Hey presto: F for Fake and the invention of the essay film

The early 1970s for Orson Welles, by then in his mid-fifties, were typical of the way his life as a self-declared independent filmmaker had resolved itself since the 1950s: a whirl of what the French call travaux alimentaires – bread-and-butter work, acting and narrating and an increasing number of guest appearances on comedy shows – out of which he attempted to finance at least the initial work on the bewildering number and variety of projects which endlessly proliferated in his fertile brain.

As a director, he was out on a limb. Neither of his mainstream American ventures of the 1950s, his dazzling teleplay The Fountain of Youth (1956) for Desilu nor Touch of Evil (1958) for Universal, had led to any further offers of work. Back in Europe, where he had been living and working since 1947, he had shot – with intermittent financing, and in the face of what to anyone else would have been insuperable obstacles – Othello (1952) and 1955’s Mr Arkadin aka Confidential Report (neither released in America); as a sideline, he had created some remarkably innovative work for British television: Orson Welles’s Sketchbook and Around the World with Orson Welles, for the BBC and Associated-Rediffusion respectively. There had been some stage work: a triumphant Moby-Dick in London in 1955, an indifferent Chimes at Midnight in Ireland in 1960, and a Rhinoceros at the Royal Court Theatre from which he had been sacked by its star, Laurence Olivier. He had even created a ballet, Lady in the Ice, for Roland Petit, again in London.

Through this blur of activity Welles managed, in the 1960s, to shoot – again, under virtually impossible financial circumstances – the film that many of us consider to be his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight (1966), as well as the relatively fiscally stable The Trial (1962), produced by the Salkinds, père et fils, and the elegant and concise Isak Dinesen adaptation The Immortal Story (1968), made for French television, Welles’s only completed fiction film in colour. These films – the tiniest fraction of his list of projects – were the ones where, by happy accident, the sperm, so to speak, hit the egg.

There were others – his saga of the Dumas clan, for example, or Surinam, his Conrad adaptation (from Victory), or his screenplay from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – which simply never happened. And there were those of which he shot what he could, for as long as he could afford to. The Deep from 1970 was among these projects, abandoned, half-edited and not fully shot; more significantly, that same year Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind, a magnum opus designed as his response to the death of the old Hollywood and the birth of the new. Meanwhile, Orson’s Bag, a compilation of sketches, improvisations and a substantial 40-minute version of The Merchant of Venice, for CBS, foundered when the company, for ‘tax reasons’, withdrew its backing.

This was Welles’s world. Stop, start; glimmers of hope quickly snuffed out; unending acting work on other men’s films (including, most bitterly of all, on the 1970 Catch-22 directed by the new kid on the block, Mike Nichols); doing the rounds of the television shows of Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, Dick Cavett and Rowan and Martin, telling anecdotes, doing magic tricks, burlesquing himself, enduring fat jokes, partly to make money but also, as he fondly hoped, to remind Hollywood (which he never ceased hoping to return to) of his existence.

Meanwhile, among all this confusion of different Welleses, another potent image had been long forming, particularly in Europe, of the réalisateur maudit: of the great director, blighted by destiny, or the studios, or the financiers, denied access to the means of production. Welles himself – as opposed to his films – loomed very large indeed, a kind of Vanderdecken of film, a Flying Dutchman doomed to roam the world, begging bowl in hand, until he could finally make the film or films that would fulfil his destiny as the greatest of the great. He became a pin-up for Cahiers du cinéma, a terrible example and a hero at the same time.

He was endlessly profiled on British and European television. In 1968, for example, French television produced a 30-minute film called Portrait: Orson Welles, co-directed by Frédéric Rossif and François Reichenbach. Welles and Reichenbach had met when the latter interviewed him on the set of Is Paris Burning? (1966). They hit it off and kept in touch, most often meeting at the editing studio Antégor, “nerve centre for independent documentary-makers”, as François Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthomé put it in their indispensable Orson Welles at Work. In 1970 Reichenbach, with the British journalist Richard Drewett, made Elmyr: The True Picture?, a 40-minute BBC documentary about Elmyr de Hory, the Hungarian faker of 20th-century masters, and his biographer Clifford Irving; Reichenbach asked Welles to narrate it. Welles declined, but was predictably intrigued, on many levels, by the material. It touched him at many points: his own facility as a painter, his lifelong fascination with conjuring – with the art of illusion in all its forms, in fact – and his equally long-standing attraction (from Citizen Kane onwards) to biographical enquiry all chimed with him.

