赝品1973

引用Kipling诗句那段显然是说，我们进行文艺创作的时候感到愉悦或者感到自己被充分表达，这就够了，这就是文艺的意义所在。不要让现代日益建立起的文艺标准来评估我们的作品，因为没有超出我们每个人自身存在以外的客观价值标准，没有形而上的文艺标准。如果世上真有我们需要认同的评价标准，那只可能基于我们每个个体的作品之上，也就是说先有我们个体的存在和创造，才产生归纳总结了这些创造优点所在的价值标准。也就是说创作者不需要认同他人的标准。

就像Orson Welles那个著名的观点，文艺理论和他人作品对自身创作意义没那么大。

传记作家谈到Elmyr为什么一直有制造赝品的执念，他的解释也是在现当代的创作环境下，创作者被文艺的所谓标准和理念所束缚，坚持自己的创作愿景是一件被压抑而不是被鼓励的事。

1. because the fake is as good as the real one

2. deveil: it's pretty, but is it art

3. Picasso：I can paint palse picassos as well as anybody

4. 巴黎圣母院没有签名

5. I am not one of anything, Like you, I'm unique

本学期最爱的片。

What is the relationship between a filmmaker and his/her documentary? If compared with various food and cuisines, the documentary is like salad. The materials are raw and fresh, but it tastes distinctive with different seasoning and dressing. People chase for truth that remained in documentary films and probably that is the only reason they savor it. However, if filmmakers enter the frames and become a part of the documentary, would this undermine the credibility or would this become the icing on the cake? This essay will investigate the relationship among a filmmaker, documentary and the audience by analyzing the presence of the filmmaker in F for fake, a documentary made by Orson Welles in 1973, explaining specifically how Orson Welles used the presence of filmmaker to manipulate the narrative.

Typical observational documentaries seek for ideally representing the reality, “stressing the non-intervention of the filmmaker” (Nichols, 2010), as “audiences value the truthfulness of factual programming. The more fictionalized factual programming becomes, the less the viewers value it.”(Chapman and Allison, 2009) Observational documentary like Chronicle of a summer(1960) and High School(1968), unfolding as a realism painting, disclose a series of ordinary people’s everyday life, whereas in Man with a movie camera(1923), an experimental documentary film of Dziga Vertov, initially displays a film language of “self-exposure”(Kolchevska et al., 1986), which is a trial to the filmmaker stepping in front of the camera. Subsequently, in the reflexive documentary, the presence of filmmaker becomes to be an irreplaceable part of the documentary, and even a reflection of credibility to the audience. For example, in Louis Theroux’s documentary, his imposing figure is familiar to the audience, who are fully prepared to watch the interaction between Louis and other social actors. The presence of filmmaker appears to be an ontological issue. More specifically, the authority of determining what to be presented in a frame belongs to the filmmaker instead of the audience. Besides, it is not an arbitrary decision whether to be presented in a film, when dose the filmmaker present, or how dose the filmmaker present. Ironically the audience is accustomed with this spectacles and believe all of these truly and firmly.

Unlike other directors who regard the audience as God, Orson Wells regarded himself as the rule-maker and indulged in manipulating the audience, like a magician gains a sense of accomplishment. He was a typical narcissist and at any moment when appearing he would call himself as “Great Orson”. Accordingly, F for fake, the last Orson Welles’s film to be published, in which the presence of filmmaker is really important. As what he proposed at the beginning, this is a film “about trickery, fraud, about lies.” The film mainly consists of found footages bought from a BBC documentary of the art fakery(Houston, 1982), Elmyr de Hory. However, Orson Welles was discontented with making a biographical documentary. He interweaved them with a fake science fiction about aliens invading the earth, fake Picasso’s affairs, and shots of his own presence.

Trent Griffiths argues, the presence of the filmmaker as a subject in the documentary frame represents a unique relationship between documentary film and history, where the filmmaker engages with social history through their personal experience of authoring a representation of it. (Griffiths, 2013). In F for fake, Orson Welles made three different types of presence. The first of these is a figure of a presenter. Just like in TV programs, the presenter in documentary mainly plays a role in interlinking different parts and their development. The presence and other footages appear alternately, but in terms of time, the duration of presence of the filmmaker is much less than the duration of the material. Orson showed up at the beginning as a magician, wearing a black hooded cloak and a bowler hat, introducing that “During the next hour, everything you hear from me is really true and based on solid facts.” At the end of the film, he responded it. “At the beginning, I did make you a promise, that for one hour I will tell you the truth, and ladies and gentleman, for the past 17 minutes, I have been lying. ” Besides, after the girl watching sequence, he explained it and then smoothly move into the next part. Without his presence, it is not able to be organized. The presence of the filmmaker makes the entire film like a Mobius strip, with two ends glued together.

