Abstract
Orson Welles’ experimental ‘essay film’, F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director’s life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles’ own ‘charlatanism’. Indeed, even Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema claims that the ubiquitous Wellesian ‘character’ – the forger, the faker, the double-dealer – culminates in F for Fake. But, along with Welles’ other late-life essay films, it also offers a pragmatic strategy for theorizing the sites of cinematic production on the basis of their constituent contingencies. For Welles the independent filmmaker, these uncertainties unfailingly manifested in financial, technological, and geographical disasters – problems that, I argue, he harnessed to cultivate a unique cinematic ‘style’. The resulting ‘Wellesian continuum’ illuminates the conspiracy of perception, thoughts, and accident in the production of cinematic space. Offering ‘how to’ guide on forging series from the contingencies of production, Welles’ meditation on fakery models the creation of such sites and lays out the conceptual architecture for theorizing their cinematic production. Welles’ resulting ontology of cinematic seriality describes technical problematics – ‘anti-techniques’ – that give rise to speculative geographies.
Mais pour mon style, pour ma vision du cinéma, la montage n’est pas un aspect, c’est la aspect.
I
‘For my next experiment, ladies and gentlemen, I would appreciate a loan of any small personal object from your pocket – a key or a box of matches . . .’ Dressed in a magician’s black cape and top hat, Orson Welles performs magic tricks for a group of children and a small camera crew assembled beneath the iron arches of a Parisian train station. A boy retrieves a pocketed key; deposited in Welles’ nimble hands, it becomes a coin. It is the early 1970s and audiences have learned to anticipate this sort of ‘legerdemain, hanky-panky, and side-arm snookery’ from the aging showman. 2 As though channeling their familiarity, a woman leans from a passenger-car window and chides him smilingly: ‘Up to your old tricks, I see.’
‘Why not?’ He replies, ‘I’m a charlatan’.
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So begins F for Fake (1973). The last major work that Welles will complete, it initiates a new direction in the experimental films that will occupy his final years. Three decades earlier, Citizen Kane’s ‘pan-focus’ innovations revolutionized American cinema’s visual language, 4 but Welles’ late work, awash in personal reflection and mesmerized by contingency, introduces something ‘far more radical’. 5 ‘When I finished F for Fake’, he would later reflect, ‘I thought I had discovered a new kind of movie . . . it’s a form, in other words, the essay, the personal essay, as opposed to the documentary’. 6 Although it would quickly grow into a wild ‘anti-genre’, 7 Welles’ ‘essay film’ had modest beginnings as a simple television biographical documentary about another charlatan: Elmyr de Hory. One of the 20th century’s most celebrated art forgers, Elmyr’s fakes hung in several of the world’s most prestigious art collections. 8 Or so it was claimed in Fake! the biography by Clifford Irving. An unsuccessful fiction writer and the forger’s neighbor on the island of Ibiza, Irving seemed to Welles to be an ideal ‘expert commentator’ for his television documentary. But ‘just as Orson was embarking on the project, an amazing thing happened that would ultimately change the shape of the film: Irving was exposed as a faker himself’. 9 Having forged an ‘as-told-to’ autobiography of the reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, Irving sold the manuscript to publisher McGraw-Hill for $7,500,000. Following the story from the editing rooms at Antégor, a Parisian post-production studio, it dawned upon Welles that Irving, ‘the author of Fake!, a book about a faker, was himself a faker and the author of a fake-to-end-all-fakes that he must have been cooking up when we were filming him’. 10 Rather than capsizing the project, the Irving revelations offered layers of coincidence that complicated his role as biographer-commentator and drew Welles’ own biography into the film’s orbit.
Introduced to Vaudevillian theatrical traditions at an early age, Welles would author his own global scandal – the infamous War of the Worlds radio hoax – when he was only 23. Thereafter, he cultivated the public image of ‘a self-styled con-man . . . whose entire career was marked by a preoccupation with illusionism, magic, and swindles’, 11 and whose ‘oeuvre . . . had more designs on us than we could ever have on it’. 12 That fiction forced itself into reality in 1971, just 1 year prior to Irving’s scandal, when film critic Pauline Kael published a two-part New Yorker article that sought to extensively refute Welles’ celebrated authorship of the Citizen Kane screenplay. 13 However flawed, her argument took its toll upon Welles’ reputation as a legendary Wunderkind, a wound to which the director’s self-proclaimed charlatanism seems an allusion. 14 With the Kael episode still stinging, Irving’s 1972 hoax inspired Welles to undertake a radical revision of his work-in-progress devoted to Elmyr: ‘we had to stop these Moviolas, use them as time machines, then roll back and come in again to the days when Clifford Irving, as far as any of us knew, was just a researcher into someone else’s fakery’. 15 What had been a small side project grew rapidly into a frenetic, feature-length meditation on ‘fraud, trickery, [and] lies’. 16
The final cut of F for Fake overflows with expressions of wonder at the works of two talented fakers – Elmyr and Irving – whose gifts were overshadowed by controversy and undermined by an uneven political economy of authenticity and expertise. Beyond his forger’s art, ‘Welles identified deeply with Elmyr’s precarious financial state [and] with his ingenious ways of putting off the inevitable disaster’. 17 F for Fake reflects this, blending Elmyr’s and Irving’s fakeries, accidents, and disasters into a medium of coincidence through which Welles charts the coordinates of his own spectacular and fraught history as a filmmaker. No stranger to telling tales about himself, he folds in familiar reflections upon his own early career of smattering, fakery, and hoaxing. Placed in proximity to Elmyr and Irving, these grow even more suspect. In a maneuver that will become a driving theme and ‘anti-technique’ of the subsequent essay films, Filming Othello (1978) and the never completed Filming The Trial, Welles brackets the privileging of aesthetic ‘vision’ to instead undertake production ‘problematically’. 18 While their evocative titles would seem to resonate with the auteurist ideology of the 1960s’ French New Wave and the 1970s’ burgeoning New American Cinema, Welles’ late-life experiments will move against the celebrations of the ‘agency’ of the director-author to emphasize broader problems of production and working life. Indeed, his essay films take an almost Peircean pragmatic view on the many pitfalls of filmmaking and the uphill battles of the independent filmmaker. Offered as testaments to what he calls the ‘divine accidents of moviemaking’, 19 they affirm contingency, chance events, and even catastrophe as the central components of cinematic production. They are, in effect, meta-commentaries on cinematic fakery.