He may well have had occasion to ponder deeply on the question of what a man’s life amounts to when, in August 1970, his Madrid villa burned down, wiping out many of his papers, screenplays, stories and sketches. And the subject of Reichenbach’s film, the delicate question of authorship, which had dogged Welles from at least as far back as the famous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, now raised its head in particularly aggressive form with the publication, in successive issues of The New Yorker in February 1971, of two articles by Pauline Kael alleging that Herman Mankiewicz, Welles’s credited co-author of the screenplay of Citizen Kane, had in fact written the whole thing. Welles was deeply upset by this allegation; Reichenbach’s film now took on an urgent personal relevance for him.

Reichenbach had shown Welles the hour or so of footage that he had been unable to use; now he became seriously intrigued, asking Reichenbach to allow him to rework the material into a film of his own. Reichenbach not only agreed but offered to finance a 30-minute film through his own company Les Films du Prisme. Welles accordingly went to Ibiza to shoot new material with de Hory, and shot scenes in a Paris restaurant with himself and Reichenbach in discussion. But somehow the material failed to gel; Welles seemed to have reached an impasse and his initial enthusiasm petered out.

Then, in January 1972, sensational news broke: it was revealed that the autobiography of the notoriously reclusive Howard Hughes, whose sale had been brokered by none other than de Hory’s biographer Clifford Irving, had in fact been forged by Irving himself. This news that the faker’s biographer was himself a faker galvanised a delighted Welles, who instantly saw the potential for a movie in which nothing is as it seems – in which everything, in fact, is fake. This idea liberated him. He could use stock footage, footage he had shot himself for other purposes or no purpose at all. He would weave apparently disparate elements into a vivacious and completely non-linear essay on the idea of fakery, a dazzling scherzo on the theme of deception, at the still centre of which would be a meditation on the great cathedrals, built by unknown craftsmen. Who cares, asks Welles, who built Chartres? Its greatness is independent of its authorship.

For one of the most present of filmmakers, whose every frame proclaims his authorship of his film, whose performances overwhelmingly dominate his own work, whose bulky profile was among the best-known images of 20th-century culture, to make a film praising anonymity is just one of many pieces of outrageous chutzpah in the film that finally became known as F For Fake (1973). But beyond the question of authorship, beyond even the question of fakery, the film is above all a hymn to the art of editing – of which, from Othello onwards, Welles had become an absolute master. In that work, his editorial virtuosity derived partly from necessity – the film had to move fast because too often, in a movie shot on several continents over many years, the eye had to be distracted.

As early as his work on the footage he shot for his stage show of Too Much Johnson at the Mercury Theatre in 1938, he had discovered what all directors quickly find out: to shoot is human, to edit divine. Here, in the editing suite, the director is absolute master, able to make a fast scene slow, a slow one fast, a funny scene sad, a dully-acted one dazzling. Increasingly Welles regarded filming as simply the generation of the rawest of raw material to be shaped, changed, transmuted by the editorial hand. In the early 1950s, Darryl Zanuck had given him a portable moviola in lieu of a salary; it went with him wherever he went.

With Welles, filming and editing went hand in hand to an unusual degree; in F For Fake the editing preceded the filming: as the film took shape in the editing suite, Welles saw the direction the film was taking, and this dictated the shots he required. And as events in the external world unfolded, he was able to respond to them. He worked from 5am to 11pm every day, with up to three different editors, reeling off instructions as he passed from one editor to the next. He moved the film away from narrative towards pure prestidigitation. Its form, Thomas and Berthomé observe with inimitable Gallic precision, is rhizomatic, “like tubers that multiply underground throwing up roots, no one being more important than any other… The underlying thread of the film is the magician’s control over the credulous mind and its corollary – the desire to believe in the improbable.”

At the centre of it all is Welles the conjuror. In Henry Jaglom’s 1970 experimental film A Safe Place he had played a character known only as The Magician; he would do so in other films, in various different manifestations. But F For Fake is his magical apotheosis. Throughout the film, his sense of exhilaration in his own virtuosity is palpable: making it, he refound his almost childlike sense of joyous discovery, of naughty astonishment at what he could get away with. After Citizen Kane, F For Fake was the next best train set a boy ever had.

