

Where’s the balloon? I must admit: I had to see this film twice to understand what it was about. The first time I saw it, I was thrown off by one simple fact: the balloon is nowhere to be found! After the opening sequence plays out, and after the young child, Simon (played by Simon Iteanu) runs into it briefly at a train station, the red balloon disappears, for a full 50 minutes of the film. As in the original, it is contained completely to the outside world, traveling on its own will, but here it has what is essentially a cameo role. Simon doesn’t make friends with the balloon, he doesn’t hold it in his hand or touch it — the balloon doesn’t even come near him. He can only glimpse the balloon from a distance. No wonder he calls it stupid.

I should’ve known from the title. Flight of the Red Balloon is centered around Simon’s mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a professional puppeteer trying to balance her artistic career and her family life. But between her no-good tenants, her husband living in Montreal, and her daughter living in Brussels to take care of Suzanne’s grandfather, it’s a struggle. So she brings in Song, a Chinese national, to become Simon’s nanny.

From what I’ve just described, you might think that Flight of the Red Balloon would be a heavy film. But with HHH’s direction, it has a light, ethereal, almost dreamlike quality to it, the camera drifting through the action as if it were the balloon we’re not seeing.

Living life through objects. Okay, so there’s no balloon for most of the film, but other objects play key roles in the characters’ lives. HHH has updated the friendship of The Red Balloon to the digital age. It happens that Song is a former film student, and she carries her video camera almost everywhere. Simon is a fan of pinball, videogames, and jukeboxes. He handles Song’s video camera too, and even plays a small role in a short film Song is making — about a red balloon. Being a puppeteer, Suzanne makes her living by giving a voice to objects. In one of the film’s flashbacks, she has a memory about her daughter, Louise –  and in her memory she uses a digital camera to capture that moment.

Life takes many forms in Flight of the Red Balloon. The red balloon itself appears not only in its true form, but also through a painting, on a wall, and in a video clip. How much of our lives today are experienced in virtual forms?

A word about Juliette Binoche. Balloons and electronic devices aside, there’s plenty of humanity in this film — and Juliette Binoche carries most of it. I think this is the first time HHH has worked with a performer of this caliber, and he took full advantage. In one incredible eight-minute long take shot, the camera pans around the apartment, between Simon, Song, Suzanne, and a piano tuner. Simon plays and talks on the phone, Song cleans and puts away things, the piano tuner tunes — but Suzanne is a flurry of emotion and action from the moment she enters until the end of the scene. Juliette Binoche’s emotional range is on full display here, moving from anger to sadness to concern and contemplation to joy with rare ease. Here she is from one angle:

At the end of the film, Simon encounters the balloon again — this time floating over a skylight at a museum. But instead of yelling out to it, or calling it names, Simon only looks up at it, with the courtesy and gentleness of an old friend. The balloon may be a far distance away from him, but it’s still there, and Simon decides to enjoy the moment he has with it.

Though it took me awhile to realize it, Flight of the Red Balloon was not one of those blind remakes we’re constantly seeing from Hollywood. It carries the same themes we’re used to seeing from HHH, while preserving the spirit of the original film. In this way, the film not only takes the baton from Lamorisse, but adds sheen and depth.

But I still haven’t seen the original film. More next week…

This week, inspired by the style of Hsiao-hsien Hou and by a film I watched called Nine Lives, I’m going to talk a little about long take shots in film.

If images and sounds are the words a filmmaker uses to write, then long takes are like run-on sentences — not always grammatically correct, but sometimes the best way to invoke the depth and feeling of a moment. In film, they are the closest thing to a live performance. To pull them off requires great skill, timing and coordination between the director, cast and crew, all working together for an inspired moment of creativity. The best long take tracking shots are both visually dazzling and technically innovative, like a grand magic trick. But most importantly, they serve to tell the story. Here are just a few of the strongest examples:

Touch of Evil (1958) — directed by Orson Welles

Click here to view the embedded video.

The grandaddy of them all. This sweeping crane shot at once introduces the setting, the main characters, and the key dramatic conflict, all in the span of a ticking time bomb.

Goodfellas (1990) – directed by Martin Scorsese

Click here to view the embedded video.

This kind of shot is now the standard on television shows today, but Martin Scorsese invented the aesthetic. When he was denied permission to go through the front entrance at the Copacabana, he took a Steadicam and went in the back way instead. What’s remarkable is how they dealt with the lighting challenges of shooting down long corridors and in tight spaces throughout.

Oldboy (2003) – directed by Chan Wook Park

(Note: This long take shot happens about 30 seconds into the video.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s not really much to the actual shot here — the camera simply tracks back and forth to catch the action — but in an era where most fight scenes are made in the editing room, this one was made in the camera.