Filmmakers employ the technical apparatuses of cinema (Welles’ beloved Moviola, for example) to replace production contingencies with ‘series’ of aesthetic objects (a scene, a sequence, a film). Such techniques become central characters in F for Fake, where the art of forgery engages in a visual dance with Welles’ technical knowledge at the editing table. Techniques in forgery can be conditioned not only by the aesthetic tendencies of the forger, such as telltale stylistic habits that become legible across multiple forged works, but by the material limits of a chosen media. In Welles’ own technical negotiations of his production’s contingencies, this often meant extracting constitutive forces from biography and geography. His acting gigs generated revenue to fund independent projects but regularly took him to a variety of locales around the world, introducing large gaps between shooting stints on his own work. The effects of this restless, ambulatory ‘globetrotting’ 20 are inscribed in his completed films. For example, Othello, which took four erratic years to complete, is filled with location shots and B-Roll opportunistically taken during downtime at other acting gigs. There, the phenomenon that the Soviet School calls ‘creative geography’ 21 – the sense of continuity in filmic space arising through shots of visually related locales – threatens to fracture as the erratic and insistent situatedness of everyday working life becomes a condition for much stranger cinematic spaces. The genius of Welles’ essay films is that they recognize this complex spatiality and invent a cinematic language to articulate it.
This article examines the ‘speculative geographies’ arising from the contingency and situatedness at the heart of Welles’ essay films. Despite critics’ and Welles’ own dogged attention to biography, his spatial invention cuts something of a desubjectivized path through this work, forcing a reconsideration of his nevertheless prominent position within it. I suggest that such a reconsideration must begin with F for Fake’s exploration of the techniques of forgery. To excavate this, I offer a study of three such techniques – the line, blocks of media, and serial expertise – in Elmyr’s work. I then lay out three related ‘anti-techniques’ – divine accidents, musicality, and amateurism – that Welles develops in the essay films. While these techniques and anti-techniques do not map cleanly onto one another, they occupy similar neighborhoods: each is a speculative tool for negotiating or lassoing contingencies. Disasters become, in Welles’s hands, the constituent stuff of aesthetic production. If this continues to raise important questions about geography and biography, it does so by revitalizing discourses on the accident in cinema. One of cinema’s great schlemazels, Welles raises contingency – or ‘tychism’, to borrow Peirce’s term 22 – to the level of ontology. Ultimately, his anti-techniques engage contingencies as key components in the cinematic production of speculative geographies. These spaces offer percepts that force thought open to dynamic sites rather than enclosing it within creative geography’s ‘worlds’.
II
In 1920, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted an ‘experiment’ that ‘demonstrated the incredible potency of montage, which actually appeared so powerful that it was able to alter the very essence of the material’.
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It consisted of a film sequence composed of four cuts, two actors (Khokhlova and Obolensky), one setting, and several shooting locales – all of which crystallized the peculiar, creative force of cinematic space: Khokhlova is walking along Petrov Street in Moscow near the ‘Mostorg’ store. Obolensky is walking along the embankment of the Moscow River – at a distance of about two miles away. They see each other, smile, and begin to walk toward one another. Their meeting is filmed at the Boulevard Prechistensk. This boulevard is in an entirely different part of the city. They clasp hands, with Gogol’s monument as a background, and look – at the White House! – for at this point, we cut in a segment from an American film, The White House in Washington. In the next shot they are once again on the Boulevard Prechistensk. Deciding to go farther, they leave and climb up the enormous staircase of The Cathedral of Christ the Savior. We film them, edit them, and the result is that they are seen walking up the steps of the White House.
