orson welles - for for fake

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A Magazine distributed in Serralves Foundation about Orson Welles and his documentary F for Fake

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Orson Welles - For for Fake
Page 2: Orson Welles - For for Fake
Page 3: Orson Welles - For for Fake
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INDEX

Page 5: Orson Welles - For for Fake

INDEX 06

1215

20

27

39História, Missão e Arquitectura

Serralves:

Early & Final YearsOrson Welles :

Orson Welles: War of The Worlds

Orson Welles: F for Fake

Ficha Técnica

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane

1. S

omet

hin

g th

at s

erve

s to

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poi

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wis

e fa

cili

tate

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eren

ce.

Page 6: Orson Welles - For for Fake
Page 7: Orson Welles - For for Fake
Page 8: Orson Welles - For for Fake

HistoryDuring the immediate period following the 1974 revolution, the city of Oporto hosted several movements that demanded the creation of an exhibition space in the city, in order to ex-hibit art produced at that time.Several initiatives, in particular the Centre of Contemporary Art, that remained in operation until 1980, played a key role in consolidating the artistic context in Oporto.These achievements were recognised by the Secretary of State for Culture, when she chose the city as the location for the future National Museum of Modern Art. The State acquired the Serralves Estate in December 1986 for this purpose. On this date, and prior to creation of the Serralves Foundation in 1989, a Founding Committee was constituted, whose members were Jorge Araújo, Teresa An-dresen and Fernando Pernes. Serralves Park and Villa were opened to the public on May 29, 1987. The creation of the Foundation, via Decree-Law no. 240-A/89, of July 27, signalled the beginning of an innovative partner-ship between the State and civil society - encompassing around 50 public and private sector bodies. The present number of Founders has risen to 181, including companies and private individuals, thus demonstrating growing and continued adhesion to the Serralves project. In pursuit of its statutory objectives, the Foundation signed a contract in March 1991 with the architect, Álvaro Siza, in or-der to draw up an architectural project for the Museum. Con-struction of the “National Museum of Contemporary Art”, as it was then known, was financed by community funds with matching funds from national PIDDAC resources. The Serralves Foundation is now renowned as one of the main Portuguese cultural institutions and the leading body of its kind in the North of Portugal. It has conducted a great ef-fort in order to project contemporary art at the national and international levels and divulge its notable architectural and landscape heritage.Museum Encompassing the Serralves Villa, Park, Museum of Contem-porary Art, Auditorium and Library - managed within the orbit of its mission, the Foundation annually presents a diver-sified programme of initiatives, aimed at promoting debate and reflection on art, nature and the landscape and provide an innovative form of art education while taking an active part in reflection on contemporary society. In view of their important architectural interest, the buildings were both classified as a “Building of Public Interest” in 1996.The Museum’s core objectives are the constitution of a rep-resentative collection of Portuguese and international con-temporary art; presentation of a programme of temporary, collective and individual exhibitions reflecting a dialogue between the national and international artistic contexts; and organisation of pedagogical programmes that widen public interest in contemporary art and encourage stronger ties with the local community. The Museum also aims to develop projects with young artists that enable them to affirm their works and further their artistic enquiries. The Museum’s Col-lection is constituted by direct acquisitions, works deposited by the State and private collectors and donations

SERMissionThe Serralves Foundation is a European cultural institution serving the national community, whose mission is to raise the general public’s awareness concerning contemporary art and the environment. The Foundation pursues its mission via the Museum of Contemporary Art as a multi-disciplinary centre, the Park as a natural heritage site ideally suited for environmental education and entertainment activities and the Auditorium as a centre for reflection and debate on issues facing contemporary society.

Page 9: Orson Welles - For for Fake

RALVES

ArchitectureThe building of the Serralves Museum was designed by ar-chitect, Álvaro Siza, who was invited in the early 1990s to design a museum project that took into consideration the specific characteristics of the physical setting and the need for integration within the surrounding landscape. The initial studies were drawn up in 1991 and construction began five years later. The building was erected in the former vegeta-ble garden of the Serralves Estate. The slope of the terrain enabled the building to be partially buried, thus minimis-ing its visual impact on the surroundings. The choice of this zone also overcame the need to cut down trees and facili-tated public access to the Museum via a new entrance cre-ated in the Rua D. João de Castro. Landscaping of the area around the Museum began in 1998, on the basis of designs by João Gomes da Silva. One of the main premises underly-ing the project was the building’s relationship with the exte-rior, by means of large windows. It was decided to introduce vegetaion from the North of Portugal and create a mixture of dense foliage and clearings. This new landscape accentu-ated the importance of sunlight in fostering different perspec-tives of the building and its surrounding spaces.

