DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
While I’ve already mentioned the AFI’s current Welles retrospective in this space, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to highlight what is possibly my favorite film by the director, one that is essential viewing for anyone interested in how filmmakers get us to believe the unbelievable.
To borrow a favorite metaphor from Welles, film is not unlike magic, and a filmmaker is just an illusionist working with a different set of tools. Both are inherently manipulative mediums, and the task of both the filmmaker and the magician is to manipulate an audience into believing something they know going in isn’t real. Movies that aspire to create convincing illusions but then can’t be bothered to effectively mask their manipulations are akin to a magician telling the audience to close its eyes while he makes a dove disappear. Yet too often we accept lazy, mediocre movies that have the gall to tell us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Maybe using the masterpiece of mental coercion that is F for Fake as a yardstick is expecting too much, but I don’t really think so.
The film, part documentary, part essay, part calculated sham, is, at its core, essentially all about film’s manipulative nature. Welles buries his thesis within a movie that is ostensibly fact-based, about renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory, phony Howard Hughes biographer Clifford Irving, and a series of drawings by Picasso. How he brings this around to the artful lying of the storyteller/filmmaker would be giving away too much of the dazzling structure here, but where Welles differs from a magician is that he reveals his manipulations (some of them anyway), and demonstrates exactly how he accomplishes them. His bending of truth with clever editing and calculated misdirection is done so gracefully, so subtly, that it becomes immediately apparent that it’s really not asking for too much to want it done well (even if not as well) elsewhere. F for Fake is nothing less than a sly blueprint on how to make a convincing sham; if only more filmmakers took the time to try to be half the genius-charlatan that Welles was.