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Kuleshov’s famous experiment is a study in spatial ontology. Its shots – or ‘bricks’, as he calls them – express movement by setting ‘one brick after another’, arranging a series of situated connections that effectuate the gradual emergence of a ‘filmic space’. 25 The invention of what Kuleshov calls ‘creative geography’, or ‘artificial landscape’, is heralded by a geopolitical prank. Employing the cinematic power to forge continuous spatiality, he weaves various Moscow locales with a borrowed shot of Washington D.C.’s White House. 26 ‘By the process of junction of pieces of celluloid’, Pudovkin explains, ‘appear[s] a new filmic space without existence in reality’. 27
Not only did Soviet montage establish creative geography as a new dimension of cinematic production and theory, it constituted a locus for geographical interventions in film studies. 28 Reinforcing this, a range of reality/representation debates characterized film criticism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and continue to resurface in geographic scholarship today. Of this work, some of the most fascinating has extended a line between the Soviet and Frankfurt Schools to focus on the ways that cinematic space is conditioned by the medium’s technological limitations. For example, Natter, following on from Bordwell and Thompson, assesses the technical limits of cinematic space with respect to the famous ‘180 degree line’ for camera shots, crossing which, viewers rapidly become disoriented. 29 Cresswell and Dixon’s important work of the early 2000s, by comparison, spoke back to the Soviet School, shepherding in numerous treatments of mobility that challenged conventional cinematic treatments of space and time. 30
More recently, Ivakev has translated elements from Peirce’s philosophy into a phemomenology of cinematic environments. If he borrows much of the Peircean schematics from Deleuze’s cinema books, Ivakev steers the latter’s increasingly desubjectivized treatment back toward a phenomenological subject who, once again, constitutes the intersectional point between reality and representation, objects and subjects. This treatment reintroduces idealist synthetic coordinates: an ‘outside’ viewer experiences a filmic ‘world’ by synthesizing its images. For Ivakev, cinematic events are ‘moments of experience. In the specific experience of watching a film, we, its viewers, are drawn into the world of that film’. 31 Nearly a century later, the ghost of Pudovkin still whispers, ‘The lens of the camera is the eye of the spectator’. 32
Soviet montage theory also contributes the germinal theoretical language and the rudimentary structural coordinates for Deleuze’s Cinema books. However, by the time he turns his attention to F for Fake in the second volume, the spaces of montage have given way to subjective cinema’s crystallized time images and ‘whatever spaces’. What was an emergent continuity for Kuleshov becomes, with Welles, a ‘quick succession of ill-fitting parts’. 33 Yet, if this recognizes a shift away from formal cinematic spatiality, Deleuze nevertheless remains sensitive to the the Soviet school’s constituent seriality. In this regard, his analysis of Welles’ cinema is an extension of the ‘fragmented I’ 34 discussions that characterized the serialized masks, displacements, and disguises in his philosophical work of the 1960s. Upon this shattered scene, Deleuze contends, Welles ‘imposes one single character – the forger. But the forger exists only in a series of forgers who are his metamorphoses, because the power itself exists only in the form of a series of powers that are its exponents’. 35 Deleuze’s treatment moves against the current of popular critical responses, which tended to make emphatic biographical connections between Welles and his characters. 36 ‘Because Welles has a strong personality’, Deleuze responds, ‘we forget that his constant theme, precisely as a function of this personality, is to be a person no longer’. 37 This serialized faker – who is not merely a fake artist, but a fake subject! – ‘culminates with F for Fake’, the film that Deleuze claims serves as a ‘manifesto for Welles’ entire body of work’. 38
It is difficult to argue with this statement. After all, Welles is said to have once remarked, ‘I like people to talk to me, but I hate it when they talk to “Orson Welles”’. 39 Apocryphal or not, this schismatic formula echoes throughout F for Fake. Irving appears on screen as a commentator on a forger while secretly forging Hughes’ autobiography. Welles introduces Elmyr by turning his camera on the art dealer-turned-documentarian, François Reichenbach, who recounts his many aliases: ‘He has about sixty times the same name . . . Hory, Meury, Bory, Seury, Kury, Bury, Dury . . . All with ‘-ury’. Sixty names . . . Then sixty personalities, as much lies and as much real’. 40 Each series opens the door to a hall of mirrors, 41 making us reel in the shattering vertigo of the forgers’ contradictions. And yet no figure moves far beyond the irresolvable ambiguity of this fragmented starting point. From the perspective of character analysis, the film resolves itself not so much as a character study as a befuddlement over Elmyr and Irving; the characters offer a source of fascination for Welles, but little else. Indeed, with the notable exception of Welles himself, the only character who undergoes development in F for Fake is Howard Hughes: the subject of whispers and rumors, traces on the Vegas landscape, stock footage, mysterious sandwiches, artists’ renditions, and fabrications from a faked autobiography – who never makes an appearance in the film. If Deleuze correctly observes that F for Fake abolishes personhood (or, ‘the subject’), this is but one of many magical feats in a complicated, speculative cinematic process.
III
Welles repeatedly hints that Elmyr’s aliases serve a more important, more practical purpose: they keep him one step ahead of duped art collectors and museum curators. It is here that ‘character’, taken as a stable, Kantian ‘I’, gives way beneath deviously pragmatic meditations on the technical nuances and everyday concerns of forgery. Signaling this transition, Welles lets Reichenbach introduce Elmyr only to re-introduce him moments later. Mimicking Reichenbach’s style, he replaces the list of aliases with the names of artists whom Elmyr forges, ‘You name ’em, he paints ’em. He’ll do you a Dufy, a van Dongen, a Derain, a Braque, a Bonnard, a Vlaminck. Or would you like a nice Matisse?’ 42 Engaging the forger from the perspective of aesthetic technique rather than fakery, Welles dwells upon Elmyr’s insistent statements that he never duplicates or ‘fakes’ another artist’s work. ‘I made paintings in the style of a certain artist’, Elmyr cautions, ‘I never copied. The only fake things in my paintings was the signature’. 43 The shift in emphasis from imitation to style resituates forgery within the regime of the subtler, asubjective and asignifying techniques of painting. If the film stops short of bracketing the question of the forger’s character entirely, it does so to reframe him as an expert technician rather than a talented mimic. F for Fake reinvents forgery as a technique capable of discovering and rearticulating the visual tendencies that arise within a given period of an artist’s oeuvre.
Why this should interest Welles remains to be seen. But first, the modes and power of the forger’s technical knowledge demand a quick review concerning their articulation of three stylistic techniques: line, medium, and expertise.
Technique no. 1: the line
The most readily recognizable stylistic dimension in painting is an artist’s line. Keenly aware of this, Elmyr describes forgery’s affective problem in terms of an a-parallel evolution
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between the forger’s work and the peculiar stylistic contingencies he discovers by studying traces of artists’ hand movements in their linework: At the beginning – say, around 1948 – I used a very easy, flowing line for a Matisse drawing. Because he had, I thought, a very simple line. And then suddenly later on I realized that his hand was not as secure as mine. Obviously, when he stopped work to glance up at his model, his line stopped, too, with just that tiny little bit of uncertainty. Where I went very securely on, Matisse was hesitant, insecure. I had to correct that; I had to learn to hesitate also.
