Welles: F For Fake (1974)

With the exception of the television documentary Filming Othello, F For Fake was Orson Welles’ last feature-length film – and it forms a kind of bookend with Citizen Kane. Like Kane, it’s a study of a multifarious, megalomaniacal personality – in this case, the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, who sold over a thousand paintings to prestigious art galleries all around the world. However, the sheer audacity of F For Fake makes Kane seem positively staid by comparison – here, Welles throws all caution to the wind, abandons any possible audience to craft a flight of fancy that is almost unwatchable, but in the most extraordinary way. In part, that’s because it’s a documentary – Welles never felt quite comfortable as a director of fictional narratives, decentring his stories as he shot them, producing records of the filming process more than immersive imaginative worlds. In some ways, it felt that cinema hadn’t quite caught up to him, and he compensated for that with voices that moved seamlessly in and out of the diegesis, or existed on the cusp of the diegesis. More than any other film of his career, those voices are perfected here – often a single commentary by Welles will function, sequentially, as dialogue, voiceover, direct address to camera and instruction to the film’s editors. Convoluted, concrete and cryptic, his words seems to generate themselves, proceeding by association and homonym as much as anything else, before descending to a laconic subdrawl that gradually detaches them from Welles altogether, as if to auralise the moment at which words escape the body, speech breaks free of the speaker. However, that voice is only so perfect because Welles is working in a quasi-documentary mode that finally allows him to realise his vision of a film in which the camera is the protagonist, a story that takes place at the very surface of the lens – at least half of it is set in the editing room, as Welles moves with glitchy, discontinuous glee between what appear to be three or four different cuts of the same events. At its strongest, it is like a version of Kane in which there is no distinction between the shot segments and found footage, or in which Kane himself is devoid of a redeeming Rosebud, unless you count Elmyr’s “young bodyguard and companion,” Mark Forgy. And as the film spirals out to encompass Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Oja Kodar and others, it feels as if Welles has achieved something like a fake film – a film that is only ostensibly separate from the world it describes. Early on, Welles points out that forgery is an art of misdirection – and this is surely his most misdirected, decentred, unrealised film, which perhaps makes it his masterpiece, as he presides over it with a Shakespearean self-effacement that’s even more exquisitely Falstaffian than Chimes At Midnight.