The central topic of this study is the penultimate film of the American film director Orson Welles: F for Fake (1973). This film shows the new style, which I call, "essayistic documentary", Welles created at the end of his career. Orson Welles here combines elements of the fictional and the documentary film genre with magic and autobiographical information, thus realizing a stylistic collage with a complexity that superseeds his other works. The theme of Welles is not only the revelation of film as technical artefact and the film director as its constructor but the visualization of the elemental discrimination between "signifie" and "signifiant". This study is meant to show that the self-reflection in the sense of cubistic art enabled Orson Welles to create such a personal and intimate film like F for Fake and to consider this style as an arrow to the future.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Critical Analysis of Welles' Late Period,
By Justin K. Rivers (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: F For Fake: And The Growth In Complexity Of Orson Welles' Documentary Form (Paperback)
Thieme's book is slim but packed with analysis. Focusing on Welles' final completed film, F for Fake, it places it in the context of the numerous other projects he was working on during his later years, and illuminates how the playful and innovative techniques used in Citizen Kane's "News On the March" montage evolved into a unique style and format used by Welles for several other important projects. From reading this book, I begin to suspect that these films offer an essential and missing link to understanding the dynamic tension between fact and fiction in the modern documentary form. Indeed, F for Fake, as a film, plays out many of the contradictions and questions that film theorists engage with constantly, in a way that is dizzying and filled with limitless layers. Thieme's study is only a first step in an important direction
The book, like most Welles scholarship, suffers from the fact that several of Welles later works are not available - such as Filming Othello, Filming The Trial, Viva Italia, and The Fountain of Youth. Thieme gives these works more thought than anyone else, and uses them to build a strong argument for her thesis. The problem is that the reader (like me) has no access to these films, and probably won't for a very long time. If you are a serious Welles scholar or enthusiast, this book is essential for tackling his long neglected documentary work. Just be aware that it is a critical study with a formal academic format and tone. Conceptually, the book is far from perfect. It requires dialog and debate with others, and that does not seem possible given the current state of Welles' legacy. But kudos to Thieme for tackling such a neglected subject, and for doing so despite the lack of a wider audience with which to engage.
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