Although it scarcely looks comparable to anything else in his career, [F for Fake, a] Quixotic essay in fictional documentary—conjured, it seems, out of nothing more substantial than an extraordinary dexterity at the editing table—may be Welles' most concerted, complete and certainly his wittiest attempt to exorcise the ghosts of Kane, Rosebud and his own 'failed' genius. A personal meditation on the art of fakery, and the fakery in art, F for Fake switches subjects and styles even faster than its ubiquitous presenter/narrator/director switches hats. But what unites the presences of master art forger Elmyr de Hory, biographer and tyro faker Clifford Irving, and Hungarian actress Oja Kodar—as well as a host of more putative personages, such as Picasso and Oja's own master forger grandfather—is the domineering absence of Welles, since what his film proposes is that fiction-making in any form is a lie and a puzzle and a constantly repeated disappearing act for its creator…. F for Fake, thus, is a puzzle fiendishly constructed to frustrate any single attempt to unlock it, or even to identify one ultimate and all-determining creator for the myriad of pieces that have gone into its making—despite the very recognisable flourishes with which Welles wraps himself in the cloak of his own montage, even doodling a signature at one point on the screen of a movieola…. [It] is hard to avoid the conclusion that Welles has created a maze in which his own commentators might lose themselves. F for Fake is truly a 'centreless labyrinth', in which the alleged credit-hogger, accused of doing down Herman Mankewicz to claim Citizen Kane as totally his own creation, parodies the very notion of 'pure' creativity and autonomous (and attributable) authorship. The ribbing of the experts continues, even in those sections which seem like the most reliable autobiography…. "The fake is as old as the Eden tree", intones Welles; and clearly, in answer to the critics who have deduced the dissipation of his own genius from the undisguised element of sham in his work, he holds up men like de Hory and Irving as his ideal of the creator—jesters at the court of art, who have demonstrated that the practitioners are not entirely their own men, nor are their works definitively tested by the names attached to them…. "We are going to die", he apostrophises before Chartres; and at the end, more playfully and pertinently, while performing a bit of levitation and quoting Picasso to the effect that, "Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realise the truth", he defines how little that truth has to do with the things we think of as 'real'. "Reality—it's the toothbrush waiting for you in a glass at home … a bus ticket … and the grave".
Richard Combs, "'Verités et Mensonges' ('F for Fake')," in Monthly Film Bulletin (copyright © The British Film Institute, 1977), Vol. 44, No. 516, January, 1977, p. 12.
This is a free excerpt of 485 words. There are 489 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Welles, (George) Orson 1915–: Critical Essay by Richard Combs Access Pass.