The Passenger (1975) – directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is the rare occasion when a long take tracking shot ends the film. David Locke (Jack Nicholson) lies down on his bed. From there, the camera slowly takes us outside his window, then turns around to reveal he has been murdered. In this way, it sort of goes against the showy nature of the long take technique — using offscreen sound and shot length to heighten tension. Antonioni, no doubt, has been one of the influences for HHH, and his own long take style.

Nine Lives (2005) – directed by Rodrigo Garcia

In Nine Lives, Rodrigo Garcia tells the stories of nine different women — the story of each one filmed in one long take. In this scene, Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) ping-pongs between her parents (Sissy Spacek and Ian McShane) who, while not communicating directly with each other, ask Samantha incessantly about each other. The choice to shoot in one take here makes sense, because it allows the natural tension in the scene to be revealed through the actors.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

An effective long take tracking shot can be a calling card for a director. For that reason, directors today often employ them to demonstrate their filmmaking prowess and style — sort of like stepping in front of the camera and waving to the audience. With advances in technology, long takes can be faked in post-production, by cleverly concealing cuts between shots and errors in shots. While this takes away from the production aspect of creating a great single shot, these techniques still continue the spirit of the long take tradition. Long take tracking shots can be seen regularly in the work of Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michel Gondry, and Joe Wright, who all continue the technical and creative wizardry put forth by Welles and Scorsese.

What are your favorite long take tracking shots?

Are there examples of something like long take tracking shots in other art forms?

]]> http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/07/19/writing-with-a-camera-a-take-on-long-take-tracking-shots/feed/ 1 http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/07/12/rian-johnsons-festival-of-fakery-the-man-who-would-be-king/ http://www.plaidcreature.com/2009/07/12/rian-johnsons-festival-of-fakery-the-man-who-would-be-king/#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:30:37 +0000 Dr. Hyperbolus http://www.plaidcreature.com/?p=1695 Continue reading]]> The final selection from Rian Johnson’s Festival of Fakery is an old-fashioned, epic tale of high adventure: The Man Who Would Be King, directed by John Huston. (Full list here.) Over a few decades, the movie was previously launched and re-launched with a host of onscreen duos — Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, even The Sting‘s Paul Newman and Robert Redford — before finally succeeding with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Though not purely a “con” movie, The Man Who Would Be King features the con of all cons: two rogue British soldiers set out to make a fortune by forging a kingdom in a land of uncivilized warring tribes. It shares many qualities with its Fakery brethren — qualities which Rian Johnson incorporated beautifully into The Brothers Bloom.

You can’t do it alone. Rian Johnson describes the buddy relationship in a con movie as “essential,” and in The Man Who Would Be King it’s no different. Like ventriloquist and dummy, one person serves as the brains of the operation, while the other is the face of it. In The Sting it’s Newman and Redford, in Paper Moon it’s O’Neal and O’Neal, and in The Brothers Bloom it’s Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. Brody’s character is even known simply as “Bloom” — it’s the name his brother Stephen gave him.

The Man Who Would Be King starts out with a simple theft. At a train station, Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine) palms Rudyard Kipling’s watch. Then later, as Kipling sleeps on the train, Peachy joins him — and kicks another passenger off the train. “I caught him stealing your watch,” he says, and immediately trust between them is established.

Peachy convinces Kipling to do a favor for him: relay a message to his friend Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery). Little does Kipling know that just by relaying the message, he’s revealing himself as a pawn to be used in a blackmail scheme.

The scam is caught, but since Peachy and Danny are fellow Freemasons, Kipling helps them get out of punishment. In a way of thanking him, Peachy and Danny pledge to leave their schemes in India behind — and reveal a broader scheme, to take over the primitive land of Kafiristan. They draw up a contract and sign it, using Kipling as a legal witness. Then, though no one has survived a trip to Kafiristan since Alexander the Great (“Alexander who?” Peachy asks), Peachy and Danny set out on the trip of a lifetime.

The test of a con. Peachy and Danny make it to Kafiristan, where they spot a small tribe being invaded by a troop of bandits. Using their superior weaponry, Peachy and Danny save the tribe — and then promise to teach them how to defend themselves. “We are not gods exactly, but we are heaven-sent to deliver you from your enemies,” Peachy tells the tribe leader. They dangle the dream of conquest in front of them, and put guns in their hands. The rest, as they say, is history.

Peachy and Danny reach greater success than they had imagined. During the first battle, an arrow strikes Danny, but does not pierce him — because it is cleverly blocked by a bandolier. The people start thinking of him not just as a leader, but as a god — “Sikander”, the son of Alexander the Great. Danny accepts the embellishment, but wants to tell them the truth. But Peachy sees an opportunity, and insists on letting them believe the lie.