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Moving back and forth between the model and the canvas, Matisse’s eyes introduce hiccups – hesitancies – into the fluidity of his lines. But what are accidental stylistic tendencies for the artist become matters of practice and mastery – technical skills – for the forger.
If forging another’s style does not depend on the ability to reproduce the lines an artist has made, but cultivating the capacity to anticipate the hand movements an artist might make, then forging another’s line is an ‘anexact’ rather than mimetic practice. It means discerning how contingencies – line breaks and variations – come to constitute a consistency from canvas to canvas. This demands that Elmyr ‘study – very, very carefully – the man’s work’ and its differential qualities – bodily movements and gestures, applications of force. The subsequent forgery will not reproduce a known Matisse painting. Instead, it will repeat his style, allowing its specificities to appear as though they are the product of Matisse’s hand. And yet, for all this, the dimensions of the forger’s own ‘athleticism’ need not parallel those of the artist he forges. 46 Consider that, where Matisse’s line is a residual product of his hesitantly looking away from the canvas, Elmyr’s ‘hesitant’ line is something that is perfected by, to the contrary, an intensified focus on the canvas space. Two different styles of comportment render lines with repeating styles. The forger’s technical style, in other words, enrolls a mastery of multiple actualized lines by abducting a field of tendencies that are anchored to and habituated by the working body.
Technique no. 2: blocks of media
Style also arises through distributions of media and materials. Elmyr identifies a second technical dimension for forgery in zones where matter accumulates layer upon layer, composed ‘step by step’
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through ‘the brushwork and the building up of the color, the subtleties, . . . certain characteristics of brush strokes peculiar to every painter. For example, I noticed that Dufy created thickness through the addition of white’.
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If lines carve out spaces, the forger’s practice also observes ‘sets’ of spatial relations, percepts that build up as distributions of matter and pigment across a surface.
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Lines express movement by cutting across a surface; surfaces constitute themselves by accumulating materials. For the artist, the latter is a space for building. For the forger, the logic shifts from the subject of the work to its raw materials. For example, Elmyr and his dealers used ‘canvases that they picked up in the Flea Market’ which, to age the forgeries, they would apply a special restorer’s varnish which copyists often used to induce a surface that has a peculiar golden glow, sometimes called a ‘Rembrandt patina’. The varnish made the surface dry more quickly and produced a natural craquelure, the veined cracks that appear in oils with old age.
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Technique no. 3: serial expertise
Part of Welles’ refrain in F for Fake is that the expert’s ‘eye’, just like the forger’s, is not a transcendent faculty of a gifted subject, but rather a gradually learned anticipation of certain tendencies (such as Matisse’s halting lines) from work to work. Obviously, these do not pre-exist the series of works that constitute them, nor the viewer who anticipates them. Like Kuleshov’s bricks, the tendencies ‘are’ the situated relations existing between the pieces. Like Ivakev’s viewer, the ‘expert’ is ‘drawn into’ the world of this relation; synthesizing it, making it real. For the vain or unsuspecting expert – or, as Welles, Elmyr, or Irving might argue, due to the very nature of expertise – this serial immanence offers ample space for forgeries to ‘pass’ into authentic collections.
Irving, for example, tells of Pacitti, one popular expert auprès du tribunal, who authenticated so many of Elmyr’s Dufy watercolors that, eventually, he purportedly ‘refused to give his expertise to two genuine Dufy paintings. He became so used to seeing Elmyr’s “hand” that it was “right” for him, and the hand of poor dead Dufy looked suspect’. 51 It cannot be said that Pacitti was inconsistent. Indeed, his consistency reveals the power of the tendency, the seriality of style, to forge and reinforce linkages between perception and thought. 52 Here, a series of forgeries constitute the space of authenticity, building a continuum that grows step by step in the eye of the expert who authenticates them. These continuities take on lives of their own – Elmyr will say ‘they become real’ 53 – where they gain the power to supplant ‘authentic’ series of works. Yet, this shift is not a matter of an ontological breakdown between reality and representation. Rather, it is the work of intersecting lines of production and seriality.
Equally relevant in this regard are the episodes where Elmyr failed to pass off a set of forgeries. Keats recounts stories of unwitting dealers who, when presented with several Elmyr forgeries in the styles of multiple artists, were capable of discerning a certain ‘family resemblance’ that emerged across the series:
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Presenting himself as Louis Raynal, Elmyr showed the dealer [Frank Perls] a section of approximately ten drawings attributed to Mattise, Modigliani, Picasso, and Renoir. Perls was impressed by the quality of the Picassos and especially the Renoirs, yet he was taken aback when he looked at a Modigliani portrait of the painter Chaim Soutine, which uncannily reminded him of the Renoir drawings he’d just seen. Reexamining the whole stack, he recognized that all had brilliant draftsmanship but that the brilliance was always alike. He surmised they’d all been made by the same hand . . .
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Against the discontinuities that should be visible between different artists, Elmyr’s own stylistic tendencies creep across and inhabit his forgeries. The expert even invents a concept for the topological coordinates in this space of ‘family resemblance’ that he discovers: brilliant, but always in the same way. Taken together, the serial force of the forgeries present tendencies that should not be there – some unlocalizable consistency that is undeniably, unnamably Elmyr. This intuition is echoed in the comments of Sotheby’s Michael Strauss, who also turned away several Elmyr forgeries on the grounds that ‘“I didn’t like them,”. . . which is a dealer’s prudent way of intimating that the work is wrongly attributed or an outright fake’. 56 Shifting language between expert declarations of legitimacy and vague statements of affect or taste – I didn’t like them, he says – Strauss may soften the expression of his judgment, but either statement is equally ontological with regard to the series they identify.
