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Home  Film + Theatre Review Of F For Fake
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Written by Dan Schneider
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One of the greatest pieces of charlatanry in Orson Welles'
brilliant pseudo-documentary F For Fake, released in 1974, is the
idea that Welles' lover and one time sculptress, Oja Kodar
(née Olga Palinkas), had any real hand in crafting the film;
specifically in writing it alongside Welles. Don't get me wrong; I
have nothing against the woman nor the claim, for the claim is in
keeping with the whole tenor of the film, and when she was young,
well, the lovely Ms. Kodar looked positively ferocious in a bikini.
But if her film commentary is to be a standard for judging her
intellect and artistic merit, well, bravo Ms. Kodar for pushing the
film's use of deceit even further. After all, Welles has been dead
for well over two decades, so he can no more debunk your insipid
claims than, say, journeyman filmmaker Carol Reed can deny the
manifest: that it was Welles, not himself- as a mere beard for the
blacklisted Welles, who directed Welles' brilliant film, The Third
Man, back in 1949.
Of course, I have erred in even calling F For Fake a
'pseudo-documentary'. In a sense, its closest cousin was the
kitschy old 1970s television 'documentary' series In Search
Of….With Leonard Nimoy, wherein Star Trek's once and future
Mr. Spock would explore the 'scientific verities' of such things
as the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, and Judge Crater's disappearance.
Welles' last finished and distributed film is really a filmic
treatise on art and truth, and, given Welles' voluminous intellect
and dazzling talent, it's a near-masterpiece, and very close to
being the 'new kind of film' that Welles claimed it was. Of
course, its closest antecedent would not be in film but in the
supposed 'nonfiction' literary works of Truman Capote (In Cold
Blood) and Marcel Proust (Remembrance Of Things Past).
Almost everything in this film, even the repeated use
of Welles' voiceover, works incredibly well. Its only stumble
(other than Welles' bizarre pronunciation of the word
'biography' as 'beeography') comes in the last twenty minutes,
when the film takes on a manifestly fictive bent, for, an hour
earlier in the film, Welles promises his viewers that he will tell
the truth, for an hour- thus giving away the supposed 'twist' of
the ending being fraudulent. Before that it's a dazzling
exploration of the appeal of notorious art forger Elmyr De Hory,
who lived in trammeled opulence on the island of Ibiza, who claims
of his paintings, 'If they hang long enough they become real.'
The film is also about his equally infamous biographer, Clifford
Irving, who, during filming, was exposed as faking a supposed
'authorized' biography of Howard Hughes, after penning De Hory's
own biography, Fake. After much brilliance, the film goes off on an
ill-advised lark about Ms. Kodar being a lover to, and model for,
Pablo Picasso. Supposedly, she posed for twenty-two portraits, got
them all, on the condition that she never sell them, but she did,
causing Picasso to go into a rage. Her grandfather was, also
supposedly an even better and more famed forger than De Hory.
The reason this trope fails is twofold. First, again,
while Ms. Kodar looks simply gorgeous in a bikini and less, she
cannot even convincingly act mysterious in her few spoken scenes
with Welles. Secondly, while both Irving and De Hory were well
known for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they have
long since dropped off the cultural map, due to a succession of
other, more daring and recent, frauds and scandals. Picasso, on the
other hand, has had every single aspect of his life examined
thoroughly. There is no way any person who would be watching this
film could buy into the silly claims at the end, especially since,
in the film's lone cinematic solecism, the film merely juxtaposes
photos of Picasso with the nude Kodar, often with window blinds
meant to somehow simulate the fact that Picasso was ogling Kodar's
body. Not exactly convincing, despite the dangerously seductive
curves of Kodar, which reappear time and again in the film- usually
to shots of tongue-wagging men lusting for her, and cars screeching
to a halt, as she struts through European streets.
The rest of the film- the last two or three minutes
after the Kodar digression, and the hour or so before the Kodar
scenes, is unadulterated greatness. Welles shifts in and out of
reality, mixing archival newsreels, his own snippets filmed all
over Europe, and scenes from 1950s UFO films (mostly 1956's Earth
Vs. The Flying Saucers)- playing off his infamous 1938 War Of The
Worlds radio broadcast, to toy with his viewers' minds. The
editing in the film is magnificent, as words counterpoint with a
succession of images which only show that Welles was the first MTV
director, a decade before that abomination of modern culture's
lowest common denominator declension appeared. His cuts sheerly
dazzle: from shots of Welles sitting in a park as the seasons
change, to haunting images of the cathedral at Chartres, contrasted
with Welles' own sterling prose:
Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is
disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of
all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety,
this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all
our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been,
to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in
stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few
decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or
wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the
frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going
to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the
living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on
singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
Even simple sentences taking on depth merely by the
images cut in, word to word. There are even brilliant scenes of
silence, of Irving and de Hory in contrapuntal stances as to
whether de Hory signed his fakes, despite the shots manifestly
being taken out of context as Welles declaims, but it all works. It
is the superb editing- one of the best in film history, that makes
this a truly organic film, for the edits are one of the major
reasons the film exists and works so well. Too often that term is
used wrongly, when critics want to merely impress readers that they
have knowledge of Politically Correct terminology.
