Fakery’s layers

Coming from Lost Highway (1997), I was more engaged in the story of F for Fake (1973) because it dealt with how the concepts of expertise, fakery, and credibility could be constructed and questioned. Like Lost Highway, this movie dealt with multiple perspectives. Though narrated through the voice of one, there were multiple stories intertwined to form one story. The different subjects of the documentary were able to explain their side of the situation and how they pulled off their trickery. Another similarity I saw with Lost Highway would be how the concepts were both very existential in nature. It forced the audience to question the truth — what is real and what isn’t?

Because of the nature of this class and how badly the movies we’ve watched messed with our minds about reality and film, I had a lot of trust issues coming into this movie. I did not know if the people in the videos were actors or if they were the actual people the narrator said they were. I link my apprehensions about this movie to how the narrator was a real and visible character. He came off as too much of a fictional character rather than an objective narrator. It also mixed fictional scenes with clips from actual interviews, so it was hard to draw the line between what was nonfiction and fiction. Despite all of this, the reveal towards the end of the movie still got me by surprise. It was the perfect way to end a documentary about trickery and fakery; it left me rethinking about art and art as both an industry and a market. I did appreciate the art market for how it worked despite its tendency to be extremely pretentious, but with this documentary’s exploration of art forgery, my respect lessened.

Another aspect of the film that I particularly loved was its format. It reminded me of the documentaries that the Neistat brothers used to put together in the early 2000s following a similar style of cinematography and quality. It seemed like amateur (handheld and borderline home-video style) filmmaking which gave the movie a more personal touch. The freeze frames were the absolute best, and I think it was a mark of the times as well, so it was interesting to see the progression in documentary cinematography over time.

In the class discussion, it was raised how Orson Welles was hired to edit all this footage to fit a documentary format, but over time, the story morphed into something other than the documentary it was supposed to be — it also became a demonstration of the exact concept it was talking about. This then reminded me of Beastmode, A Social Experiment (2018) and how documentaries have this tendency to evolve over time together with its subjects and creators. Unlike movies with a relatively set start, middle, and end, documentaries are more prone to change because it tackles real-life stories that can develop any other way during its production. For the case of Beastmode, the political climate changed over time, and the writers adapted to that change and found a way to intertwine the storyline of the documentary’s original stars Baron Geisler and Kiko Matos with the Duterte administration. Upon doing more research about Welles’ documentary, I found out that Irving took on a bigger role in the documentary than what was initially intended. It was only during production when people found out that Clifford Irving’s biography of Howard Hughes was forged. This simply added even more layers to the narrative. Naturally, Welles didn’t want to stop there, so he decided to add another layer of his own by adding in a fake story at the latter part of the movie.

This whole experience of watching F for Fake simply made me fall in love with the documentary format again. I lost touch with it recently due to lack of time, but I’m glad to have rediscovered that love I thought I already lost. Documentaries are something I’ve always wanted to make, and seeing this movie has done nothing but push me to pursue this kind of career in the future. Though not completely nonfictional, there’s still something very special about the rawness of documentaries and its subjects. A movie that stimulates the minds of audiences while watching it and creators while making it will always be a great one, and this was nothing short of that.