IV
Welles was fascinated by the ambiguities inherent in both the forger’s athletic ability to repeat spatial and aesthetic styles and the expert’s anticipatory gamble that creates, affirms, or rejects authenticity from larger sets of potentially contingent and nonrelated elements. That each was, at its heart, a technical problem clearly prompted him to reflect upon his own practices as a filmmaker. (Known to travel with a ‘60 mm editing table that went all over the world’, 57 Welles was in many ways a technician first.) From there, a few lucky accidents, such as Irving’s hoax, led him to discover the critical logics that would form the foundation for the essay films.
Each, for example, offers retrospective assessments of his past productions, placing an emphasis on the contingent and the uncertain: F for Fake concerns War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, while Filming Othello and the incomplete Filming The Trial have eponymous foci. Thus, while biography helps to frame the work, like the above discussion of Elmyr, this mediates a richer technical – or rather, an anti-technical – problematic. For when Welles reflects back on his own work, he affirms the accidents of his career, rejects the culture of auteurism, and places contingency in the driver’s seat. Thus, in F for Fake, he deflates the myth of his early successes to merge his own biography with a ‘story line rotten with coincidence’: 58 the twisted tale of Elmyr and Irving. Like a forgery, Welles’ speculative exercise makes his own history increasingly resemble theirs until the film eventually becomes something of a forgery itself. Filming Othello shifts speculation to the contingencies inherent in film production. There, Welles contextualizes Othello’s ‘cinematic style and substance’ as matters of ‘what was thematic, what was planned, and what was accidental’. 59 These coordinates immediately invoke the film’s site specificities: its many random locations, the instability of its funders, the trajectories and demands of Welles’ working life, and so on. While clearly taking cues from the Soviet School (or stumbling upon the techniques himself), Welles’ later work moves counter to the synthetic vision and technical utilitarianism of creative geographies. Concentrating on contingencies, the materials of the production, and not-knowing, the essay films borrow strategies from the forger’s toolkit to create a technical language for cinematic spaces – speculative geographies – that are fueled by the germinal force of accidents. In Welles’ hands, forgers’ techniques become anti-techniques that the filmmaker must negotiate: divine accidents, musicality, and amateurism.
Anti-technique no. 1: divine accidents (tychism)
Othello’s 4 years of on-and-off production were so riddled with disasters that what unfolded in front of the camera, ‘whenever there was money enough, . . . was pure improvisation’.
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Originally planned to be shot in the south of France at Nice’s Victorine studios, ‘Time and chance and many, many a vicissitude would take us over half of Italy to England for the mixing of the sound, to Africa, especially to Africa and specifically to Morocco’.
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It was a production that seemed doomed from the start. Welles explains, an Italian producer, dreaming of Verdi’s Otello and neglecting to mention that he was about to go into bankruptcy, stranded our whole company in a small town off the coast of Africa. With a little money of my own – all I had – and absolutely no costumes whatsoever, we improvised our way for a while and had to stop for a while. And I had to go to work as an actor in other films to earn money enough to continue with my own. And that went on and on and repeated itself several times. And it meant that Othello was made, so to speak, on the installment plan. This and other circumstances did impose a method and a style of shooting which was contrary to what had been carefully planned.
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Othello’s notorious crises set the tone for most of Welles’ post-Hollywood productions. His completion of The Deep – which had been almost entirely shot (1967–1969) and edited – was rendered impossible by the 1973 death of star Lawrence Harvey. 63 Throughout 1976, The Other Side of the Wind had a revolving door of backers/producers. These included an embezzler who ran off with US$250,000 of production money, and Mehdi Mouscheri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, who fell into a rights dispute with Welles, a situation that grew much more complicated when the Iranian Revolution erupted in 1979. Added to these struggles were the ‘process-oriented methods that permitted at least four Welles features and a number of short works to be left unfinished’. 64 Increasingly, when asked about his four-decade-long, unfinished production of Don Quixote, Welles would propose changing its title to ‘When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?’ 65 And of course, each crisis in its own way fueled rumors that Welles was a has-been and a fraud.
Yet such events were also crucial for the evolution of his cinematic anti-techniques. Concerning Othello, he explains, ‘circumstance itself had a lot to do with the determination of our style’. 66 For example, the murder of Roderigo takes place in a Turkish bath. Yet no such setting appears in Shakespeare’s play. The introduction of the new space is a product of circumstance – not only of the shooting locale but also the conditions of the production. Stranded in Morocco with a bankrupt production and no costumes, Welles and his crew contrived and shot the bath scene at a local fish market, borrowing incense from a local cathedral to make steam. When the funding impasse failed to resolve itself, Welles hired local clothiers to build cheap costumes and constructed armor out of sardine cans. ‘The banners were homemade, too’, he explains. ‘Everything was homemade’. 67 Similarly, while shooting Chimes at Midnight, ‘budgetary constraints . . . led the production to seek out useable secondhand garments, starting with the remnants of the recent big budget production of El Cid, directed by Anthony Mann and shot in Madrid’. 68
Later, recalling his localized solutions to emergent problems – his successful fakeries – the essay films build a novel theory of cinematic production from ill-fitting pieces. Endless negotiations with a universe of accidents become the model, rather than the exception, for a metaphysics of cinema: if you have a master plan for what you’re going to do – exactly where the camera’s going to be, exactly what the scene is supposed to state – if you are locked into that, you are depriving yourself of the divine accidents of moviemaking. Because everywhere there are beautiful accidents: the actors say something in a different way than you ever dream it could be said. She looks differently, there’s a smell in the air, there’s a look that changes the whole resonance of what you expected. Then, there are the true accidents, and my definition of a film director is the man who presides over accidents, but doesn’t make them.
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These ‘divine accidents’ of cinematic production seem to echo the famous dice roll by which ‘Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation’:
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O heaven over me, pure and high! That is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players.