But, editing is only part of this film's success.
Flat-out lying is a major force. As example, Welles suggests Howard
Hughes, not William Randolph Hearst, was the initial subject that
the film which became Citizen Kane was to be about, and claims to
have known Hughes on a personal level, and throws a few more Hughes
legends into the fire- such as the fact that a ham sandwich was
always left in a tree where Hughes once lived. These claims are
nonsensical, but delightful, just as similar claims that Welles was
a sixteen year old vagabond painter in Ireland who took up acting
only when he failed and was penniless, then coaxing some Irish
theater owners into believing he was a Broadway star. Yet, the lies
serve a purpose, as setups so that Welles can tear at the now
bizarrely in vogue notion that 'art is truth'. As Welles
correctly says within, 'Art is a lie to make us realize the
truth.' Art is not truth itself. Welles also uses a filmed session
of what was supposedly Howard Hughes' voice debunking Irving's
biography, even though none of the reporters on hand had ever seen
nor heard the real Hughes' voice for over a quarter century. What
this says for the ability of the media to discern reality from
fakery is all too obvious, as well disconcerting.
The DVD, by The Criterion Collection, is in a two disk
package. Disk One has the film in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and a
commentary by the older, but still attractive, Kodar and the
film's cinematographer Gary Graver. The comments, recorded at
different times, are interspersed, and while Kodar says a few
interesting things about Welles, most of her comments are vapid,
show she knows little of art, and is clearly faking her way through
the claim of her writing this film. I was reminded of Werner
Herzog's participation in the pseudo documentary Incident At Loch
Ness, and its pseudo-commentary, where Herzog and a succession of
other people walk out of the commentary session, still angry at the
film's 'producer'. Kodar, unfortunately, is just an aging
airhead. If you ever imagined what that goddess you lusted for in
high school or college ended up as, she is the type of woman who
answers that question.
Graver, meanwhile, says some interesting things about
the actual making of the film. There is also the original, and
unseen, nine minute trailer for the film, as well as a pointless
introduction to the film by former filmmaker and professional
gossip Peter Bogdanovich. His wisdom consists of forgettable bon
mots as: 'If you get on the film's wavelength it's riveting. If
you fight it and expect it to be a linear thing, then you're not
going to enjoy it.' But, Disk Two really makes this a DVD to have,
even if the film itself were not so brilliant. On it is the audio
from Howard Hughes' telephone only debunking of the Irving affair,
a small 60 Minutes tv piece on Irving, from 2000, and two superb
documentaries. There is a 52 minute film called The Noble Art Of
Forgery, about De Hory, which is what F For Fake would have been
had it been played 'straight'. The best moment in that film comes
near the end when fake 'fake De Horys' are revealed in a Japanese
collection of De Horys to be exhibited. De Hory's gay 'boy toy'
lover even amusingly wonders where such a thing as a 'fake fake'
ranks on the scale of sin. There is also a great 88 minute film,
produced by Kodar, on Welles and his series of unfinished films
(The Merchant Of Venice, Moby-Dick, The Deep and The Other Side Of
The Wind, starring actor/director John Huston), called Orson
Welles: One Man Band. In it, Welles is seen in what seem to be
Monty Pythonian skits which nonetheless show he was a truly great
actor.
The insert has an essay by film critic Jonathan
Rosenbaum that, yet again, shows how little critics (Rosenbaum
particularly- a notoriously dense and blatantly manifest critic)
get of great works of art, which neatly, if unwittingly,
recapitulates the very thesis of the film he writes so inertly of.
