Monthly Film Challenge Part 4: F For Fake (1973)

This month we look at a film that is a lot more fun: Orson Welles’ audacious F For Fake, which sees the great man having the time of his life with a cinematic format that can often prove to be a piece of work: the essay film.

Before you watch F For Fake, there are a few things that it might be worth reading up on, such as: Howard Hughes, if you don’t know, was a billionaire tycoon and famous recluse and allegedly deeply mysophobic; Clifford Irving wrote a fake autobiography of Hughes that fooled America; Orson Welles did an infamous radio version of “The War of the Worlds” that also fooled America; Pauline Kael, a highly influential film critic in the 1970s, wrote an article that claimed that Orson Welles took credit for the greatness of other people’s work in Citizen Kane – which deeply offended Welles; Oja Kodar was Welles’ mistress at the time of filming.

F For Fake begins as an apparent documentary on fakery and charlatans and much of the film’s running time focuses, though this is hardly the word, on Elmyr de Hory, a brilliant forger of paintings, and his biographer and subsequent rival Clifford Irving. However, the film is far from a straight biographical sketch as Welles freely moves where his myriad interests take him. The film is often incredibly fast-paced and it is easy for the inattentive viewer to get lost, with the cutting and the voiceover creating the impression of an improvisation in which Welles changes the subject, apologizes for not making much sense, calls it “mumbo-jumbo” and starts again for a different perspective. We often see Welles sitting at a dysfunctional editing table, trying to hammer the film into shape. This gives the impression of a film making itself right there in front of you, allowing the film to feel incredibly new and unique.

However, there is more, much more, to F For Fake than the ramblings of an eloquent master filmmaker, even if half the fun of the film comes from the fact that Welles is an infectiously bubbly and good-natured host. The film begins with a few magic tricks and this is what sets the film’s tone best – F For Fake is a film in love with trickery and it is all about what cinema can do to trick, such as when Welles’ clever editing creates a dialogue between two people who are not in the same room that results in the suggestion of a major revelation. Earlier in the film, he shows the effect that Kodar has on a series of men as she walks down a busy street, the film gleefully cutting and freezing while Welles claims that the actors were real people and gave their reactions at unawares and for free. Welles will promise, “During the next hour everything you will hear from us [Welles and his collaborators] is really true and based on solid fact.” Later, he will even repeat it in writing, yet we are never sure that we can trust him, especially because he is so excited by the subject of fakery. Ultimately, F For Fake keeps the viewer at unawares almost throughout, preferring that they question everything they see.

F For Fake is a film of many subjects, one of which is a questioning of art. Elmyr de Hory is frequently heard saying that if a painting hangs on a wall for so many years, then surely it is art. Elmyr de Hory’s fake paintings have apparently always fooled the experts. These so-called experts are one of the targets of the film – people who dictate the taste of their culture by their own opinions, and yet these opinions are rarely based on fact and can often be contradicted. Remember that Welles had a grudge against Pauline Kael at the time. Welles asks who the real fakers are; people who can paint like Picasso or the experts who arrogantly claim that their work is Picasso. But Welles goes further than this, stating that if the artist himself cannot tell a genuine work from a fake then what does it matter whose signature is on the painting. And, similarly, why should Picasso have all the acclaim and all the riches when other, impoverished artists are just as capable. Welles suggests a difference between genuine art and art for commerce and sees the experts as complicit with the market, turning art into golden investment opportunities via the cult of personality. For Welles, art is less to do with who and more to do with truth. And this is what leads us to the film’s best scene, a beautiful and profound sequence in which Welles visits the cathedral at Chartres, “the premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world and it is without a signature.” Welles muses aloud on this cathedral, his words moving from praise to ruminations on art in general and on to man and life and death. Art, Welles’ own personal conception of the term, is movingly reaffirmed while its critics are questioned.

Welles presents a version of his own autobiography, in which he emphasises his own falsehoods: the lies that allowed him to act in the Gate Theatre in Dublin despite being an inexperienced sixteen year old and the infamous broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” The effect of this broadcast is made clear: “I didn’t go to jail – I went to Hollywood.” He identifies strongly with Elmyr de Hory, whose own fakery was a result of his destitution after “experts” disregarded his own original paintings. Clifford Irving’s representation of Howard Hughes equally mirrors the original conception of Citizen Kane, which was to have been a fictionalised biopic of Hughes. In a few telling sequences, Welles goes to Las Vegas and points his camera at a hotel penthouse window, presumably where Hughes was eking out an existence. He looks at a series of Hughes myths, developing the idea that the truth will never be discovered from behind the series of myths and lies propagated by Hughes and others. Ultimately, a lot of F For Fake is unclear and a lot of the joy of the film is down to Welles’ own embracing of the fluidity of fiction and fact. At once, he presents a shot of himself reciting poetry about man and truth while distorted through a curved glass (suggesting “Through the Looking Glass”, The Lady From Shanghai and distorted truths) and yet cocks his gaze at the camera and mumbles ‘pretentious.’ As anyone can see, the running time of F For Fake is 85 minutes and even Welles himself delights in “lying [his] head off.”

As is probably obvious from the above, F For Fake is a fast-paced ideas-packed essay. It is a film that rewards multiple viewings and yet is always a lot of fun. Orson Welles delights in simply being a spinner of tales, the more convoluted and confusing the better. We often see him sitting down at a restaurant regaling assorted people with his stories and at times, the film suggests what it would have been like to have had dinner with Welles, his chatter moving seamlessly, and sometimes not so, through a wide range of topics, all interesting and all told with verve and humour. Indeed, a lot of the value of F For Fake is simply how enjoyable it is. Thematically complex and somewhat dark, F For Fake is probably the most fun you will have with an essay film. Exuberant, playful cinema at its finest.