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If Welles, too, raises ‘true accidents’ to a generative position in cinema, then what does it mean for him to ‘preside’ over, rather than ‘make’ or ‘abolish’, such accidents? Quite simply, it means that he becomes a host to the differential.
Peirce’s variation on Nietzsche’s divine accidents, ‘tychism’ – ‘the doctrine that absolute chance is a factor in the universe’
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– offers a possible clarification: A tychistic event along the general continuum always represents a breaking up, in some sense, of the old continuum. It is never simply the continuation or repetition of the general conditions of the continuum, but is a discontinuity . . . The interaction of continuity, tychism, and the general tendency of events to take habit, explains the present diversity of law in nature – even at the level of consciousness.
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Embracing tychism’s unpredictable discontinuities under the moniker of ‘divine accidents’, Welles works as though at sea: changing direction as contingencies emerge, foraging in already-constructed sets and ‘scaveng[ing] cast-offs’, populating real, disparate locations with actors in sardine can armor.
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Counter to the Soviet model that forges continuities, Welles, host to the differential, negotiates breaks in continuity: [A] series of sudden alterations and violent retreats, [where] all sober planning had to be scuttled and the making of the film – whenever there was money enough to continue – was pure improvisation . . . And the jigsaw pieces were separated not just by plane trips, but by breaks in time. Nothing was in continuity . . . there was no way for the jigsaw picture to be put together except in my mind. Over a span sometimes of months I had to hold each detail in my memory – not just from sequence to sequence, but from cut to cut. And I had no cutter. I had a whole series of cameramen because of the delays. While I went searching for money or took on jobs to earn it, the cameramen themselves found work. So I’d be picking up in the middle of a scene or even a sentence with a new cameraman who’d seen nothing of what I’d done before . . . Well, of course, all that was bound to affect the shape and form and stylistic substance of the film itself.
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V
Anti-technique no. 2: musicality (synechism)
Long before he had reason to celebrate divine accidents, Welles had declared that films are ‘made in the editing room’.
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For Mr. Arkadin (1955), he reportedly ‘spent four months editing, averaging . . . two minutes of finished film per week. He was barred from the cutting after failing to meet [Louis] Dolivet’s Christmas 1954 deadline’
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and the film was eventually taken away from him. Little surprise then, that in Filming Othello, ‘it is the editing machine that Welles chooses to introduce, even before he talks about Othello or Shakespeare: “Here films are salvaged, saved sometimes from disaster, or savaged out of existence”’.
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Obviously, as a host to divine accidents, ‘careful editing of his footage was required to smooth over gaps, hide budgetary constraints and make sense of material shot over the course of many years in innumerable locations’.
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But more than a simple device for abolishing contingencies, the editing table was an instrument for orchestrating them. Welles explains, Carlisle said that almost everything examined deeply enough will turn out to be musical. Of course this is profoundly true of motion pictures. The pictures have movement, movies move, and then there’s the movement from one picture to another. There’s a rhythmic structuring to that, there’s counterpoint, harmony, and dissonance. A film is never right until it’s right musically. And this Movieola, this filmmaker’s tool, is a kind of musical instrument. It’s here that other film instruments are tuned and finally orchestrated. So if you find me winding up our conversation here, you understand that as a filmmaker I’m speaking to you from my home.
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If Welles’ encounter with divine accidents was tychistic, the musicality produced at the Movieola is synechistic. The editor forges continuity from disparate, tychistic materials. Recall that serial experts’ (cf. Technique no. 3) claims to authenticity depend upon manifest continuity between pieces as empirical evidence of common authorship. Welles’ counterpoints, harmonies, and dissonances, by contrast, are not originally manifest, emerge only through an editor’s meticulous experiments with variously unrelated materials, and do not map cleanly onto empirically referenceable extensive space. The result is a speculative arrangement of alternate locales and performances, footage shot in violent retreat – a play of accidents that is less a dog’s breakfast than a geographer’s omlette: schlemazel Dada.
F for Fake profoundly models how editing can open synechistic windows on speculation. The film takes its initial inspiration from Clifford Irving’s Fake! but borrows much of its interview footage from François Reichenbach’s BBC television documentary, Elmyr: The True Story?
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Initially, Welles planned to use this material to produce a short, simple piece for network television. But following Irving’s hoax, Welles and his cinematographer, Gary Graver, shifted gears, scrambling to keep up with the Hughes affair, adding new shots, re-thinking the narrative, re-editing, re-combining different themes, incorporating emerging material: Since the film’s storyline consisted of things happening in the news as we filmed, Orson had the freedom to find new themes and locations and then integrate them into the film. We were shooting and editing the film almost simultaneously . . . It seemed as though Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, and Elmyr de Hory were constantly doing something new. This was a film that kind of just made itself . . .
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At the editing studio in Paris, with news of the Irving Hoax still unfolding, Welles cultivated his own medium- and site-specific athleticism: he had two or three different rooms with a different editor in each one. He would oversee the work, giving one editor an assignment in the first room, then run to the next room to work on another scene, and then to the next room.
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We glimpse this athleticism in the essay films. There, Welles brings us ‘directly into his workshop’,
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‘surrounded by stack after stack of film cans’,
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narrating from the editing table, and producing on the spot. F for Fake’s reflections on Welles’s editorial techniques remind viewers that it is a study in the production of the Wellesian continuum, its speculative forging of synechism from tychism: For the first time he built up his entire film in the cutting room. As the film gradually took shape, Welles would take one scene as a basis on which to imagine another, which he would then interrupt the editing to film, unless he commissioned it from his cameramen or took the shots from an existing document. The sounds and images assembled in this way were simply raw material, which Welles was always ready to transform. He accelerated some shots, slowed others down, froze images or had part of a shot enlarged by the laboratory to make it look like a different shot in the edit . . . the same images sometimes appear full-screen, sometimes refilmed in the screen of an editing machine, often without any break in the continuity of their projection. It is the same for the soundtrack: Welles laid new sound effects over the footage he borrowed from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and himself insidiously dubbed [Joseph] Cotten in the middle of a line to make him say something that had proved to be missing from the brief interview filmed in California by [cinematographer Gary] Graver. He also fabricated a version of his radio programme The War of the Worlds. Even changed in this way, the sounds and images seem little more than fragments of a mosaic that has yet to be put together. Welles set about this with a skill in making connections that also reflects his prodigious visual and aural memory.
