赝品

【BFI - Big screen classics】

影片开场后不久就是打破第四面墙的对话，提到了1个小时内的内容为“真相”。尤其精彩的是提到“Movie”时，镜头后拉搭配上下黑边收缩直接营造出一个银幕比例从3:2到2.35:1的变化过程，这种转换感模糊了电影与现实的界限。

然后进入片头，片头也有很多细节，胶片盒贴的红蓝绿色带对应着光的三原色RGB，然后职员表搭配快速剪辑的男性凝视（主体与客体）特写镜头还有拉出到现实的监控器画面镜头，都是在进一步描述电影和现实这两个世界。后出现了影片中我最喜欢的一幕，用抽帧搭配摇晃的镜头的方式仿佛把观众带回到了默片时代（感觉是致敬梅里爱的魔术）变了一个魔术。

紧接着台词跟进继续强调“真实”与“虚构”、 “赝品”与“真品”、 “真相“与“谎言”。这种感觉非常的奇妙，用于形容Elmyr作为赝品制造大师的台词感觉也都是对照形容奥逊威尔斯自己这部电影的。被制造的电影是虚构的，但打破这种“虚构”（第四面墙）后所呈现的是否是“现实”？还是依然是“虚构” 。其中电影的转场也非常有意思，从“现实”由监控器做过渡在跳回到“电影”之中，还有对应台词的秋天到冬天，冬天再到夏天再到秋天的固定镜头转场来阐述时间的变化。

后续则是奥逊威尔斯回应他的处女作《公民凯恩》的制作和署名权的部分，还有《飞行家》电影原型人物的一个大案子。按照1个小时真相的前提，这就是“真相”了 这一切真相么？还是如故事都是“谎言”来理解呢？

影片中使用大量的纪录片原片做剪辑，剪的非常“梦幻”。还把毕加索的肖像照片放在电影里剪辑又产生一种“虚假”感，搭配他的画与同形态下现实人物身体的特写，依然是一种现实感与虚幻感的叠加。

这还没有完，最后的高潮戏，在虚构的场景中（一小时以后），奥逊威尔斯用夹杂着匈牙利口音的英语（仿造者视角）和美音英语（自己视角）同镜头下说出台词，搭配梦幻般的滤镜 对话虚构人物（毕加索视角）来了一场赝品制造者和真迹创作者之间的对话，探讨关于人 艺术品 艺术家 等话题。这也是最后一步的模糊电影与现实的界限 达成了电影的一种解构 （如果所有的毕加索真迹被摧毁 那赝品谁又能认得出呢 对于这个思考 感觉可以用《艺术的故事》里面的话回答 “没有艺术 只有艺术家” ）。电影的结尾彻底抛开了电影，走进了现实，但电影中的现实又是什么？ “a fact of life. We’re going to die.”

试想这样一种情况：

数字艺术家用触感笔在屏幕上画出了一幅画，这幅画来自他精巧的构想，他尽自己可能的将这些感受用轻重和颜色表达出来，他的思想和手法共同塑造了这个作品的「表现」，他将自己的想法保存为一种可以被感受的形式，同时也允许了人们基于这样的「表现」进行的解读。

接下来他复制了原稿，以数据的形式，数据记载了每一个像素上颜色的深浅变化，并重新在屏幕上展现出来，而这是一种仿制。电脑这个历史上最成功的仿画大师并非以思考加手法的方式重新创建了一次「表现」，而是不加思考的记录了这个固化的「表现」的每一个细节，并原原本本的展现给观众看，这分明是两幅画，但当肉眼无法辨别出原稿和副本的差异时，副本是手绘的还是原稿数据的具象化的对人们又有什么区别呢。

在我看来，这就是仿制画的本质，绘画者的想法和电脑一样在仿制时无法对作品造成任何的影响，因为成功的仿制的目的是接近原画的「表现」，而艺术的本质却不是色彩的搭配或人物的形态，艺术在于作品包含的想法和传递的感受，在于引人思考的部分，是艺术家抛出的那个问题，而「表现」只是想法的载体而非艺术本身。

那么我们是否可以这样认为：那些成功的在「表现」层面做到以假乱真的作品，那些画家本人都无法分辨的仿品，和电脑复制的数字艺术在某些程度上是一样的，都是重现了思想和手法固化后的「表现」，而观众们依旧可以按照一贯的观赏方式，透过「表现」接收到艺术家抛出的那个问题，从仿品和原作中获得一样的启发，无论这幅作品出自哪只手？

基于这样的想法，「艺术」的部分在「艺术市场」中便出现了缺席，艺术交易市场成了一种基于收藏癖和纪念意义而建立起来的「非艺术环境」，在这样的情况下，市场真正在意的往往是其「纪念价值」或「历史价值」，「艺术」则只成了一些「有迹可循的知识」。

所以，艺术是什么呢？

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