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EARLY YEARSWelles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He had an unusual childhood, being somewhat of a prodigy, and his per-sonal relationships suffered as a result. His mother died when he was nine, and his father, Richard Head Welles, receded into the past, a drunkard.Welles performed and staged his first theatrical productions while attending the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Il-linois and was brought under the guidance of the principal, Roger Hill, who became a surrogate father to Welles. He made his stage debut at the famous Gate Theatre in Dublin, Ireland in 1931 when he talked himself onto the stage and ap-peared in small supporting roles, and by 1934 was a radio director/actor in the United States, working with some of the cast that later became the Mercury Theatre. In that year, the brown-eyed actor married the actress and socialite Virginia Nicholson. That year too, he co-directed a seldom seen short silent film, unintended for commercial release, The Hearts of Age, which also featured Nicholson in addition to Welles.Welles drew a great deal of attention in 1937 with a produc-tion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in Fascist Italy and a voodoo-themed version of Macbeth featuring a primarily Af-rican American cast. Shortly afterward, he and producer John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre company after they worked together on The Cradle Will Rock.Welles began playing The Shadow in late 1937; his deep voice suited the role well. In the summer of 1938, Welles and the Mercury Theatre began weekly broadcasts of short radio plays based on classic or popular literary works. Their Octo-ber 30 broadcast of that year was an adaptation of The War of the Worlds. This brought Welles his first public notoriety on a national level—the program created panic among some lis-teners who found it completely convincing. Welles’s adapta-tion of H. G. Wells’ classic novel simulated a news broadcast, cutting into a routine dance music program to describe the landing of Martian spacecraft in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The innovative broadcast was realistic enough to frighten many in the audience into believing that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Recordings of the broadcast are still availa-ble (see old-time radio and also the UK Region 2 DVD of Citi-zen Kane). The publicity that resulted from this led to the offer of a three-picture Hollywood contract from RKO.

BIOGRAPHY

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FINAL YEARSA man known for his large appetites, Welles became ex-tremely overweight in his later years, topping out at more than 350 pounds. He capitalized on his image in various ad-vertising campaigns for certain brands of wines, hot dogs, and correspondence courses. A bootleg of the recording session for one of his later commercials still circulates on the Internet and elsewhere, often known simply as Frozen Peas. In the recording, Welles can be heard brazenly chastising the commercial’s producers for its poor script and their “impos-sible, meaningless” directions, before walking out on the ses-sion, telling them that “no money is worth this.” (This incident was later satirized on SCTV with John Candy playing Welles, trying and failing to get through a reading of Good King Wenceslas before storming off set with the same lines as on the bootleg. Another bootlegged recording features a clearly inebriated Welles struggling, and failing, to get through his lines in a commercial for a California champagne).During his career he won one Oscar and was nominated for a further four. One of his most notable film appearances was as Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons (1966). In 1971 the Academy gave him an Honorary award “For superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures”.After dieting and losing 50 pounds, Welles died of a heart at-tack in Hollywood, California at the age of 70 on October 10, 1985 (the same day as Yul Brynner). The final role Welles per-formed was that of the planet-eater Unicron in the animated Transformers: The Movie, recording his lines mere weeks before his passing. However, it was not his last appearance on the screen, as the previously-filmed 1987 independent movie Someone To Love, was released two years following his death. His last TV appearance was in the introduction of the episode “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” of the series Moonlighting. Welles also recorded a narration for the 1987 re-release of The Alan Parsons Project’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination shortly before his death.Welles’ ashes were placed at the estate of a friend in Ronda, Spain, at his request. Some reports mention that some of his ashes may have been scattered in the town’s famous Plaza de Toros, the oldest bullfighting ring in Spain that is still used. Prominent critic Geoff Andrew has said, ‘He remains that rar-ity – a genius of the cinema.’

BIOGRAPHY13

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On Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of radio lis-teners were shocked when radio news alerts an-nounced the arrival of Martians. They panicked when they learned of the Martians’ ferocious and seemingly unstoppable attack on Earth. Many ran out of their homes screaming while others packed up their cars and fled. Though what the radio lis-teners heard was a portion of Orson Welles’ adap-tation of the well-known book, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, many of the listeners believed what they heard on the radio was real.

