Monthly Archives: April 2005

F for Fake

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The title of Orson Welles’ playful and raffish essay film, F for Fake (1976)–released this week on DVD by the Criterion Collection–suggests one possible word following the sixth letter of the English alphabet, and indeed, the film’s focus on the story of art forger Elmyr de Hory justifies it. But the film could also have been called “F for Fame,” as one of the film’s preoccupations is the way notoriety and personality can overwhelm art, imposing notions of “authenticity” and “fakery,” “expertise” and “value,” in ways that are less certain than one might assume.

The essay film is a genre that is notoriously difficult to define itself, although Welles’ film contains many points of affinity between the essayist examples of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker–a loose conglomeration of topics thematically related, informal in structure, seemingly spontaneous and stream-of-conscious, and narrated in the first person. It has been reported that Welles spent a solid year edited the film in three separate rooms seven days a week, and its complexity of rhythm and ideological ruminations will likely stun the uninitiated. Cutting quickly from interviews to reaction shots culled from other interviews, snippets of dialogue, footage of Welles in his editing suite speaking to the camera and continuing his narration from various locations around the world, F for Fake is an almost impossibly lively pastiche of images and ideas that never tires.

Welles visits with de Hory and recounts the painter’s long career of forgery that is said to have duped the world’s most prestigious art collectors. He compares and contrasts de Hory with the forger’s biographer, Clifford Irving, a struggling novelist who later shocked the publishing world with his fake biography of Howard Hughes, the famous recluse who confronted the media via telephone…or did he? And throughout the film, Welles casts himself as a charlatan, performing magic tricks and recounting his famed hoax, the War of the Worlds radio broadcast that terrorized the nation and launched his Hollywood career. Finally, Welles introduces Oja Kodar, his partner for the subsequent and final twenty years of his life, by alluding to her own brush with fame and duplicitous past that is much too entertaining to reveal here.

Aside from its tour de force editing, what makes the film especially enjoyable is Welles’ sense of irony. Cataloging a flurry of de Horay fakes (“you name them, he paints them”), Welles films de Horay hard at work on a piece before the painter proudly burns it, then Welles pauses to recite “a bit of verse” with dramatic flair, and ends with de Horay applying the finishing touches to another work: “This isn’t a forgery this time, this is a portrait by Elmyr of another famous art forger–Michelangelo,” Welles says. “I must say I’m honored. My signature forged by Elmyr on a real Elmyr is really something.” (Later, Welles returns the favor by rendering a fine chalk caricature but signing Elmyr’s name on it.)

As cheerfully subversive as Welles’ film is (he constantly refers to elisions at the request of his lawyers), it’s not a glib statement for the sake of irony itself, but a personal meditation on the nature of art and art’s audience, and the capricious nature of fame and fortune. For a filmmaker who struggled throughout his career to find an enthusiastic audience for his visionary projects, the film’s cynical yet well-humored embrace of the artistic commercial establishment is impressive. (“I began at the top and I’ve been working my way down ever since,” Welles remarks wryly.)

That combination of irony and respect builds to a beautiful ritardando reflection on Chartres Cathedral; “the premiere work of man, perhaps, in the Western world,” Welles says, “and it’s without a signature.” Coming from one of America’s most lauded and marginalized filmmakers, it’s a moving testament to the limitations of fame and the calling to create regardless.

Turner Classic Movies has chosen Orson Welles as May’s feature director of the month, and will broadcast many of his films, including F for Fake over the next few weeks.

Pin Boy

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Pin Boy (Parapalos)

My brief, several-day stint at the San Francisco International Film Festival turned out to be a great reunion with friends but an extremely lackluster screening experience. And I’m not the only person who apparently felt this way–the SF Weekly questioned how an “international film festival” could be be 40% American films, and groaned at the fest’s motto (“Every Film is a Foreign Film Somewhere”), which only seemed to rub it in.

Ten films, two incontestably good ones and one interesting mood piece, summarize my take, although I should note that the festival continues for another week and could improve; I’ll be returning to Los Angeles tonight.

ïMy favorite film by far was Argentine filmmaker Ana Poliak’s Pin Boy (Parapalos), a minimalist take on the life of a young man, Adri·n, who works in a manual bowling alley, setting up remaining pins after each player’s throw. The job includes equal doses of dead time and physical precision, requiring careful attention to avoid serious injury as the workers are seated directly above and behind the pins. The festival notes claim the bowling alley is set in Buenos Aires, but the film itself never explicitly states this, focusing existentially on the day-to-day experience of Adri·n in his dark quarters, talking with coworkers, returning balls and arranging pins, and collapsing in his apartment each morning as his cousin heads off to work.

