The Magic World of Orson Welles (48 page)

Welles did not in fact shoot a large section of the movie, but it belongs entirely to his personality and is almost a textbook on how to create new material out of old.
F for Fake
might be described as a collage, like the
Kane
newsreel (which Welles actually parodies at one point, in the form of a biography of Howard Hughes). It is made up of sharply contrasting types of images, some of them “found,” some of them doctored or created, all of them devoted to familiar Wellesian themes. Thus Reichenbach's documentary photography coexists with several deliberately glamorous, dreamlike shots that belong exclusively to the world of the fiction film; notice, for example, the two pictures here, one showing Elmyr de Hory and the other showing Oja Kodar.

The contrast is appropriate, of course, because Welles is exploring the ambiguous relationship between truth and dreams. But even more than that, he is directly confronting the essential “lie” upon which the movies are built: the editing process. In a sense he finds himself in a position like the Russian filmmakers after the Revolution; short on money and technical facilities, he rearranges a preexistent film. It was exactly this practice that helped Eisenstein discover that cinema is not reality, but a
version
of events—a coded message with ideological biases. For example, in his essay “Through Theatre to Cinema” (1934), he speaks with a certain relish about what he terms the “wise and wicked art of reediting the work of others”—an art that all the cutters in the Soviet Union had mastered by the late teens:

Figures 10.2–10.3: Elmyr de Hory and Oja Kodar in
F for Fake
.

I cannot resist the pleasure of citing here one montage
tour de force
of this sort, executed by Boitler. One film bought from Germany was
Danton
, with Emil Jannings. As released on our screens, this scene was shown: Camille Desmoulins is condemned to the guillotine. Greatly agitated, Danton rushes to Robespierre, who turns aside and slowly wipes away a tear. The sub-title said, approximately, “In the name of freedom I had to sacrifice a friend.”

But who could have guessed that in the German original, Danton, represented as an idler, a petticoat-chaser, a splendid chap and the only positive figure in the midst of evil characters, that this Danton ran to the evil Robespierre and . . . spat in his face? And that it was this spit that Robespierre wiped from his face with a handkerchief? And that the title indicated Robespierre's hatred of Danton, a hate that in the end of the film motivates the condemnation of Jannings-Danton to the guillotine?

Much of
F for Fake
is built out of a trickery similar to what Eisenstein describes, although the deceit is laid bare and presented to the audience for their contemplation. At one point we see Reichenbach's camera reflected in a mirror, and we repeatedly see Welles at an editing table, rearranging old footage. In the original Reichenbach documentary, Clifford Irving is seen commenting on Elmyr's art and character, but in Welles's reediting, Elmyr becomes Irving's commentator. As the film proceeds, Reichenbach's documentary is elaborately toyed with before the audience's eyes, revealing what John Russell Taylor has called its ironic “subtext” of meanings. “In the end,” Welles remarks, “Elmyr played a very important role in the life of his biographer. . . . Irving, who is a better magician than I, was able to transform himself into a superstar. . . . Isn't this revelatory of our age, that a swindler ultimately becomes a celebrity?”

At the same time, the film allows Welles to comment on other kinds of deception, particularly on the relationship between art and originality. (No doubt he was obsessed with this topic when he began the project, because Pauline Kael's essay on
Citizen Kane
had unleashed a controversy over the authorship of his most distinguished achievement.) One of the chief focuses of his attention is the forger de Hory, who, before Welles's film was released in the United States, committed suicide under the threat of extradition to France. (De Hory's fear of imprisonment is vividly evident in a single frame of documentary footage that Welles isolates for us, showing the dread in the forger's eyes as he talks about the time he once spent in jail.) A charming,
dapper rogue, de Hory is seen dashing off a Matisse and then tossing the “masterpiece” into a fire. Later he forges Orson Welles's signature on a portrait of Michelangelo, which he has painted in Welles's own style; returning the favor, Welles sketches a cartoon of an aging Howard Hughes and signs it “Elmyr.”

Rather than condemn de Hory, Welles admires his daring and wit. What is modern art, after all, he asks, except the opinion of “experts” who “speak with the authority of a computer”? He reminds us that experts were called in to validate the handwriting of Howard Hughes on documents in the possession of Clifford Irving; the authorities testified that the handwriting was genuine, and Welles toys with the amusing idea that it may have been forged by none other than Irving's friend de Hory.

Welles shows that the importance of expertise derives from the commodity status of art; when he talks about the art market, he shows us a montage of McDonald's hamburger stores and parking lots in Los Angeles. Though he does not say so directly, he also suggests that in the industrial age art is significant only when it is original, bearing the style of an admired painter (or auteur) who makes it unique and thus marketable. There is, in other words, no connection between labor and value in art, and the romantic notion of the artist, which Welles himself exemplifies, deserves a rigorous questioning. It may be true, as Clifford Irving says at one point, that de Hory failed as a painter because he lacked an “original vision”; his forgeries, however, serve to mock a society that converts originality into capital. He has had the perfect revenge on his critics, and he has proved that the ideal of the supremely gifted artistic genius makes its adherents the prey of swindlers.