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Here, Welles’ ‘frenetic editing style’ reaches its crescendo: ‘rapid cutting . . . dated back to the days of Griffith [but Welles] mastered it in a way that no one preceding him had been able to. Every foot of Kodak film has edge numbers, and some of the cuts in F for Fake were so short that there were no edge numbers for the negative cutter to match’.
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Similarly, the film’s source material – newspapers, interviews, anecdotes, documentaries, rumors, lies – grows so dense and comes at the viewer so rapidly that it often feels like the film is chasing, rather than telling, its story. This is an experience that reflects the contingencies of the production: ‘With each new piece of news about Irving and Elmyr de Hory, the film continued to change shape’. 88 Thus, just as Welles is forced to pause and reconsider his film in light of new information, so too are his viewers invited to speculate about a wildly overflowing amount of material. Here, Elmyr and Irving hover over a review of Fake! by the London Daily Express. Here is Welles, seated in the editing studio, reading aloud from an account of Irving’s trial in the Sunday Times. Here, projected on the screen of the studio’s Moviola, is Henry Raymont’s 19 July 1972 The New York Times article announcing yet another book contract for Irving – an exposé of ‘what happened’ during the Hughes hoax. 89 The final cut celebrates this spontaneous musicality: ‘almost reveling in . . . discontinuity, Welles manages to mock both the seeming ontological realism of cinema and classical continuity editing’s aspiration to be invisible’. 90 Welles’ continuum becomes a rapid-fire aggregate of diverse materials: synechism stretched to its limit.
VI
Anti-technique no. 3: amateurism
‘Actors pretend to be modest’, Welles once remarked, ‘but no magician is modest. Every Magician is the greatest magician in the world’. 91 Who, then, is Welles? When pressed, this sometimes actor, sometimes magician, this presider over accidents, identifies as none of the above. He is, in his own words, ‘an adventurer’. 92 Still, within the critical literature, locating Welles’ ‘character’ seems to have everything to do with understanding how he presides over the accidents of F for Fake and the other essay films. According to Rosenbaum, the film ‘is for Welles a playful repository of public history intertwined with private in-jokes as well as duplicitous meanings, an elaborate blend of sense and nonsense that carries us along regardless of what’s actually being said’. 93 Berthomé and Thomas manage to say much the same thing, but locate it within the film’s structure rather than Welles’ humor or duplicity. F for Fake, they argue, ‘unfolds not a plot, but an abstract subject, very difficult to formulate in words, which starts from the notion of falsification and branches out to touch on sometimes distantly-related subjects’. 94 Finally, Bukatman offers something of a combination of the biographical and the structural, claiming that Welles’ ‘difficulty in completing a film [is] completely comprehensible: as any shot can be meshed with any other to produce some new meaning’. 95
Welles demurs. The ‘movie director’, he explains, ‘must always remain a slightly ambiguous figure, after all, because so much of what he signs his name to came from elsewhere, so many of his best things are merely accidents over which he presides’. 96 Thus Welles’ opening ‘experiment’ introduces F for Fake’s rolling metaphysics of tychism and synechism. It is, after all, in the same moment that he attempts something radically new that he admits to being up to his old tricks. Perhaps this is what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘the pure process that fulfills itself, and that ever ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds – art as “experimentation”’. 97 To illustrate this concept, they invoke the writings of the serialist composer John Cage, who considered the experimental ‘not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown’. 98 So articulated, Welles and Cage arguably grapple with similar contingent potentials in aesthetic production, although these get expressed through very different modalities.
As a lover of the ecology of sounds (city noise, for example), Cage embraced contingency by employing different apparatuses that introduced chance into his composition process: using first the magic square and, later, ‘the chance operations of the I Ching’, and occasionally a star map, ‘a map of the university campus’, and so on. 99 ‘Chance operations can be used to make something that is fixed’, he explains. ‘That is how I made the Music of Changes. I used the I Ching in order to write down something that enforced a performer to go through a particular series of actions’. 100 The modes and chromatic relationships of Satie’s Socrate framed the questions that Cage put to the I Ching as he composed his Cheap Imitation. The expert composer, Cage’s experiments with strategies and tools helped to limit his interventions in the production process.
Where Cage employed devices to introduce contingency, Welles’ ‘globetrotting’ became an unintended geyser of contingency with which he continuously struggled. As a director, he became host to it. At the editing table, he orchestrated it. But Welles did so by way of ‘instinct’ rather than method.
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It is a viewpoint that this ‘adventurer’ extends to every corner of existence: ‘I believe in amateurism and an amateur approach to everything’.
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During an interview at a Parisian film school, he put this in terms that set cinematic production at odds with expertise. Celebrating the productive, speculative force of not-knowing, he tells the audience, In school you should be making movies, not letting the professor tell you about Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith . . . You will acquire the eye cinématographique of those people who made the movies you went to see. The more virgin our eyes are, the more we have to say.