Poliak’s DV camera maintains a steady gaze, intensifying the subtleties of the workers’ conversations in their cramped and shadowy confines with tight compositions. The film’s careful sound design emphasizes the ambient noises and shapes them to reflect Adri·n’s subjective experience. In many ways, the film’s formal claustrophobia is reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl, but Pin Boy is far less lush, emphasizing its austere and potentially dangerous environment with flat lighting and compelling, matter-of-fact realism.

The film is quite effective at conveying the plight of a particular variety of workers in a seemingly Sisyphusian task with little future, particularly with the growing threat of modern machinery. Their conversations are suffused with a deep sense of professionalism and camaraderie, and their insular but fragile environment is further made poignant by their ongoing efforts to observe and sketch each other in various poses.

Pin Boy is a film that manages to addresss the frustrations and uncertainties of Argentina’s working class without didacticism or sloganeering–it’s a precisely-rendered and touching portrait.

ïI also thoroughly enjoyed French filmmaker Raymond Depardon’s Profiles of Farmers: Daily Life, an incisive summary of the rural LozËre and Haute-Loire mountain region of France and a variety of farmers who live there. Interviewing an array of people, from the young to the aged, Depardon conveys the attitudes, hopes, and fears of a profession and a way of life that seems (like Argentine pin boys) on the brink of extinction. The compositions are striking (Depardon also works as a still photographer), the personalities are vivid, and Depardon’s own farming roots clearly and quietly invests his film with genuine feeling.

ï Innocence, by Gaspar NoÈ’s romantic partner, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, is an intriguing, highly atmospheric mood piece somewhat reminescent of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock with its story of a mysterious and often disturbing boarding school for young girls. Hadzihalilovic’s eye for visual flair and enveloping sound design is considerable. But while the child’s-eye view of the ambiguities and threatening potential of the adult world are skillfully rendered, the film stumbles with a lack of dramatic cohesion and never seems to fully develop its allegorical aspects to any statisfying degree. Nevertheless, it’s a work that is admirable in its restraint and poetry.

ïThe one unmitigated failure I saw was Jean-Pierre Denis’ La Petite Chartreuse. Denis has apparently collaborated wih the Dardenne brothers in the past, and his film contains two of their trademark elements–handheld camerawork and Olivier Gourmet–without any degree of their artistry. For two-thirds of the film, one might even think that Gourmet’s formidable acting talents–emotion conveyed almost exclusively through physical movement–redeems an otherwise heavy-handed melodrama about a man “who cannot cry” who accidently runs a girl over with his truck. But eventually, the film’s emotional manipulation and truly bizarre narrative choices overwhelms him in a denoument so poorly executed it’s shocking.

The Corporation

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One of the most lauded documentaries from last year was a film I only managed to catch up with this week, when it was released as a stunningly produced two-DVD set. The Corporation analyzes what it convincingly calls the primary influence on contemporary life: “Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places,” the narrator says, “the corporation is todayís dominant institution.”

The film is over two-hours long, but the DVD contains over seven or eight hours of supplemental material, including two audio commentaries, a host of clips from screening discussions and media appearances around the world, and an entire disc of expanded interviews with about 40 people featured in the film–from those who oppose corporate excess to those who are deeply imbedded.

The film is a crash course for those unfamiliar with the ideological and historical underpinnings of the corporation and yet it is also humorous, engaging, and visually creative. We learn that a corporation is a specific kind of business arrangement designed to decrease the accountability of its members, that it is granted a charter by the government (of the people) and was initially designed to provide limited services for the public good (like railroads and bridges).

But shortly after the Civil War, corporate lawyers took advantage of the newly-created 14th amendment (designed to protect black Americans) and convinced the Supreme Court to define corporations as legal “persons.” To this day, a corporation is not regarded as a group of businesspeople, it is regarded as a personal individual who can, for example, buy and sell property, borrow money, sue or be sued, and earn wages–separate from the rights of its members. From 1890 to 1910, the 14th amendment was cited in court by 19 black Americans . . . and 288 corporations.

Taking their cue from this legal definition, the filmmakers proceed to analyze the personality of these “persons”–entities who cannot legally do anything against their own self-interest–and conclude they are clinical psychopaths. Not that psychopaths are incapable of doing good, of course, but without severe restrictions they are capable of doing great harm (economists call it “externalities”). Due to US trends in deregulation over the past 30 years, unbridled corporate gains have had devastating consequences for the public health and psychology, the environment, and economic justice. And with increasing privatization of public resources and patents defining genetic research, the future looks even more bleak.

But far from a doomsday proclamation, The Corporation is a thoughtful, entertaining film, and its DVD presentation has been custom designed to inspire discussion and further investigation. Beautiful, easily-navigable menus and hours of extended commentary can be searched by speaker or topic and are linked to literally hundreds of websites–this was clearly a labor of love. The DVD also includes the full trailers for a couple dozen recent documentaries on related subjects, as well as updates to events and technologies mentioned in the film. The website lists DVD house parties and provides resources for discussion groups, and I can hardly think of a more pertinent film to foster extended engagement.