As example, Rosenbaum compares this film to James Joyce's
disastrously bad, and syphilis-affected, Finnegans Wake; one of
'real' literature's greatest frauds and failures, and is another
example of Rosenbaum's critical and intellectual stolidity. F For
Fake, however, is simply nonpareil, and well above Joyce's lame
last book, for it is a film that literally is based upon the
nihility of its viewers' cultural and intellectual awareness, even
if it falls a whisker shy of unadulterated greatness. Finnegans
Wake, on the other hand, depends totally upon its readerships'
intellectual and cultural fetishism for minutia- the polar opposite
of F For Fake's raison d'être. In a sense, the whole film
is a series of mirrored reflections on art that blurs reality, not
unlike the famed funhouse scene from Welles' earlier film The Lady
From Shanghai.
That said, F For Fake is certainly not a Postmodern
film, as many critics have wrongly claimed it, for Welles amply
demonstrates this with the very metaphor of the magician as
charlatan, as such illusionists and tricksters go back to the dawn
of civilization. That modern art's commerce, which like capitalism
knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, spawned the
art forger is simply an extension of this reality, not something
new and daring, as a Postmodernist would claim. Postmodernism, in
fact, is merely another hoax upon the intellectually effete, which
depends solely on the effete's obliviousness to their
cluelessness, and is something that Welles would have scoffed at as
being every bit as pretentious as the venal art dealers he and the
film revile. Yet, in this age where politicians from JFK to Reagan
to Clinton to Bush have warped reality into being mere image, where
online blogs are read as 'citadels of truth' by people who trust
the dimwitted Rush Limbaughs and vapid Bill Moyerses of the world
to tell them what reality is, where Katie Couric, Brit Hume, and
Tucker Carlson are passed off as journalists, where the airheaded
Oprah Winfrey is viewed as a cultural guru, and where talentless
hacks in the arts- think Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David
Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and current American Poet
Laureate Donald Hall- are seen as possessing talent, this film
stands ever the taller for being a clarion alarum to the last few
decades' descent into cultural irrelevance.
And while America's culture McMart World may not be as
instantly deadly as the Neandertal urges of radical and
retrogressive Islamic and Christian Fundamentalism, future cultural
historians will not look back on this as a Golden Age for the arts.
Of course, such 'experts' are beaten to a pulp in this film, and
bad critics like Rosenbaum again merely recapitulate this in their
own stolidity by displaying their very ignorance of what this work
is about. As the film suggests, and correctly, it is they- not the
bad artists they promote and defend, nor outright frauds like
Irving and De Hory, who are the truest fakes, for their idea of
what quality entails usually has to do with not the work in front
of them, but irrelevant things, such as its provenance, their own
personal emotional likes as opposed to objective intellectual
standards, or what political stance it supposedly takes, not the
very art of the thing. They debase all art for they care for the
message alone and the ownership it conveys and has, as well as its
lowest common denominator commercial appeal, not how it is
conveyed, nor its wisdom nor beauty.
Thus, De Hory, who was obviously a great painter- one
simply has to be awed at the skill, precision, and speed with which
he can out-paint many of the great painters he faked (and it should
be noted he never copied extant paintings, merely painted fakes in
the style of known painters, to pass them off as newly discovered
works), will likely never get his true critical due, for works that
were considered great only when deemed as genuine Picassos or
Braques will surely be consigned the status of 'imitations', even
though only De Hory's confessions stand as the delineating factor
that these silly 'experts' rely upon. I have long championed the
necessary value of both hoaxers
<http://www.cosmoetica.com/D10-DES9.htm> and bad artists
<http://www.cosmoetica.com/S7-DES5.htm> in exposing the
even worse arbiters of art- be they sickening art dealers, bad
critics, or clueless literary agents, for these dilettantes and
poseurs are the real threats to great art and culture, not the De
Horys nor Irvings. Welles again nails the issue in the film,
stating that, in this day and age, 'Value depends on opinion.
Opinion depends on experts. Elmyr makes fools of the experts. So,
who's the expert? Who's the faker?'
F For Fake, though, is the genuine article- a terrific
work of cinema by a master of the art form. It makes fools of the
benighted critics who damned it when it opened, merely using it as
a grindstone for their anti-Welles axes, and shows that Orson
Welles was not a 'failed' Hollywood director, but a brilliantly
inventive and successful independent director, one whose final
completed and edited work showed how the reality of the unreal was
a growing force in modern life, and left it up to the viewer how to
deal with that fact. The real surprise would have been had it been
hailed as the herald it is, both as a work of cultural criticism
and a work of art so far ahead of its day that even now, nearly
four decades after it was conceived and begun, it still may be more
aptly called a work of prophecy than documentary. Thus, it is one
of the few films, or works of art, that I can recommend not only
for its art, but for its cultural and sociological import. See it,
think about it, and let it soak in. But don't be embarrassed if
you find that you've soiled yourself in the morning dreaming of
Ms. Kodar. After all, there is a very good reason Welles has her
beauteous form in the film, and you know that you're only lying to
yourself if you deny it. See what a mere work of art can really do?
