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français : Pour parler, encore et encore, d’Orson Welles

Speaking, Again and Again, of Orson Welles

Wednesday 20 February 2008 by Guy Braucourt

Translated from French by David Buchanan

Firstly of course, because we must never lose sight of our monuments (I mean great men, not the stones commemorating fatalities and wars!); we must continually visit and revisit them, learning from them, as from History. And secondly because the place this giant occupies in cinema from the 1940s to the 1980s isn’t, won’t be and can never be supplanted by someone working within today’s production system. A system which leaves no place, let alone free rein for such a wildly ambitious, and moreover pretty anarchistic, breed of creator… Luckily there are still a few adventurers out there, a bit crazy but nonetheless in full control; most often producers of their own films, something Welles couldn’t/wouldn’t ever do: I’m thinking, in no particular order, of Eastwood, Tarantino, Kitano, and Moretti among others - but there aren’t many!

And why revisit this genius on the subject of a rare, little-known film, hardly ever seen on television? A film of which I’m unaware if there’s even a DVD edition (happy hunting, DVD-philes!), and which, just to simplify things, appears here and there under different titles: ‘F for Fake’, ‘Nothing But the Truth’, and ‘Vérités et Mensonges’ for its French release… Apart from the fact that it’s quite revealing about Orson, the man, and Welles, the filmmaker (this “character in search of himself” that one of his biographers evokes) this 1973/74 film, an exercise in “verités et mensonges”, documentary and fiction, today seems incredibly up-to-date. It has a modernity of concept, writing and ambiguity which matches today’s tastes: are the shots actually happening, or reconstructions (see also, for better and worse, our television screens) ? Is it real, or imaginary (even if this had already been done within the confines of the theatre, in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, Corneille’s ‘L’Illusion Comique’ and the work of Pirandello) ? These variations and mixes of genre are pigeonholed as docu-reality, docu-fiction, documentary fiction. If I may, in homage to Orson Welles, a real-life magician and illusionist, I would prefer to dub this hybrid that he helped pioneer : “docu-mendacious”. This carries no negative connotation; for what else is this meditation on fallacy, illusion and lies known as ‘F For Fake’ than a gentle, ironic (slightly cynical) look at the very essence of cinema? Why do you think we love cinema so much – this sublime art of trickery!


Guy Braucourt

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