F for Fake - Criterion Collection | William Alland, Jean-Pierre Aumont

F for Fake - Criterion Collection | William Alland, Jean-Pierre Aumont | F for feat!

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F for Fake - Crite...

	F for Fake - Criterion Collection William Alland, Jean-Pierre Aumont Criterion, 2005 average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Twilight Years of A Film-making Prodigy

NOTE: This is a review for the documentary 'Orson Welles - The One Man Band', which is included as a second-disk feature on this product. This is not a review of the film 'F For Fake'.

When a person slowly disappears, nobody seems to notice. This is probably what happened to Orson Welles when his film career stumbled into a downhill slope. The man who was arguably the most brilliant filmmaker to emerge on the American scene, ended up doing narration, wine commercials, and magic shows. He died in poverty, leaving behind masterpieces, but also leaving behind dozens of unfinished films. Films that could have been just as magical as his earlier works. 'Orson Welles - The One Man Band" takes a look at those struggling later years when Welles was a ghost hovering around the Hollywood movie scene. Many people knew he was trying to make movies, but many people also knew he could never get them finished. Because of his inability to finish films, no major studio would try to finance him, so he became a gypsy-like filmmaker. Even still then many projects were not finished.

Although it is sad to see a legend struggling so badly, the film does not feel sorry for him. In fact, the film has a very positive outlook on Welles later years. The film is narrator by two people. One is the filmmaker. The other is Welles' companion, Oja Kodar. She had spent a considerable time with Welles in his last years and knew him probably better than anyone else. The image she shows of Welles was not of a burned-out has-been, but of a strong man who still had plenty of creative spark. When watching the snippets and short clips from his unfinished films, one can see exactly what Oja Kodar was seeing. Either it was bad luck or it was his conflicts with studios that could not get his films finished. Or maybe it was both. Regardless, one can see even in his later films, Welles still had incredible film-making talent and vision. One can see that he was also a versatile actor. He could play a wide variety of roles and play them as good as the best actors. When we see how creative he still was, we cannot help but think it was the Hollywood that ruined his career. There could be a lot of truth to this because many people feel he was never the same after 'Citizen Kane' because Welles might have stepped on too many big toes after his brilliant debut feature. But the unknown remains just that. At times, it is the artist who ruins his or her career with their own bare hands.

It is hard to say what happened, but this film does not try to explain that either. It tries to focus on Welles the artist. And he was just that until his death. An artist who had no audience. How frustrating, but we have seen this example time and again throughout history.

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F for feat!

The first sequence if the film shows us one the most alluring women ever existed: Oja Kodar, and through these traveling, the eye-camera invites us to participate with Welles through a particular journey: the fake.

The inextinguishable genius of Orson Welles is carved once more in relief through this admirable of two well known fakers , Elmyr and Irving. As it's well know, Elmyr was regarded the most astute, fine and intelligent artist of the falsification, his immense skills as painter allowed him to copy Modigliani, Matisse or the same Picasso, his reproductions were bought for many art dealers; on the other hand, Irving is closely linked with Howard Hughes.

Orson Welles acts as the master of ceremonies, his voice in off and some other important reflections about himself and so other issues.

The movie is deeply absorbing and engaging, but the rest of its charm runs for you; it would be a crime to tell you the rest of this original masterwork.

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A Cinematic Juggling Act

His last major work as a filmmaker, Orson Welles' "F for Fake" (1973) survives as a rough-edged yet provocative essay on the art of fraud. In this instance, we have three noted subjects: art forger extraordinaire Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving (the novelist who conned the world as Howard Hughes' "authorized biographer") and Welles himself. Editing plays a vital role as the Great Orson maintains his semi-documentary juggling act for 90 minutes. Fittingly enough, "F for Fake" reveals more about the creator of "Citizen Kane" than the minor curiosities he examines. Welles ends his cinematic odyssey with an affectionate wink.

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Masterful

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).... 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?

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