The ideaBefore the era of T.V., people sat in front of their radios and lis-

tened to music, news reports, plays and various other programs

for entertainment. In 1938, the most popular radio program was

the “Chase and Sanborn Hour” which aired on Sunday evenings

at 8 p.m. The star of the show was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and

his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Unfortunately for the Mercury group, headed by dramatist Orson

Welles, their show, “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” aired on another

station at the very same time as the popular “Chase and Sanborn

Hour.” Welles, of course, tried to think of ways to increase his au-

dience, hoping to take away listeners from the other broadcast.

For the Mercury group’s Halloween show that was to air on Oc-

tober 30, 1938, Welles decided to adapt H. G. Wells’s well-known

novel, War of the Worlds, to radio. Radio adaptations and plays

up to this point had often seemed rudimentary and awkward. In-

stead of lots of pages as in a book or through visual and auditory

presentations as in a play, radio programs could only be heard

(not seen) and were limited to a short period of time.

Thus, Orson Welles had one of his writers, Howard Koch, rewrite

the story of War of the Worlds. With multiple revisions by Welles,

the script transformed the novel into a radio play. Besides short-

ening the story, they also updated it by changing the location and

time from Victorian England to present day New England.

The BroadcastOn Sunday, October 30, 1938 at 8 p.m., the broadcast began

when an announcer came on the air and said, “The Columbia

Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson

Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the

Worlds by H. G. Wells.”

Orson Welles then went on air setting the scene of the play: “We

know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this

world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than

man’s and yet as mortal as his own...”

As Orson Welles finished his introduction, a weather report faded

in, stating that it came from the Government Weather Bureau. The

official sounding weather report was quickly followed by “the

music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” from the Meridian

Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York. Actually, the

broadcast was all done from the studio, but the script led people

to believe that there were announcers, orchestras, newscasters

and scientists on the air from a variety of locations.

The dance music was soon interrupted by a special bulletin

announcing that a professor at the Mount Jennings Observa-

tory in Chicago, Illinois reported seeing explosions on Mars.The

dance music resumed until it was interrupted again, this time by

WAR OF THE WORLDS

Page 19: Orson Welles - For for Fake

WAR OF THE WORLDS

a news update in the form of an interview with astronomer, Pro-

fessor Richard Pierson at the Princeton Observatory in Princeton,

New Jersey. The script specifically attempts to make the interview

sound real and occurring right at that moment. Near the beginning

of the interview, the newsman, Carl Phillips, tells the listeners that

“Professor Pierson may be interrupted by telephone or other com-

munications. During this period he is in constant touch with the as-

tronomical centers of the world.

During the interview, Phillips tells the audience that Professor

Pierson had just been handed a note, which was then shared with

the audience. The note stated that a huge shock “of almost earth-

quake intensity” occurred near Princeton. Professor Pierson be-

lieves it might be a meteorite. Another news bulletin announces,

“It is reported that at 8:50 p.m. a huge, flaming object, believed

to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers

Mill, New Jersey” Carl Phillips begins reporting from the scene at

Grovers Mill. (No one listening to the program questions the very

The PanicThough the program began with the announcement that it was a

story based on a novel and there were several announcements

during the program that reiterated that this was just a story, many

listeners didn’t tune in long enough to hear them. A lot of the radio

listeners had been intently listening to their favorite program the

“Chase and Sanborn Hour” and turned the dial, like they did eve-

ry Sunday, during the musical section of the “Chase and Sanborn

Hour” around 8:12. Usually, listeners turned back to the “Chase

and Sanborn Hour” when they thought the musical section of the

program was over. However, on this particular evening they were

shocked to hear another station carrying news alerts warning of

an invasion of Martians attacking Earth. Not hearing the introduc-

tion of the play and listening to the authoritative and real sounding

commentary and interviews, many believed it to be real. All across

the United States, listeners reacted. Thousands of people called ra-

dio stations, police and newspapers. Many in the New England area

loaded up their cars and fled their homes. In other areas, people

went to churches to pray. People improvised gas masks. Miscar-

riages and early births were reported. Deaths, too, were reported

but never confirmed. Many people were hysterical. They thought

the end was near. Hours after the program had ended and listeners

had realized that the Martian invasion was not real, the public was

outraged that Orson Welles had tried to fool them. Many people

sued. Others wondered if Welles had caused the panic on purpose.

