The speculative geography of Orson Welles

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.