F For Fake

Author Tim O’Brien once noted that “the truth is insufficient for getting at the truth.” If there is one film that is most emblematic of this point, it is F for Fake. With F For Fake (1974), director/charlatan Orson Welles establishes the central conceit behind forgery, fakery, and implicitly all of cinema. Though this is a film conceived as a documentary of the painter Elmyr de Hory, a man who faked Picassos and sold them to the museums under false pretense, Welles takes the initial footage and begins to interweave fact with fiction, truth with lies, all while compounding which is which. That the film works so wonderfully speaks to the level of artifice and deception that Welles crafts onto his work.

Built around multiple levels of forgery being used to swindle the public into believing (with Elmyr, Irving, Hughes, Picasso, and Welles himself – in the form of Citizen Kane), Welles begins to essay his thesis that the level of craft and love devoted to a swindle may in fact offer up a deeper truth about reality and the desire to believe which a real work may be unable to do. That is, if the faker is willing to believe in the magic of his artifice enough, then his sleight of hand will go unnoticed because we do not actually wish to notice it.

The film offers a pretense to Welles’ central point by stating in the beginning that nothing in the next hour will be a lie. However, the film concludes by stating that a lie has just been told. What Welles intends to do with his audience is reveal the fantastic, to make us believe in it, and then to ask whether what he has just forged is so truly horrible, whether we were at the very least entertained and intrigued even if the feeling of foolishness does not abate. For it must be noted that the cinema involves lies 24 frames a second (with apologies to Haneke), and we are complicit in this lying, exempting the actor for the character, the stage for the location, and the camera as truthsayer, so the fact that Welles seeks to expose the very conceit of cinema is fascinating stuff, especially when contrasted against “everyday” scenes of him eating alongside Irving and Elmyr.

In gaining our trust with a promise but then reneging on it, Welles exposes a deeper issue of whether all of the arts are not fakes that have been granted legitimacy by critics extolling “two noses up” (with apologies to Pinky and the Brain), while sidelining those arts that are not read with the same sophisticated erudition as others. So imitation is not given the same respect as originality, yet these fakes are entirely original. It’s a fascinating endgame that Welles orchestrates, and the last twenty minutes of the film are gold.

While I don’t harbor as much love for this film as others, it’s a breathtaking journey into the heart of creativity, of fake creativity, and of the alliances that bind all of the arts together in conceits.

F for Fake: 9/10