paul on spout.com

-  John Cassavetes

I watched Marcus Wolland in his play, The Magnificent Welles (2002, available on DVD).  Wolland wrote and stars as Orson Welles in this one-man play.  Set in a hotel room in Rio De Janeiro, Welles carries on a conversation with the audience in between phone calls from RKO Studios on the night his film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is taken from him.  Historically, Welles believed Ambersons to be his masterwork. While Welles was shooting another film in South America, RKO Studios cut 44 minutes from Ambersons, reshot the ending, and burned the cut negatives so that Welles could never show the film the way he wanted.

It's an insightful play that pulls no punches in revealing Welles and all of his shortcomings. It brings to life the real tragedy of a man and the work that has been lost.  But it is not the final word on this artist.

Some months ago I saw Welles' final completed film, F for Fake (1974, available on DVD from Criterion).

There have been mixed reviews on F for Fake.  Some call it dated, trivial, and forced.  A sign of Welles' degeneration from wunderkind to martyr.  True, Fake was made in the 70's and of course has that feel.  He maintains his predisposition for larger than life characterization (something that had lost its luster in the heyday of Pacino and De Niro), but that's who the man was; a larger than life character.  What I found to be most rewarding about Fake was exactly that Welles is a larger than life character, brimming with vitality, and not the dejected Van Gogh of filmmaking persona that has been imposed on him.

With Fake, Welles is infusing life into the work of his hands by any means necessary.  Although he had every right to be fatalistic about his work and the abuse it suffered, he refused to "preclude laughter, enjoyment and hope," if for nobody else than himself while he made it.  That is what makes the film so inspiring.  It's a film made by a man who had every reason to abandon filmmaking, but for the pleasure that making film brought to him.  It's also brilliant.

Welles took another filmmaker's documentary, cut it up, added some footage from an abandoned doc he himself had been working on, and shot some new stuff.  Then he cut and cut and cut.  As a friend of mine put it, "It just proves that a great film can be made anywhere with anything."

F for Fake opens with an elusive and quick cut sequence of Orson Welles' donning a black cape and a mischievous smile.  He is performing snappy slide-of-hand tricks for a little boy, making a key disappear then reappear as some coins, show up again in the kid's pocket, only to transform back into coins falling from the boy's nose. These tricks continue for sometime.  Somehow, in a way that is difficult to describe, the next 2 hours is Welles performing that same trick using film. The editing is the magician's hands and the story is the key disappearing and reappearing as a coin then disappearing again and showing up as a key that the audience pulls out of their pocket in amazement and asks, "How did he get this in there?"

If Fake achieves one thing, it is the constant upheaval of the audience's perception.  From moment to moment what we consider to be fact becomes fiction, what we consider to be art becomes crap, whom we consider to be experts become deceivers.  I think of it as the lecture of what Welles has learned in his life told at break-neck speed.  I've never had an experience with a film to compare it to.

F for Fake is Welles' last completed film.  It's so fast and fresh it feels like it's made by a 25 year old prodigy. Of course, Citizen Kane was made by a 25 year old prodigy, but feels like the work of a mature, calculating director.  Maybe that's the mark of true genius: They don't let their gift ripen on the vine, but keep picking it and letting it grow back new and fresh each time because they stay confident that their life has meaning.