F for Face Value

Written by Emerson Enriquez 170819

Throughout the duration of this class, I’ve gotten to expand my taste when it comes to any work of cinema. Having seen such a wide array of films, my appreciation for different genres and means of storytelling has grown. Needles to say, the selection I’ve been to exposed to in this elective was nothing similar to the slapstick comedies and mainstream rom-coms I’m used to. We’ve become accustomed to plot twist after plot twist, one grotesque fictional element following the next. Getting to view a documentary-drama such as “F for Fake” then came as some sort of surprise at first since one could assume that the events depicted would all be based on fact, with nothing about them “made up”. In short, it’s expected that a documentary should have no fake elements; yet in some almost “meta” way, that was the whole point of Welles’ work.

From the get-go, Orson Welles, the film’s narrator and director, depicts himself as an illusionist performing tricks in front of a kid. He narrates the happenings in the life of art forger extraordinaire Elmyr de Hory, whose mimeographs go on to be sold as if they were the original pieces. Clifford Irving serves as de Hory’s critic, yet he himself is convicted of some forgery as the biography he wrote about de Hory turned out to be a Howard Hughes rehash. Welles touches on the fact that the art dealers and buyers of de Hory’s works of deceit are also “fakers” to an extent; continuing to purchase the counterfeit works despite their awareness about it shows how the genuineness of a piece can be so easily pushed aside. The entire scandal about the forgeries touched on the importance of authentication (or perhaps, the lack thereof ) when it comes to artistic works.

“The pompous word for ‘lie’ is ‘art'”

The overall beauty and “looked-at-ness” of art is described to be an arbitrary thing. Welles expounds that most of the art dealers involved in promoting de Hory’s counterfeits were more concerned with how real the piece looks, rather than how real the piece actually is. This comes from their main goal which is to sell the art, and profit. Face value is the most vital, and seemingly, the only factor looked for in the pieces. Demand for artworks toppled appreciation for the authenticity of these. The film coins that the forgery de Hory practices is, in itself, is actually an artwork about the art piece he’s mimicking.

Fakeness comes either as “good” or “bad” depending on it’s quality and how believable it is. It’s an illusion. The point of illusions, of course, is to enchant a target into believing that something that isn’t there, is actually present. In the case of the documentary, it was spotlighted on the originality of Picasso’s and Matisse’s. Although, and quite unexpectedly for me, another slightly profound layer of dimension was added to Welles’ narration, this time in terms of the structure of the docu-drama itself. At the end where the whole story of Kodar, her grandfather and Picasso was demonstrated, the narrator of the whole 88-minutes admitted to lying to or deceiving the audience. At the beginning, he promised that all that will be shared for the coming hour will all be true, yet perhaps as a viewer, time wasn’t really thought about that intently that it came as a dumbfounding moment when Welles revealed that he’d been bluffing for the last 18 minutes or so about Kodar. I never would’ve expected a “plot twist” of sorts to occur in a documentary. The realness of the whole film itself then came up fore questioning as well, similarly to the decoys de Hory paints.

What the fake paintings in the film and the film itself had in common was that they were looked at with face value. Perhaps for the trained artists and viewer alike, it would’ve been possible to see through the bluffs present in both works. While the film was still a documentary, and therefore, still partially factual, it still comes off as “fictional” in some aspects. Both of the two are forms of art still. Art, as described by Welles, is a lie that makes us, or rather, directs us to see the truth. When one focuses on viewing something solely on face value, that person is hindering him or herself from grabbing the essence and authenticity of that thing. Nowadays, how important or recognized is the authenticity of certain things, “art” or not? The way I see it, things will always come off as “real” as they can when we, the viewer, simply succumbs to accepting it as such. For any one person, any “real thing” can be an illusion, and vice versa.