To raise such issues is to indicate problems in our culture that run very deep. Some of these have been analyzed brilliantly by the English critic Raymond Williams, and whether Welles read Williams's
Culture and Society
or not, certain chapters of that book might usefully be considered in relation to
F for Fake
. Williams has noted, for example, that the whole modern notion of the uniquely gifted artist grew out of a reaction against industrialism in the eighteenth century. At about that time, he says, several old words in our language began acquiring new meanings:

The word
Art
, which had commonly meant “skill,” became specialized . . . first to “painting,” and then to the imaginative arts generally.
Artist
, similarly, from the general sense of a skilled person . . . had become specialized in the same direction. . . . The emphasis on skill, in the word, was gradually replaced by an emphasis on sensibility; and this replacement was supported by the parallel
changes in such words as
creative, . . . original
, . . . and
genius
(which, because of its root association with the idea of
inspiration
, had changed from “characteristic disposition” to “exalted special ability,” and took its tone in this from the other affective words).

Williams points out that these changes came about because of a need to defend, through art, “certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society toward an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying.” They resulted, as we all know, in the concept of the artist as a bearer of a special, higher truth, a sort of priest whose very existence was a rebuke to materialism. But as Welles and many others came to recognize, the idealistic notion of art had certain pernicious consequences—on the one hand the elevation of the artist into a god (and hence, in Welles's typical view of things, into a Faustian overreacher), and on the other hand the increasing specialization of the artistic product, so that by the middle of the twentieth century the romantic rebellion had become a materialism par excellence, a privileged enterprise that was owned or patronized by millionaires.

There is consequently an affinity between Picasso, Howard Hughes, and forgers like de Hory and Irving. For one thing, as Welles suggests, the modern artist is always part idealist and part swindler—a description the young Welles once gave to Charles Foster Kane, and a description that would fit any of the archetypal American tycoons. For another thing, both the artist and the tycoon are celebrities, and celebrity is based on another kind of deception, a public masquerade that forces the real self into greater solitude. “On this overpopulated and mechanized planet,” Welles comments, “it is not so easy to remain oneself.” Showing photos of the exterior of Howard Hughes's Las Vegas hotel, he notes that “these mysterious heros, who have done everything to become celebrities . . . end by seeking anonymity.” Indeed Howard Hughes's real self, whatever that might have been, has been consumed by a myth more awesome than Kane's, a fiction that other aspirants to fame are able to feed upon. Long before his actual demise, it was rumored that Hughes might be dead anyway, or at least mad and kept prisoner, his image preserved by a group of sinister associates who imitated his telephone voice and forged his signature. Hughes's notoriety had turned him into a sort of Pirandellian “living character,” nourished by a fantasy, who could “live through all eternity,” but meanwhile the actual man slowly perished.

If fame is therefore a lie, and if, as Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,” then what are de Hory and Irving but the mirror images of the men they have duped? Welles even implies that the manifest forger
might be considered a hero, a man who exposes the absurd contradictions in his culture. And this judgment leads him to endorse some paradoxical, almost Wildean epigrams about art. “The important thing,” as Clifford Irving says at one point, “is not to know whether a painting is true or false, but whether its falsity is good or bad.”

Behind all of these observations, of course, is the central paradox of Welles himself, who was a celebrity, an artist, and a self-styled con man, and whose entire career was marked by a preoccupation with illusionism, magic, and swindles. “I am a charlatan,” he comments at the beginning of
F for Fake
, and he repeatedly reminds the audience how much his own success was the result of deliberate fraud—the trick he tried to play upon the Gate Theatre in order to become an actor, the
War of the Worlds
hoax, and so forth. Indeed the central characters of his films have usually been men who live by false public images (Kane), masquerades (Arkadin), or imposture (Prince Hal). Outside of these films, Welles spent most of his time as an actor hiding himself under whiskers, false noses, and a variety of accents; even when he appears as a magician in this movie, he is dissembling, and he reminds us of Robert Houdin's theory that “a magician is an actor who plays the role of a magician.” At its most personal level, therefore, the movie becomes Welles's confession that he was the prisoner of an illusion, a self-created public image that does not necessarily correspond to the “real” person and that is potentially destructive.

Such ideas, plus the brilliant collision of montage pieces in
F for Fake
, create a sort of vertigo of lies, a crazy house that tries to tell the truth about movies, art, and celebrity. It is a film that grew out of Welles's anxiety about his culture and his status as a gifted artist, but it was also influenced by a perception Welles once shared with André Bazin: a scoundrel, he remarked—even a scoundrel as dangerous as Harry Lime—becomes charming when he admits his trickery. Thus Welles disarms his audience by confessing to several frauds himself, leaving the question of what constitutes art or genuineness in the realm of mystery. As for truth and reality, they are mundane, he says, like “the toothbrush waiting for you in a glass, a bus ticket, or the grave.” The one unalterable truth is that everything passes, and the basic fact of life is “we're going to die.”