The power of radio had fooled the listeners. They had become ac-

customed to believing everything they heard on the radio, without

questioning it. Now they had learned - the hard way.

short time that it took Phillips to reach Grovers Mill from the obser-

vatory. The music interludes seem longer than they are and confuse

the audience as to how much time has passed.) The meteor turns

out to be a 30-yard wide metal cylinder that is making a hissing

sound. Then the top began to “rotate like a screw.” Then Carl Phil-

lips reported what he witnessed: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the

most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed... Wait a minute! Some-

one’s crawling. Someone o... something. I can see peering out of

that black hole two luminous disks... are they eyes? It might be a

face. It might be good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the

shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another one,

and another one. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see

the thing’s body. It’s large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather.

But that face, it . . . ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can

hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are

black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with

saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.

Carl Phillips continued to describe what he saw. Then, the invad-

ers took out a weapon. A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I

can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that?

There’s a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right

at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they’re

turning into flame! Now the whole field’s caught fire. The woods,

the barns, the gas tanks of automobiles, it’s spreading everywhere.

It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right... Then silence.

A few minutes later, an announcer interrupts: “Ladies and gentle-

men, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers

Mill by telephone. Just one moment please. At least forty people,

including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village

of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all

possible recognition.” The audience is stunned by this news. But

the situation soon gets worse. They are told that the state militia is

mobilizing, with seven thousand men, and surrounding the metal

object. They, too, are soon obliterated by the “heat ray.” The “Sec-

retary of the Interior,” who sounds like President Franklin Roosevelt

(purposely), addresses the nation. Citizens of the nation: I shall not

try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the coun-

try, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives

and property of its people. we must continue the performance of

our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this

destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and con-

secrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth..”

The radio reports that the U.S. Army is engaged. The announcer

that New York City is being evacuated. The program continues, but

many radio listeners already panicked.

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“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth cen-tury this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scruti-nize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assur-ance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inher-ited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympa-thetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Cros-ley service estimated that thirty-two million people were lis-tening in on radios.”Orson Welles, 1938 October 30

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CITIZENKANE

Even while drawing the ire of some of his listeners, the broad-cast cemented Welles’ status as a genius, and his talents quick-

ly became a fascination for Hollywood. In 1940 Welles signed a $225,000 contract with RKO to write, direct and produce two films.

The deal gave the young filmmaker total creative control, as well as a percentage of the profits, and at the time was the most lucra-

tive deal ever made with an unproven filmmaker. Welles was just 24 years old.

Success wasn’t immediate. Welles started and then stopped an at-tempt at adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the big

screen. The daring behind that project paled in comparison to what became Welles’ actual debut film: Citizen Kane (1941).

Modeled after the life and work of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, the film told the story of newspaperman Charles

Foster Kane (played by Welles), tracing his rise to power and his eventual corruption from that power.

The film outraged Hearst, who refused to allow mention of the movie in any of his newspapers, and helped drive down the film’s

disappointing box-office numbers. But Citizen Kane was as revo-lutionary as it was revolutionary and earned Welles a 1941 Oscar

for best screenplay.In the film, which was nominated for a total of nine Academy

Awards, Welles deployed a number of pioneering filmmaking techniques, including the use of deep-focus cinematography,

which presented all objects in a shot in sharp detail. Welles also anchored the film’s look with low-angle shots and told its story

with multiple points of view. It was only a matter of time before the genius of Citizen Kane would be lauded. It’s now considered one

of the greatest films ever made.Welles’ second film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons, was a

far more straightforward project and one that helped send Welles running from Hollywood.

Toward the end of its filming, Welles made a quick trip to Rio de Janeiro to do a documentary. When he returned he discovered

that RKO had made its own edit of the film’s ending.Welles, who disowned the movie, raged. A bitter public relations

spat between the filmmaker and RKO ensued, and Welles, suc-cessfully cast by RKO as difficult to work with and with no appre-

ciation for budgets, never truly recovered

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“A film is never really good, unless the cam-

era is an eye in the head of a poet.” Orson Welles

Even while drawing the ire of some of his listeners, the broad-cast cemented Welles’ status as a genius, and his talents quick-

ly became a fascination for Hollywood. In 1940 Welles signed a $225,000 contract with RKO to write, direct and produce two films.

