I'm cheating this week. Only my second blog post and I'm mining the past. Soon I'll be retreating to Xanadu to live an isolated, godlike existence, but until then...
Back in 2007, I was delighted to be asked by Stephen and Katrina of The Pastels to help make their idea for a film club in Glasgow a reality. It was very much Stephen and Katrina's baby, but Al Kingsbury and myself were involved at the start. (I believe it was our status as big movie nerds that got us the gig.) Monorail Film Club at the Glasgow Film Theatre was born. Musicians, artists and writers were invited to select and introduce a film. The cinema goers were invited to discuss "music, cinema and life in an informal and random way" in the bar afterwards. White wine was consumed on a Sunday night.
Now, I wasn't planning on doing a history of Monorail Film Club, but just to give you an idea of the content, early screenings included: Masculin Féminin introduced by Stephen Pastel, Grey Gardens introduced by Roxanne Clifford (then of The Royal We, now of Veronica Falls) and The Servant introduced by Alex Kapranos. In November 2007 I introduced Orson Welles's astonishing F For Fake.
If any of the above suggests the past tense, then that is only my involvement. The arrival of my daughter meant less cinema visits and then we went and sealed the deal by moving to London. But the film club is still going strong and I recommend you check it out if you can. It has also spawned Film Club Bristol, which I am going to attribute to psychogeographic investigations by an ex-Monorail regular.
I dug out my notes for the F For Fake screening from the old Monorail Film Club myspace page (check out the GFT site for current details). Don't know why exactly, except I had recently been thinking about not only F For Fake, but also Céline and Julie Go Boating, which I compare it to. Perhaps it is vaguely related to the fact that I've been looking into hauntology, getting ready to watch some Nigel Kneale and contemplating the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Trying to locate suitable music in the house to accompany these musings, I put on the Valerie and Her Week of Wonders soundtrack and was magically transported back to when I first saw the movie, at the Monorail Film Club of course.
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Anyway, I wrote the notes at a time when I was transitioning from writing about music to getting involved in film. I was able to do some film criticism for Plan B, helped with the Monorail Film Club and made some short films with my friend Paul Darroch. Just to be clear, Paul is a real, true and dedicated filmmaker. Me? Well, it soon became apparent that I am a writer and have no business directing or producing or doing anything else that doesn't only involve sitting in a room putting words to paper. But that's a story for another day. Or not.
The below notes are therefore a glimpse from 2007 that might think they point towards today.
F FOR FAKE
Exposing unreliability at each and every turn, F For Fake successfully questions authorship and wonders at the individuality of the artist. In perfect documentary fashion, trust is placed unreservedly in our host. A grand master of ceremonies, Orson Welles draws us into his confidence from the start. He may be about to lead us into a labyrinth of lies and deceit, but it's reassuring to know that his steady hand will guide us.
All well and good, but the steady hand is gloved and he begins by asking for a key. Like all good magicians, he makes the offering appear completely under the spectator's control. You would expect to see an upright bastion of good sense and order, but here we are introduced to Orson Welles, magician. He is inviting us to trust in everything he says, while at the same time offering up the very real possibility of some sleight of hand.
Ostensibly taking an art forger and purported hoax on Howard Hughes as its subject matter, the film establishes itself as being about something else altogether: the magic of cinema. It comes off as a strange hybrid of film essay, manipulated documentary and poetic study of Welles the director. Even today it proves hard to compare it with anything else, let alone try and pigeonhole the work. It almost feels like it approaches a blending of Jean-Luc Godard's later video essay work with his sixties features starring Anna Karina. And by that last remark, I mean to infer that F For Fake is immense fun.
Welles casts himself as charlatan, fraudster, trickster – in other words, movie director. After years of being shut out of his own editing suites, it is as if he decided to bring out his full arsenal of cinematic tricks on a completely new type of picture. The editing alone on F For Fake reputedly took a whole year to complete, and it shows. A virtuoso, at times dizzying job, reality and fiction crash and tumble amongst one another as we are thrown down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole. Make no mistake, F For Fake is a wild ride, although you may not realise it all at once.
I'm somehow reminded of Céline and Julie Go Boating, Jacque Rivette's 1974 masterpiece. It too begins with a magician of sorts – a woman reading a book of magic on a park bench in Paris – before leading us down its winding narrative paths. Clearly a work of fiction and, at 192 minutes, it stays around much longer than Welles's piece, but the two share a fascination with the workings of cinema, without necessarily dealing with them directly. Theatricality, showmanship, the slippery nature of truth – these things seep through the pores of both films. And there's the sheer joy in it all, the desire to entertain and to mystify in equal measure. F For Fake may well reveal the magic of cinema's innermost workings, but only if you're watching very, very closely.
Director: Orson Welles.