The second character of filmmaker’s presence in a film is to eliminate the sense of wariness and hostility of the viewers. Again, at the beginning of the film, Orson Welles talks about fakery and truth while he performing the tricks with a little boy. A key vanished, appearing again in the kid’s pocket, and then it turned into a handful of coins. As a presenter, he was performing, walking and talking, in order to bring his audience into the scene. During the presence, Orson obscures the difference between the subjective and objective reality, confuses the boundary between reality and illusion, and alarms his audience, it is not easy to distinguish fraud from the truth(Johnson, 1976). Also, about 5 to 6 times, he invited the audience into his editing room, unveiling more about truth or fake throughout the found footages with him together. It effectively shortens the distance between the audience and the filmmaker.

Another effect addressed in F for fake is that the filmmaker could become the embodiment of the audience, asking questions they are concerned with and reacting what the audience would react when they are in that circumstance. For example, in the last 17 minutes, when Orson claiming as a fake sequence, he talked to Oja not only on behalf of himself but people who are interested in this story. He then seriously asked Oja some questions, such as “can you tell us more about Picasso? ”, “Is that just a forgery?” and so on. The audience will assume they are present at the very moment and will be built a sense of immediacy by watching the presence of the filmmaker.

Appearing is a kind of presence while disappearing is another. The voice over is another kind of “disappeared” presence of the filmmaker. It runs throughout the whole film so that sometimes the audience even forget its presence, but genuinely it plays a profound role in the film with introducing the background, mending up details, and making commentary. It helps with presenting content vividly and reinforcing the diversity of factors in a film.

In general, the filmmaker in F for fake presented as a witnesses, a participant, and even an actor.In the case of the filmmaker present within the frame as a specific subject – revealing their emotional and material investment in the story as a subject alongside rather than apart from the people they film – this kind of ‘intersubjective objectivity’ underpins the work in a more fundamental way (Griffiths, 2013). The key point here is that “the figure of the filmmaker introduces this tension, which can have productive implications for representing reality”. As a rule, MacGuffin in fictions appears commonly as a certain stuff, for example, in Orson Welles’s previous film Citizen Kane, “Rosebud” is a typical MacGuffin. However, in a documentary, the MacGuffin is the presence of the filmmaker which undertake the responsibility to lead the audience into the story and make them being immersed in the story. It is more likely to be a tool of seducing, or fishing, to make sure the audience’s heart swelling with the waves made by filmmakers.

As to F for fake, Some critics still take delight in arguing if it should be cataloged as a documentary because by the time documentary are supposed to be totally authentic. At the first glance, it seems like a documentary because it is a story about Elmyr de Hory, the art forger. However, in any case, when being looked in-depth, it is a hybridized film in which heterogeneous footages can be found and mixed here. In my opinion, It doesn’t make any sense to figure out whether or not it is a documentary because the boundary of art is blurred and the ambiguity precisely shows the glamour of art. The history world in documentary is for people to seek for the truth, but at the same time, is for people to misunderstand the truth.Like what Orson Welles proposed at the end of the film F for fake, art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.

References

Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to documentary. Indiana University Press.

Chapman, J. and Allison, K. (2009). Issues in contemporary documentary. Cambridge: Polity.

Kolchevska, N., Vertov, D., Michelson, A. and O'Brien, K. (1986). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. The Slavic and East European Journal, 30(1), p.118.

Johnson, W. (1976). F for Fake Orson Welles. Film Quarterly, 29(4), pp.42-47.

Griffiths, T. (2013). Representing history and the filmmaker in the frame. [online] Doc.ubi.pt. Available at: http://www.doc.ubi.pt [Accessed 27 Oct. 2017].

Houston, B. (1982). Power and Dis-Integration in the Films of Orson Welles. Film Quarterly, 35(4), pp.2-12.

Filmography

Wells, Orson(1975) F for fake.The USA.

Rouch, Jean (1960) Chronicle of a summer. France.

Wiseman, Frederick (1968) High School. The USA.

Vertov, Dziga(1923) Man with a movie camera. Soviet Union