Gary Graver, his cinematographer on much of the film, describes how, when the money was running out, they improvised technical solutions, inventing the cinema as they went along, just as Griffith had done, as Gance had done with Napoléon. The opening credit sequence, for example, was filmed in an abandoned old house in the depth of the countryside. The sequence called for a 360° shot, but they had no generator to produce the requisite light. They decided instead to give each of seven or eight crew members sun guns. As the camera circled by, one after another of the crew would duck down to keep out of shot, then immediately stand up again; it works perfectly. On another occasion, lacking a focus puller, the cinematographer rigged up a string with a toothpick attached to the lens and adjusted the focus as he operated.

Graver, whose experience was essentially on low-budget (and fairly low-life) movies, was Welles’s ideal partner in filmmaking, ready to be told what to do by Welles, but endlessly inventive of means – cheap means – by which to achieve what he was asked for. Welles’s extraordinary ability to keep the whole film in his mind as he worked enabled him to create shots which would match the pre-existing footage. This godlike capacity to yoke together people who had been filmed years and sometimes oceans apart, defying time and space, is another element of the film’s quite extraordinary exhilaration. It feels like a young man’s film, not least in the director’s quite shameless desire to show off his sexy girlfriend to the world.

Oja Kodar had been a part of Welles’s life since 1962, when he was directing The Trial. He remained married to Paola Mori, but their intimate life was over. Oja had quickly become an artistic partner as well as an emotional and sexual one. All the evidence suggests that in her Welles had at last found his soulmate – a woman with whom he could share his life at every level. From an early stage they started to collaborate on projects: The Deep was, to a large extent, designed to promote her career as an actress. Both The Other Side of the Wind (the title was hers) and F For Fake (ditto) are strongly influenced by Oja’s frank and uninhibited sexuality; both, indeed, might be said to showcase it. Sensuality had never been a part of Welles’s world; sex – as in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – had most often been presented as problematic and disturbing. No doubt Welles’s relationship with Oja was not without complexities: curiously enough, in F For Fake Oja is shown as the object of voyeuristic interest, either from the drivers and pedestrians ogling her in the streets (of what appears to be Paris, but is in fact Rome; another illusion), or from Picasso. But the celebration of her physical allure is unashamed and joyous.

Altogether, the film suggests a fresh wind from Welles, a rediscovery of his essential pleasure in filmmaking, and a giant stride in a new direction. He thought of it as the pioneering work in a new genre, one unique to him because it depended entirely on his personality to make it cohere. “I’m a better actor than I’m a director, and I’ve never had a chance to prove it,” he told Bill Krohn in an interview in Cahiers du cinéma. “I’m very serious. I know that the thing I do best in the world is talk to audiences. And that’s what confuses me and makes me think I should have been in politics, which is nonsense… my favourite mask is myself. And I feel much more at ease on the stage talking to the audience than I do pretending to be someone else. With most actors it’s exactly the opposite.”

This slightly odd observation – surely what he is talking about has nothing to do with acting – is nonetheless disarmingly frank in its main point: all his career, Welles had been reaching out to the public, sometimes more successfully than at others. Since the late 1930s, in radio programmes, in newspaper columns, in speeches, on television, he had always been, as he puts it, trying to talk to audiences. He had always had this compelling need to address the public in propria persona – in the persona, that is, of a wise, benevolent, impassioned, ironic, wayward, quizzical interlocutor. In The Fountain of Youth, Welles as the storyteller relates both to the action and to the audience. He is not part of the story; he is the magician, summoning up these people and making them disappear again. He is the master of ceremonies. With F For Fake and his invention of the essay film, he combines all his impulses: the desire to instruct, to entertain, to bewitch, to tease. In it he triumphantly effects his escape from linear narrative, which has always been his enemy.

A mark of his exhilaration in his new creation is that he curbed his natural tendency to linger over the editing process, and the final film was speedily delivered early in 1973 – although, with the usual complications which seemed to attend the release of every Welles movie, it was in fact not shown publicly for many months. It was liked, on the whole, in Europe; its reception in America was essentially one of bemusement. Yet again, Welles was taken to task for not having made a second Citizen Kane.

He was not to know it, but his constantly surprising champagne cocktail of a film, which he hoped would be the harbinger of a long line of similar films, was the last film he was ever to complete. The frolicsome new departure of F For Fake was a hop, skip and a jump to nowhere.