The deal gave the young filmmaker total creative control, as well as a percentage of the profits, and at the time was the most lucra-

tive deal ever made with an unproven filmmaker. Welles was just 24 years old.

Success wasn’t immediate. Welles started and then stopped an at-tempt at adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the big

screen. The daring behind that project paled in comparison to what became Welles’ actual debut film: Citizen Kane (1941).

Modeled after the life and work of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, the film told the story of newspaperman Charles

Foster Kane (played by Welles), tracing his rise to power and his eventual corruption from that power.

The film outraged Hearst, who refused to allow mention of the movie in any of his newspapers, and helped drive down the film’s

disappointing box-office numbers. But Citizen Kane was as revo-lutionary as it was revolutionary and earned Welles a 1941 Oscar

for best screenplay.In the film, which was nominated for a total of nine Academy

Awards, Welles deployed a number of pioneering filmmaking techniques, including the use of deep-focus cinematography,

which presented all objects in a shot in sharp detail. Welles also anchored the film’s look with low-angle shots and told its story

with multiple points of view. It was only a matter of time before the genius of Citizen Kane would be lauded. It’s now considered one

of the greatest films ever made.Welles’ second film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons, was a

far more straightforward project and one that helped send Welles running from Hollywood.

Toward the end of its filming, Welles made a quick trip to Rio de Janeiro to do a documentary. When he returned he discovered

that RKO had made its own edit of the film’s ending.Welles, who disowned the movie, raged. A bitter public relations

spat between the filmmaker and RKO ensued, and Welles, suc-cessfully cast by RKO as difficult to work with and with no appre-

ciation for budgets, never truly recovered

21

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27

When we get to a late film in Welles’ career, the documenta-ry F for Fake (1976), he formulates his most explicit statement about contemporary reality, leaving little room for greatness, let alone tragedy. And if F for Fake seems a superficial film, we will then have experienced the first lesson of postmodernism: playfulness, conscious illusions, and an undisguised reflexive-ness about making movies. Put another way, what is seen in the film that seems real is not as real as it appears — but most especially we can’t trust the filmmaker Welles himself, he will lie to us and deceive us, if only to get at the heart of the movie’s main contention: you cannot trust anyone, especially anyone who asserts his or her authority without any basis or proof.And what seems at first glance an obvious point, we discover in practice that the more obvious it is the less we’ll get the point (precisely the lesson of the last part of the film, which deals with a story about Picasso and one of his mistresses). We are just watching a film, a bunch of moving images that represent a certain reality. The problem with movies as an art, the most difficult thing to understand, is that what we are shown and how we see what we’re shown have never been the same. However, the authority of the giant screen image is such that audiences have tended to view what they see literally. The image on the screen overwhelms us (Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie, and oth-er books by culture critics, have cited the movie image as the turning point for the preoccupying of the American mind), and Welles both takes advantage of this situation and tries to make us conscious of it.

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The film image is only an image, and on this subtly unobvi-ous premise Welles framesF for Fake and validates the fakery of film artistry by evincing the fakery of life/people, suggest-ing that movies have become the art of the 20th century pre-cisely because of this innate mechanism to handle the unreal, the fake (again, Gabler rightly shows that the preponderance of movie fakery has been uncritically accepted by Americans; whereas artistic fakery might well be the antidote). The struc-ture of F for Fake also plays out the meaning of the mirror im-agery from his earlier films.At its center, the film portrays two great fakers. If you’re over forty years old, you will remember Clifford Irving, who claimed to have had recorded interviews with Howard Hughes and published a biography based on these tapes. The hoax was fi-nally exposed when Hughes allowed himself to be interviewed over the radio to disclaim any knowledge of Irving and the in-terviews. The episode caused a worldwide sensation, and Ir-ving went to jail for a few years.Coincidentally, Irving had written a book called Fake dealing with an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, the original subject of Welles documentary, the perfect living metaphor for Welles’ design: an artist who recreates artwork by the modern mas-ters that few people if anyone can distinguish from the original work of that master. Elmyr was never prosecuted for selling many of his art works to major museums around the world; no museum could risk the humiliation (and subsequent loss of be-lief in their institution) of admitting that they had bought fake Manets, Cezannes, and Picassos. Elmyr lived in relative peace and opulence on the island of Ibiza, which also happened to be a Welles haunt.The challenge that Elmyr presented to experts and authorities (civil and artistic) must have infatuated Welles greatly. The frag-ile basis on which all authority in society rests and how easily it can be undermined couldn’t have been more poignantly de-veloped. Also, Welles understood the average person’s distrust for artistic and intellectual experts and critics, and that nothing would cause him greater satisfaction than finding out that ex-perts couldn’t tell fakes from real works.

