F for Fake Essays

F for Fake Essays F for Fake Essay F for Fake Essay Essay Topic: F for Fake F for Fake:Fakery or Trickery â€Å"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. †-jean luc godard ABOUT THE FILM F for Fake is a film which portrays chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. Its not hard to see the film as one elaborate magic trick, a dizzy feature-length lark that delights in confusing the audiences at regular intervals. A singular combination of documentary, essay, narrative and cinematic vaudeville on Hory, real-life Horys biographer and notorious fellow faker Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and the complicated relationship between creativity and larceny, art and theft. In a time when everybody seems to be playing his/her own favorite con game, it certainly Orson Welles who keeps engaging the audiences with his own tricks. The story format is like boxes within boxes until be get the surprise in the last box that is the resolution act,and as per an article from NEW YORK TIMES by Vincent Canby (September 28,1975) (1), Orson Welles cleverly uses some documentary footage shot by Francois Reichenbach of the two con men chatting and cavorting on the island of Ibiza. The rotund writers Oja Kodar and Orson welles add a lecture on the cathedral of Chartres, then weave a tale about a Yugoslav girl and her joke on Picasso. In the film there are moments where orson wells himself speaks about his own fakery about his past works and plays trick with the audiences and keeps them completely unnoticed with this facts. (2)   Welles and Kodar structure F for Fake as an extended monologue, a point-counterpoint speculation on how and why de Hory and Irving pulled off their respective fakes, so much so that they built success and fame out of their practice. The tone is clever and light, the editing at once whimsical and complex as Marie-Sophie Dubus and Dominique Engerer (editors)'(3) cross-cut between the original footage and archival documentary footage of de Hory and Irving. That interplay makes F for Fake a surprisingly dynamic, constantly engaging experimental documentary, a personal essay that gives the viewer the feeling that he’s in Welles’s own experiences about the incidents related to the characters of the story. Structurally Welles isnt a disembodied voice in the film: He physically comments from a variety of locations and inserts himself into the story, almost like he was there when the footage was shot. Welles is seen, for example, from the editing room (creating a film within a film which can be seen over his shoulder on the editing table), walking in a forest shrouded in a cape and hat, and, inexplicably, eating at a restaurant with friends, where his narration strangely turns into a discussion with them about de Hory. End notes- (1)www. nytimes. com (2)joseph mcbride (3) www. wikipedia. com