F FOR FAKE: Orson Welles and Search for the Real Self.

Welles had high standards and he distinguished between what he considers to be a good and bad film. If he didn’t have such discipline and power, he wouldn’t have made films that exude human capability toward greatness. But the questions he poses in F for Fake aren’t that we should doubt Mozart, Beethoven or Picasso but we should think for ourselves, that we should be free of someone else’s opinion about Art. He knows that de Hory and Irving were scoundrels but the immorality of their actions is accidental for what he wants to accomplish. What’s more fascinating than the fact that both forgers are unethical is the idea of authenticity, and whether someone like de Hory was capable of being authentic. De Hory’s masks were duplicating with every fake that he painted, and we have to ask how much will trickery (that has serious consequences) change the evolving person over the course of their lifetime?

For Welles, the search for authenticity in art is the search for the authenticity of the self. Don’t ask him to reveal himself, because as he says in F for Fake, quoting Picasso, “Art is a lie. A lie that makes us realize the truth.” Welles’ concealment of himself is an illumination of the other. By concealment, he lifts the veil of existence and becomes the aesthetical vessel through which we’re humanized and invited to explore what  makes us human.

Welles never intended F for Fake to be his last movie, but sadly, it was — at least until the long delayed posthumous 2018 Netflix release of Welles’ self-indulgent The Other Side of the Wind, shot off and on over many years in the 1970s. As Kyle Smith wrote at the time of its release, “You’d be better off watching instead the movie about the movie: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (the title refers to one of Welles’s mordant self-observations) explores the relentless, almost purposeful squandering of talent that is the Welles tragedy.”