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This might seem passé in a world that produces movies like The Matrix (1999), which bases its entire save-the-world plot on the fact that nobody can tell the real from an illusion. Welles delights at the proposition that a great faker, like Elmyr, is being written about by another faker, Clifford Irving. Further, Welles not only hammers home this point but starts to under-mine his own sincerity (for instance, calling his acting vocation the ultimate fakery).Chance and coincidence are also hallmarks of postmodern life, and one cannot but hesitate to believe Welles when he suggests that Howard Hughes, not William Randolph Hearst, was the initial model for Charles Foster Kane in an early script. It seems hard to believe because Welles co-writer Herman Mankewicz was a friend of Hearst and spent much time at Hearst’s Xanadu-like estate at San Simeon. How convenient that we should find out that Kane was originally based on the life of Hughes after the Irving/ Hughes scandal was exposed.Yet one must recognize these titillations: Welles and Hughes did have contact with each other before 1941; Hughes had distinguished himself as a film director (there’s also much of Welles in the Kane character, although Hearst was bitten by the Hollywood bug through his relationship with longtime mis-tress Marion Davies); Hughes was a recluse and saved and stored many objects from his life in many warehouses much like Kane does. Through serendipity (that the Irving biography of Hughes should collapse in the midst of the filming of F for Fake) and artfulness, Welles creates another succession of mir-rored reflections that purposefully blur the real and the fake until we can no longer see which is which. The illusions pro-ceed to a human vanishing point, Elmyr himself.

29

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Elmyr also represents a most dangerous person. An original fraud. (In many ways, a mirror image himself to the celebrity: a person known for being known!) A criminal whose crimes don’t resemble real crimes; moreover, his crimes once de-tected must go unpunished. Or nearly unpunished. He must promise to make no more fakes. Although, Welles hints that the circumstantial evidence shows that when Irving needed a forged signature, Elmyr was the best candidate to provide it. In fact, I detected a melancholic (not quite tragic) note in F for Fake when Welles reflects on the fate of Elmyr’s talents be-ing absorbed by his forgeries, as if his “real” talent suppresses real talent, possibly a talent Elmyr is afraid to test.Welles further tweaks those in a position of expertise when journalists listen to Howard Hughes over a radio receiver tell-ing them that he has never met Clifford Irving. The journalists had known Hughes twenty or twenty-five years before and were there to “authenticate” his voice. With great authority they inform the world that they were listening to the real Howard Hughes. (And one can’t help but think how fraudulent journal-ism has become lately as the news devolved into entertain-ment.) Yes, it probably was Hughes; yet, this “real” Howard Hughes had descended many steps into his personal unre-alities and (according to the book Citizen Hughes by Michael Drosnin) addressed the media sitting naked with a long beard and fingernails several inches long. His reality was more bi-zarre than the story of real artistic forgeries!Throughout F for Fake, Welles sustains a lightly detached air, as if the film were an artistic exercise or game, which might dis-appoint those anticipating the tragic failings of Welles’ “great” men; indeed, this film seems to be more of Welles coming to terms with everyone’s (including his own) expectations of his own greatness since Citizen Kane. Welles himself succumbed to celebrity in his later years, his girth beyond even Hank Quinlin proportions. Only within the infinity of mirrors that’s emblematic of his own artistic themes, Welles could at once deflate the expectations but also finally transcend them

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Fak

e is

as

old

as

the

Ed

en t

ree.“

31

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Everybody denies I am a genius, but nobody ever called me one!“

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FICH

ATÉCNICA

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FICH

ATÉCNICA Logística e Orçamento

Rita LamyMarketing e ComunicaçãoRita LamyCoordenação EditorialRita LamyEventosRita LamyRedaçãoDaniel CamposVítor GonçalvesRicardo QuintelaFotografiaDavid DinisDesignRita LamyTipografiasRockwell Std Light, Regular e BoldChampion HTFPapelRenova Reciclado 200gJornal 50gCouché Brilho 200g

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