--
Dan Schneider, www.Cosmoetica.com <http://www.Cosmoetica.com>
The Best in Poetica seeks great poems & essays
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written by s.h. on November 04, 2006
Not to come on too strongly with the PC angle, but this review might have TRIED mentioning Kodar without making some remark about her attractiveness.
written by J. Ainjil on November 27, 2006
Well, seeing that Oja Kodar's purpose in the film was soley to ravish, I'm not sure one can mention her without commenting on her atttractiveness. Still the review might as well have been written in the fifties or sixties as it is clearly written for men only. I loved the film by the way, and agree with most everything the reviewer says. The last 20 minutes are hard to sit through! A love song to a lover by a man in love, is all the last section of F For Fake! is (Welles and Kodar were consorts the last quarter century of his life). Otherwise, a great, great film.
written by Tim on April 13, 2007
But I have to agree with the others ... why can't men write about women without mentioning their "attractiveness?" It's 2007, and this crap is still kicking
written by Greg on June 08, 2007
that we have Mr. Schneider's fat brush of pompous dismissal to paint such obvious hacks as Joyce, Basquiat and Wallace in their true colors. Though perhaps Mr. Schneider is employing some fakery of his own, interrupting his otherwise reasoned review with a pointless and meandering digression into the very sort of handwaving rejection of artists put forth by bad critics he purports to rally against. Could it be that Mr. Schneider's apparent ignorance of this irony is yet another hoax?
written by Jacob on July 09, 2007
One reader has asked:
"why can't men write about women without mentioning their attractiveness?"
Generally, people write about what's in the foreground of their consciousness; for most men, when they're contemplating a woman, especially a beautiful woman, her perceived attractiveness is very much in the foreground. Sorry, but I don't think that's ever, ever going to change, and railing against it just seems silly, like complaining about the rain.
F for Fake is beautiful and a terribly sad and wise movie.
written by Dan Schneider on August 16, 2007
Had Welles not masturbated so blatantly over Kodar's form. it would not be mentioned.
The whole Kodar digression is the hole in the film, and what denies it greatness. Simply stating that, and referencing Kodar's employing of some of Welles' deceits, is not proof of my voyeurism, but of a critical eye on Welles'.
Just as if I point out Left Wing biases in European documentaries of the 1950s often sinks them as cultural documents, it is not a display of my political bias, just a comment on that displayed.
As for railing against bad artists- this was the point of Welles' film, one many critics missed. I just used illustrative examples that Welles would likely decry if alive today- be it Oprah or Wallace.
written by Paul on August 26, 2007
So far as I know, from having read his biographies (bee-ographies, to him), the story about Welles being a down and out teenage painter in Ireland, and stumbling into the theater in Dublin, is true. Or else it's a lie he repeated over and over again and which no one was ever able to contradict.
written by Jon C. Miller on October 30, 2007
F for Fake is not about dealing with the philosophical problem of whether "true art" is subjective or objective, but about how we allow so-called experts to tell us what art is, all the while being enamored more by the trivial gossipy aspects of the artist's (or art forgers) life. Because of this, Welles' inclusion of Kodar as the Britney Hilton-like T&A distraction, only helps to highlight this very sad point.
written by Palmer Eldrich on February 18, 2008
I just watched the film and have subsequently read a few reviews and done a little research. What an intriguing, fun loving, and clever little gem!!! Thank you Orson!
Stupid PC reviewers. Watch the movie, then have at least a somewhat of a informed opinion.
The rest of you... “Our songs will all be silenced—but what of it? Go on singing.”
=)
written by YR on April 07, 2008
1) Welles was never blacklisted -- if he were, he wouldn't have been so prominently credited as an actor.
2) "The Third Man" was sandwiched in between "Odd Man Out" and "The Fallen Idol" in the career of "journeyman" Reed -- two other acknowledged masterpieces, and both more similar stylistically to "The Third Man" than any Welles films.
3) Even if one accepts the ludicrous claim that Reed was just a "journeyman," plenty of journeymen have turned out great films when working from a great script -- and the one here was authored by Graham Greene, certainly no slouch.
4) The film bears many unique hallmarks of Reed's style, such as an emphasis on concrete details to build suspense and the prominent use of a child actor (c.f. "The Fallen Idol," "Oliver!"). Welles never had an inclination to spotlight children.