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Indeed, what is intuition if not an engine for hosting and orchestrating the contingent relations that refuse to resolve themselves in manifest systematicity? ‘The first day that I directed a film was the first day I had ever been on a movie set’, Welles recalls, merging biography and filmography not to link character and structure, but contingency and production. ‘I was illuminated by the grace of total ignorance’. 104
The production histories of his films suggest that not-knowing opens productively where contingencies become the conditions, however ‘paradoxical and confused’, for speculation. Furthermore, the site-specificity of such conditions – their ‘foundness’, their situatedness – gives rise to speculative geographies:
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We were never able to afford to build anything so nothing was designed, everything had to be found. Hence, all that globetrotting. Iago steps from the portico of a church in Torcello, an island in the Venetian Lagoon, into a Portuguese cistern off the coast of Africa. He’s crossed the world and moved between two continents in the middle of a single spoken phrase. In Othello that happens all the time. A Tuscan stairway and a Moorish battlement are both parts of what, in the film, is a single room. Roderigo kicks Cassio in Masagan and gets punched back in Orvieto, a thousand miles away.
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To be clear, Welles’ cinema does not shy away from classic creative geographies’ post-Kantian syntheses of movement and time. However, his militant amateurism, his presidence over divine accidents and his orchestration of their continua more closely resemble the forger’s efforts to approximate the serial tendencies in artists’ anexact spatialities. Rather than resolving contingency into a world for the viewer, he orchestrates contingencies that the viewer peruses, contemplates. Not an other world, but a strange geography, a space arising from dissonance. In F for Fake, Welles rapidly occupies multiple places at once, circulating through the film’s locations. He stands among upper class ex-patriots at Elmyr’s Ibizan dinner parties; he is half-hidden behind palm trees and desert flowers, gazing up at Howard Hughes’ ostensible penthouse suite in the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas, NV; 107 he weathers the changing seasons seated in a Dublin city park; he is bathed in golden hour light, meditating on the anonymous architectural objet d’art, Chartres Cathedral in France; but he is always, always in the editing room, seated at his Moviola.
VII
In seeking to situate Welles’ peculiar solution to the production of cinematic spaces, we might recall Peirce Lewis’ observation that Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in a tangible, visible form . . . the cultural record we have ‘written’ in the landscape is liable to be more truthful than most autobiographies because we are less self-conscious about how we describe ourselves.
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F for Fake upends this sentiment during its most celebrated scene of speculative geography, Welles’s soliloquy on France’s Chartres Cathedral. Despite echoing several of the qualities that Lewis identifies as components of a landscape’s ‘cultural record’, Welles finds an un-authored, autonomous space in Chartres. If its unknown, long gone architects impose themselves upon Welles’ speculations, it is only by way of what Kingsbury would call a ‘pataphysics of absence’ 109 – a certain alien exception to their own absence. But what else could this be but the speculative space itself? In the place of a signature, the cathedral offers a resource for generating questions: a problematic field. A model for his speculative geography, Welles reflects upon Chartres’ multiplicity of spaces – a ‘rich stone forest’, a ‘grand, choiring shout of affirmation which we choose, when all our cites are dust, to stand in tact’ 110 – spaces that are thinkable, but not tangible, visible, or manifest. Not an empirical test, but a speculative exercise.
F for Fake articulates a new kind of spatial problematic that continues to develop in Filming Othello and Filming The Trial. These personal essays seek, as Welles puts it, to escape ‘auto-criticism by means of autobiography’. 111 This problematic constitutes a formula for analyzing how film production creates sites in which contingency – ‘some peculiar hiccup in continuity that . . . means Look Closer’ 112 – forges cinematic spaces. The speculative dimension to these spaces not only perverts Kuleshov’s experiments but introduces a system – synechism – for orchestrating dissonant spatialities. Both directors merge technique with material chance, but Welles counters the Soviet’s orderly creativity (invisible cutting, clean movement) with situational forces that are wild and contingent – ‘divine’. In this regard, Welles is closer to Peirce, the thinker of tychism, than to Kuleshov, the thinker of synthesis. If Kuleshov was a creative geographer, Welles is most certainly a speculative geographer.
Finally, Welles’ speculative geography resonates with Deleuze’s comments on acts of creation in philosophy. 113 Maintaining a linkage between a work and the divine accidents that give rise to it, Deleuze insists that ‘as soon as you have something to say, you are like a foreigner in your native language’. 114 So it goes with Welles’ ‘new kind of movie’. Creative work pushes the thinker past a threshold of familiar thought and into unfamiliar spaces that force speculation. We see how difficult this space is to reach in those studies that read Welles’ projects, of whatever kind, in terms of his ‘character’. In his biography of Welles, for example, Callow, observing that magic is not about fooling people, asserts that it ‘is an end in itself, contentless, inexplicable. It renders the successful practitioner mysterious and powerful, though there is never any doubt in the audience’s mind that it is not real’. 115 Every magician knows this. But the point is to create a percept: a floating body, a man who disappears into a box. Similarly, the speculative geography of the essay films is not a matter of rendering Welles a master of ceremonies who draws the viewer’s eye into an unreal world. Rather, it is a matter of readying oneself for the contingencies of production that, when they converge, when they are orchestrated, constitute the sites in which a multiplicity of spaces coexist. If Kuleshov arranged shots to mimic a perceptual object-world, Welles forged speculation-fueling percepts from unavoidable contingencies.
Forgery, in other words, is a geographer’s art. During his speech for his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, he offers careful speculation on the constitutive dimensions of tychism and synechism. It differs in almost every respect from the language of Kuleshov’s creative geography. Where the Soviet filmmaker articulated his experiment by way of a prank that transcended space, Welles’ speech serves as a reflection on the situated conditions that forge space. Where Kuleshov’s analysis serves to reaffirm modern spatial ontology, Welles’ offers a glimpse, if you will, at a site ontology: some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work. In other words, I’m crazy. But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it’s a fact that many of the films you’ve seen tonight would have not been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn’t have been mine. The truth is, I don’t believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it weren’t for this my own particular contrariety . . .
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Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.