Nearly every con movie features a caper that’s too big for the crew to pull off. Sometimes they succeed, but most of the time, hubris takes over, blinding the con artists from the truth of their craft. Instead of pulling out of the scheme as they should, they start to believe the bright shining lies they put forth, and act with more risk.

But without taking the risks, who would they be? In The Brothers Bloom, Stephen takes Bloom through “the ultimate con”, the kind where “everyone gets what they want.” It’s not even about the money — it’s about perfecting the con. Similarly, Peachy tells Danny, “Let’s go seek our safety in battle!” But when there are no more battles to win, Danny reaches for godhood. And the gods get angry.

It’s all in the game. No matter how despicable the con artists might seem (and they are almost never portrayed that way), it’s their cons that are their legacy. The myths and perceptions they create aren’t true, but they’re almost believable — making them empowering and addictive. No matter what the results, the con artists return faithfully to the game — where next time the payoffs might be bigger and sweeter.

Things usually don’t end well for con artists. But they don’t end either. For Henry and Johnny, Moses and Addie, Peachy and Bloom, hope lies in the opportunity around the corner. The real strength, though, lies with those who carry on the story.

DANNY: Peachy, in your opinion… have our lives been misspent?

PEACHY: Well, that depends on how you look at it. I wouldn’t say the world’s a better place for our having lived in it.

DANNY: No, hardly that –

PEACHY: Nobody’s going to weep their eyes out at our demise.

DANNY: And who’d want them to, anyway?

PEACHY: And we haven’t many good deeds to our credit.

DANNY: None. None to brag about.

PEACHY: But how many men have been where we’ve been, and seen what we’ve seen?

DANNY: Bloody few, and that’s a fact!

PEACHY: Why even now — I wouldn’t change places with the viceroy himself if it meant giving up my memories!

DANNY: Me neither.

Neither would we.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was one of Gilliam’s minor films. But there are many elements in it that make it a worthy addition to Rian Johnson’s Festival of Fakery.

Before they were who they are. Baron Munchausen is a tribute to past lives and personal narrative: they influence who you become and how you’re remembered. Set in Europe during the 18th century (dubbed the “Age of Reason”), it begins with a small theater company performing a show called “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”. The show provides relief for the participants and the audience, as outside the theater a Turkish army threatens to take over their town.

In the middle of the show, an elderly man claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen interrupts the performance. He gains the theater’s attention and insists on telling his story as it really happened. But before he can finish his re-telling, gunfire and explosions erupt. The audience flees, and Baron goes backstage, to lay down and await his death.

Sally Salt, the theater company owner’s young and unsung daughter (the company is called “The Henry Salt and Son Players”) heads backstage and finds him. She convinces Baron to get up and keep on living. Together, they travel above and beneath Earth and sea, to round up Baron’s old gang and save the town. Along the way, many of the characters from the beginning of the story re-appear as characters in Baron and Sally’s new adventure.

The film features a young Sarah Polley playing Sally, as well as a young Uma Thurman and a young(er) Robin Williams. It’s interesting to see the beauty and talent was there from the beginning — and that Robin Williams was always, well, Robin Williams.

1989 design and effects. Talking about Baron Munchausen, Rian Johnson commented on the film’s physical effects and how they made a “special magic” for him. There’s no doubt that the effects are old — watching the film, I wondered if even Gilliam would make it the same way today. But along with its overall design and look, the effects work to create a more theatrical, almost storybook feel.

“It wasn’t just a story, was it?” As a film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a little uneven. It plays long and tedious though it only runs about 2 hours. But it’s a film that gets better as you get used to its storytelling. By the end of it, I realized that there was a strong theme running through it the whole time. And it has a killer ending, where everything comes together, like a musical crescendo.

In the end, Baron and his gang come back to the town and realize they aren’t who they once were: they’re “old and tired”, as Sally says. But they’re not finished. Devoted to his mission, Baron throws himself into capture by the Turks, guaranteeing a quick death — which is what he might have wanted before.

At the moment of his execution, his comrades become inspired to save him, and after that, they triumph in victory over the Turks. They celebrate in a parade, where Baron is shot and killed by a sniper. Is he dead? No he’s not. It’s just another tale being woven by Baron — though this one is the kind with the power to inspire the town to step outside the gates and fight for themselves.

One of the film’s funniest lines comes in the beginning, when, under siege by the Turks, a city official blurts out, “We can’t start escaping at a time like this. What would future generations think of us?” At that moment the comment is ironic. Baron Munchausen demonstrates that the story is the thing worth protecting, because it’s the thing that lasts. It’s how they remember us that stands up, and stands against the challenges of our time.

“Why did I make Subway? Why did I do all that crazy undersea stuff in The Big Blue? Why did I go all black and nasty with Nikita?. I don`t know. Because I did. I do what I do because I want to do it, because I want to explore, go looking for things.”

- Luc Besson

“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.”

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