The Masters of Cinema Series

Question Marks

by Craig Keller, 2007

“The forgeries were genuine.” – Orson Welles

Does F for Fake tell us something profound about the link between “art” and “truth”? Welles’s film — or Welles — well, whichever’s apter, for now I’ll say: Welles’s film certainly poses enough questions about the relationship of the one notion to the other, and in the asking there resides, it seems to me, some kind of telling… or (since Welles’s tone is never didactic) some grand kind of reveal, the coalescence of a hundred successive insights gleaned from F for Fake’s practically fractal method of inquiry. To begin (which is to orbit those twin poles of art and truth), we might note how each mention of “art” in the early portions of the film builds toward an implicit question: Where lies, and how goes, the interchange between a label of “art” and a figure of “financial worth”? At the same time, to follow all the perambulations, and permutations, of the concept of “truth” as it exists in the film we might find ourselves asking: What kinship is shared by “truth” and “aesthetic value”? (And when we say “truth,” to whose truth, when, and where, are we referring? Are there such things as grand, consensus truths? Do they lie genetically encoded in the consciousness and mass-mind of the human race, a nanometer to the left or right of that part of the brain that experts postulate might motivate the apprehension of, and compulsion to worship, an almighty Deity…?)

Something like 37 minutes in, Clifford Irving asks (asks François Reichenbach?): “When an artist has no personal vision, what can he communicate onto the canvas?” But he never asks: “Isn’t the ‘genuine expression’ proof enough?” Why do the art experts Irving (ostensibly) consulted about the authenticity of a Modigliani painting cite stylistic characteristics in the endorsement — or non-endorsement — of the work, and thus posit the surface aspects as the “definers” of merit, like digits of an “authentication code” whose alignment decides whether further appraisal, consideration, sustained engagement with the work is warranted? Why does the spectator get the impression from both what Irving relates, and how Irving relates it, that the stylistic “trademarks” of a “genuine” work, the greater their abundance and, therefore, their susceptibility to being “checked-off,” correlate, in the minds of curators and presumably Irving himself, directly to a dollar amount?

Not so rhetorical a question as it might appear at first glance, then: How is it that in this world the life and work of the artist can correspond to — or even mirror! — a procession of actuarial tables? If this puts us in mind of the office-space in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, doesn’t Welles’s mention of “computers” twice in F for Fake likewise seem only natural? — as natural as Welles at the cutting console, seated before a wall of film-cans that sport a medley of labels in primary hues, their totality evoking some monstrous computerized panel from the golden-age of Bell Labs, or from the popular conception (in the vast collective consciousness) of starship command bridges? And didn’t Welles already mention some “computer-brain” in his 1962 film The Trial? Aren’t the computer-brain and the beehive-mind, after all, sort of one and the same thing? (And can fiction be understood — even feared — as itself a sentient, processing thing, a self-perpetuated “beaming” from unconscious nether places, as Jacques Rivette suggests — or is it “channels”? — in Out 1: Spectre? Although isn’t it Welles himself who in F for Fake initiates, with the touch of a finger, the film’s self-destruction in those convulsive final seconds?)

When Irving gazes upon a finished “imitation” and accuses its forger-artist as having, necessarily (or not?), “no world-view to communicate,” doesn’t he conflate “world-view” with “identity,” and therefore circumscribes identity as something fixed, definite, unwavering? Nevermind all the purchasing institutions — is it not also the forged artist who him- or herself is thus “robbed” — not simply of his or her identity, but of any motion to evaluate his or her work, once a certain point of “success” (fame? notoriety?) has been attained, on bases beyond those superficial, stylistic, merely identificatory characteristics? Of any good-faith effort to apprehend his or her oeuvre as anything other than a series of “artifacts”? Are the forged artists not robbed of attention to their expression (is the notion of expression itself somehow devalued in the process?), once “identity” overshadows the utterance? Do the experts not in some way move to position the artist, in the process of financial valuation and the resulting aesthetic hierarchization, as some correlative of the modern phenomenon of those “celebrities” who are “famous for being famous”? (Might we also find a precursor of this phenomenon in what eventually became of Howard Hughes? — and might we also ask how much of Hughes’s latter-day celebrity-status described a confluence of sensation with “actual” pathologies, and how much sublimated the hallucinations of an influential mass-media — or of Clifford Irving and his sexy Swiss wife?) Given this host of ephemerality and smoke-screens (something quite separate from “subterfuge”), shouldn’t we perform at least a single double-take when Welles intones: “Our semi-mythological nightbird billionaire has flown his Vegas coop…” ?

