Soliloquy of Welles in F for Fake

F for Fake (Vérités et mensonges) (1973) is a film-essay or documentary film mostly famous for its film editing, directed and written by Orson Welles, who claims in the beginning of the film that this is a movie about trickery, fraud and lies. Welles is the storyteller, narrator figure in the story, which primarily deals with the art forger Elmyr de Hory and his fake autobiography written by hoax-biographer Clifford Irving.

The film problematizes the art’s value in a humorous and in the specific way of Orson Welles. Welles claims that stories of all movies are some kind of lies and he promises that there will not be a lie for sixty minutes. However the film is not sixty minutes apart from the introduction part, it is eighty-nine minutes; in the end, Welles plays his tricks too by telling a fraud story about Picasso to question the value of art.

Playfulness is adapted into the film in a strict tone as Welles plays with the ideas and awkward situations about the funny businesses. It can be seen that in the introduction part, while he makes some tricks to children like turning coins to keys, he calls himself as a charlatan, nothing more and there are also hoaxes in the film deliberately used by Welles in order to contribute to this playful attitude. Filming process and Orson Welles narrating in his film editing room can be seen throughout the film. Therefore there is a self-conscious film making process which makes the film self-reflexive and postmodern in its all senses.

Through the end of the film, Welles maybe gives his ideas about the art issue through an artistic performative soliloquy giving the example of Chartres Cathedral. He suggests that the even if it is one of the most beautiful and complex structures of western civilizations, cathedral does not have a signature on it and as it was built a millennium ago, now it is unknown that who was its architect or engineer. Welles claims that it was built to left a trace about themselves, something to the following generations, even if it is a little thing. As he concludes, he finishes by saying that, fakes and treasures, frauds and masterpieces, everything will be demolished and everything will turn to dust. “Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much” he says.

There is a strict parallel with Welles’s ideas and the poem Ozymandias of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the poem, Shelley met a traveler from an antique land, Egypt, who tells him the inevitable fate of the great sculpture of the Pharaoh, as there are only its legs left. Sculpture’s head is in the sands and on the pedestal it says: My name is Ozymandias, Kings of Kings, look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. It is ironic that nothing left of him and it is mentioned that, even if time destroyed Ozymandias’s works, only its sculpture’s feet stays and its sculptor is unknown, even if the things of the king stays only because of him.