So give it a go and tell us what you think.

Next month: La Chinoise

See also:

La Jetee

Un Chien Andalou

The Seventh Continent

REVIEW: This Is Not A Film (2012)

  This Is Not A Film is an Iranian home movie co-directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. It is essentially a document of Panahi’s life under house arrest, banned from making films and writing scripts and facing an inescapable prison sentence. The film is dedicated to Iranian filmmakers at a time of increased state censorship. The film was smuggled into last year’s Cannes film festival on a USB memory stick hidden inside a cake.

  The film begins with Jafar Panahi consulting his lawyers about the prospect of his six-year prison sentence and his twenty-year ban on filmmaking being reduced on appeal. His son leaves him a phone message saying that he has turned on Panahi’s camera – presumably because Panahi himself cannot. Panahi invites fellow filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to visit and to help him document his day. He starts by giving a virtual telling of a script he had tried to make before the ban and prison sentence were imposed. The script, significantly, is about an imprisoned girl. Panahi loses heart in the idea – “If you could tell a film, why make it?” Panahi continues to question the nature of filmmaking, particularly considering the question of what makes a film.

  The film is set entirely inside Panahi’s apartment – apart from at the end when Panahi accompanies a stand-in caretaker down to the ground floor of the apartment block, itself an absorbing and suspenseful act of defiance. However, the film remains a fascinating piece of work and a devoted statement about the plight of filmmakers under the threat of censorship. Panahi begins filming small details of his life, all possible acts of defiance if they were to be considered filmmaking. At one point, disheartened by his attempt to ‘tell’ his new script, Panahi starts to consult his previous work (The Mirror, The Circle and Crimson Gold), describing how outside events might affect the filmmaking process and, yet, might not be considered as filmmaking proper. Under the microscope is essentially what constitutes filmmaking and what does not. Panahi, and cinema in general, proof adept at finding loopholes in government strictures, creating a work that becomes both a meditation on an art form and an attempt at peaceful demonstration.

 

  This is mirrored throughout the film itself that, for an apparently unplanned work, has a remarkably cohesive nature. A loud firework celebration outside sounds like a demonstration and the film’s staggering final image seems to be one of revolt. Far from being an exercise in filming a diary, This Is Not A Film becomes an essay on the nature of making and receiving film, a valid account of the evils of state censorship as well as a powerful story of a man buried inside his own house. Panahi has a comic sidekick of sorts in a pet iguana, which is also trapped in the house. His attempt at escape involves climbing over everything, at one stage up the back of a bookcase while Panahi watches, almost jealous of his pet’s relative freedom.

  This Is Not A Film challenges the form of cinema. It is draws upon the fictional drama and the essay film, the documentary and the mockumentary, the cinema of protest and the cinema of introspection. It has more to say about the world, art and humanity than any other film currently in the cinemas and it says it all from inside an apartment in Tehran with three people and an iguana. It may not be a film, but it is filmmaking at its most probing, eloquent and imaginative. 

REVIEW: A Separation (2011)

  A Separation is the fifth film by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. With the film’s full title being Nader and Simin: A Separation, it is a film that deals with a divorce and the consequences that follow.

  The opening scene is filmed in one shot with the two leads Nader and Simin (the fantastic Peyman Moadi and Leila Hatami) arguing about their case in front of an impartial third party. The camera is angled from the perspective of the judge and the placement of the actors is carefully symmetrical. As the judge is left unseen, the audience is put, from the very beginning, in a judicial role. It is up to us to decide which character is most worthy of our sympathy as the film plays out.

  Independent-minded and politically aware Simin requests the divorce so that she can escape from the country, which Nader refuses to do due to his responsibilities to his ailing father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. It is clear that, though they are divorcing, they both still have a lot of affection for each other. Simin does not leave the country, however, waiting on their daughter (played by the director’s own daughter, Sarina Farhadi) who has been left to decide who she wants to live with. This paves the way for the arrival of a second couple, Hodjat and Razieh (the also-fantastic Shahab Hosseini and Sareh Bayat). Nader hires the devout Razieh to care for his father, but it is not long before a dispute sees him throwing her out of his house in anger. From here on, things become much more complex.

  The film examines many facets of separation in Iranian society, separations between law and compassion, religion and human decency, class and equality, pride and fulfilment and tradition and progression. Without it ever being said, Simin’s reasons for wanting to leave the country are clear and much is made of Razieh’s faith getting in the way of her ability to carry out all that Nader’s father needs. As a result, every character has their reasons and deciding who to blame and who to sympathize with becomes impossible. The film features several scenes in which the characters must justify their actions to a judge, who has to sift through the details of the ensuing accusations. Like most court room-based films, it is engrossing drama, but A Separation has much more than that to offer. As the film constantly plays with your sympathies, it becomes clear that life is just not as black and white as many films would like you to believe. Even the film’s most apparent ‘bad guy’ becomes the film’s most pathetic.

  This makes A Separation a powerfully human film; one that accepts its characters at face value and is not afraid to create an impossible situation, one where no one will win and nothing will be wrapped up with a neat little bow. The film ends like it begins, with the audience having to decide for themselves, though by the end they are even less equipped to decide who most deserves to get what they want.

  A Separation is a subtle critique on traditional values, seeing them as sustaining their own existence by the avoidance of compassion and acceptance. But it is also a film that deals with some very difficult subject matter and does it truthfully and with much sincerity. Unlike many films of this sort, it also has the courage of its convictions, right through to the end, making it a remarkable and emotionally draining experience.