Slings-and-arrows-wise, wouldn’t Picasso, out of all modern painters, be among the most impervious to the capricious devices of the art-appraiser and the faker alike? — Picasso who exemplifies the idea of the artist-as-adopter-of-personae, Picasso whom “Oja’s grandfather” addressed by remarking: “You move so easily from one Picasso-period to the other, change like an actor, like an art-forger yourself…”? Doesn’t Welles signal to the spectator his own empathies — or, one might say, show his own hand — on the whole tricky subject of personae when, recounting the story of Marcel Vertès and the fake Toulouse-Lautrecs, he evokes (imitates?) that selfsame persona by which a 1970s mass-audience had perhaps come to know him best — that is, “television personality”? When, as Welles recounts the Vertès tale, he continually looks off-frame, as though reading cue-cards (how are we to know whether the cards, whose general use facilitates the delivery of fake extemporaneous address, are actually present in this scene at all?), is he in fact telegraphing to the spectator, via this faking-of-fakery, that his television appearances are themselves hokum, sham — hardly, in fact, the “real” Orson Welles? (And doesn’t the likeness of the film’s final sections with the sign-off of a typical then-contemporary television production — and the auto-destruction implicit in this segment of Welles’s film — also telegraph our way something of Welles’s “true” attitude toward the TV crazy-mirror?) As several courses of seafood come and go across the restaurant table at which Welles holds court, and conclude with a gargantuan lobster — a dish that is nonetheless preceded by Welles’s passing the waiter a plate of mussels and requesting in an off-hand tone: “Would you take this away please and, — and bring me the steak au poivre, thanks a lot. —” — is he not, I ask, is he not, amidst this super-human excess of cuisine, baiting and ridiculing his critics, all those who besmirch his reputation by painting him as a fat-assed idler given over to offal gluttony and sweetbread sloth?

In all of these duals, duels, doubles, hoaxes, illusions, doesn’t Welles underscore his life-long obsession with the idea that the “essence” of a human is ultimately unknowable (a notion intersecting the axis of his life-long obsession with Shakespeare, himself obsessed with the idea of the obfuscation, and usurpation, of identity) — and doesn’t he perhaps go even a step further here by suggesting the “truth” of that essence is irrelevant? Doesn’t he express this conception in all its ghostliness, with such sublime eloquence, when he presents in F for Fake the image of two Oja Kodars, superimposed, approaching, then passing through, one another? At the same time, and paradoxically (for doesn’t the truth sometimes rest at the crossroads of paradox?), doesn’t Welles test the idea, with all the shots of the ugly Californian sprawl of billboards and Orange Julius franchises and the “Glendale Federal Plaza,” that pastiche is no substitute for a “real thing”? — while also prescribing caution against substitutional shell-games by presenting, in true shell-game/fake-out manner, one shot in which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, Oja has been substituted with the “double” of her identically dressed sister? — (and in doing so, isn’t Welles getting to the slippery heart of an extraordinarily elusive matter, in a way not dissimilar to Buster Keaton’s presentation of sisters in the short masterpiece The Playhouse?) — while also, then, inquiring implicitly whether the whole pastiche of it all might not just be, in its own intriguing way, as good as the real thing? (Or is it all tantamount to “settling,” and as such something more like a… temptation from the Eden Tree?)

This lurching train of thought leads us back to the archway of truth, and one of Welles’s — or, the film’s — most devilish puzzles: Whose voice do we hear when, after Joseph Cotten, as he reflects upon the role that launched his career in film, remarks, “Oh, I’m not complaining —”, and at the moment a production-still of Cotten fills the screen, the following phrase comes across the soundtrack: “ — no, I had a fine part in Citizen Kane.”? If we listen closely to these words, can we be sure that this is Cotten’s voice (as the on-screen zoom-in on the still might coax us into believing)? Or is the voice… that of Welles, imitating Cotten? — For, after all, who had the finest role, or at least the one with the most screen-time, — in any case, the titular role — in Citizen Kane? If this truly is, in fact, Welles speaking, is it possible that he’s not even imitating Cotten at all, but rather using his normal speaking-voice, mixed at a lower volume on the soundtrack, — in effect testing whether this quasi-headshot of Cotten has done its part in grabbing (or is it hijacking?) our attention, and made us infer, mistakenly, that we are, in fact, still hearing “Joseph Cotten” speak?

Is the crux of the Cotten-trick, and more broadly, of the film of the whole that, indeed, “maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much”?

I should say that the crux, ladies and gentlemen, is the providence granted by a supreme masterpiece, which in turn can be granted only by its author: his name was Orson Welles.