Sleight of Hand, Sleight of Mind
Orson Welles' F for Fake and the Art of the Cinematic Con Orson Welles' 1974 "film essay" F for Fake opens with a scene of Welles, in the role of a magician, performing a sleight of hand trick with a young child, "transforming" the key the young boy has presented him into a coin and then showing how the young boy had the key all the time in his pocket. The magic was the perfect illustration of Welles' purpose in the film. F for Fake was a film about fraud and deceit, about how the makers of art (and, in particular, film) use "trickery" to fool their intended audience into believing something that is not true. The film focuses on three known "charlatans" (Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, and Welles himself) who used their talents to produce such magnificent forgeries that they were able to fool everyone (even so-called "experts") into believing in the truth of their claims. Despite the status of this film as one of Welles' "minor" films from late in his life (it was one of the last films he completed prior to his death in 1985), it has had a tremendous impact on filmmaking, both in a technical sense (the film's complex editing of various film stocks and styles) and in a textual sense. Welles' identification of the ways in which an audience can be manipulated into believing anything as long as it has the "air" of authenticity has had a tremendous impact on current filmmaking, especially in the realm of horror filmmaking with the current crop of "found-footage" films that have appeared in the last thirteen years (since the phenomenal success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999). This essay will trace the ways in which Welles' film (as well as his earlier brush with charlatanism with The War of the Worlds) has impacted and influenced the current crop of horror found-footage films and the ways in which they manipulate audiences into believing their fraudulent realities. As stated in the previous paragraph, Orson Welles actually developed his genius for audience manipulation 36 years before the release of F for Fake with the 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds. Although War of the Worlds was initially conceived as a standard radio play about a Martian invasion of Earth based on H.G. Wells' classic 1898 science-fiction novel that would be performed by the Mercury Theater on the Air on the eve of Halloween, Welles was dissatisfied with the initial drafts of the script, referring to it as "silly and dull" (Cruz 7).1 However, since CBS Radio was insisting on using the material for the October 30 broadcast, Welles decided on an important change to the material that would ultimately have a dramatic impact on its reception. Under his direction, the play was rewritten to be performed so it would sound like a news broadcast which, Welles hoped, would heighten the performance's dramatic effect (Sanes 1). Welles, however, also had an ulterior motive in mind. He saw how easily Hitler was manipulating the airwaves in Germany to spread the fear and hatred of the Nazi party to the German people and wanted the American people to be aware just how susceptible they were to the powers of the media and how important it was to question the information they received via the radio (the dominant form of communication at the time) and not to accept everything they heard at simple face value (Rossi 10).2 Ultimately, Welles' concept succeeded in ways that even he could not have foreseen. Although, initially, Welles seemed reluctant to believe that people would actually believe such a fantastic, ludicrous story was actually fact, but the program, produced in an era in which interrupted broadcasts with news from the war in Europe were commonplace, caused fright and panic from those listeners who had either tuned into the program late (and had, thus, not heard the announcement of the program being a dramatization) or who simply refused to believe the announcement because they were so accustomed to receiving only legitimate information through radio news broadcasts that they could not imagine a situation in which the radio news broadcasts would be "faked." Although many people were livid and felt betrayed upon learning of the deceit, some did understand the intent of the broadcast. Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Tribune, wrote:
All unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create a nation-wide panic. They have demonstrated more potently than any argument, demonstrated beyond a question of a doubt, the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery (qtd. in Sanes 4)
Although Welles would go on to employ "fakery" in many of his film projects
(most notably with the fake newsreel footage "News on the March" from Citizen Kane (1941)), he would not fully address the idea of trickery and audience manipulation again until F for Fake. In an effort to "expose the connotations involved in watching a documentary in that you assume objective truth, willing to believe everything that is shown on screen" (Lippe, et. al. "The Chat" 18), Welles created a film essay/ documentary which is (at least) equal parts truth and fiction. Although he begins the film with a "promise" that everything in the first hour of the film is absolutely true, even that, according to some scholars, is a bit of a mislead. Adam Lippe states in "The Chat" that Welles claim that Howard Hughes was the original inspiration for the character of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane is a complete fiction (128).3
Welles' hour of truth ends approximately twenty minutes before the film does. During that time, Welles fashions a detailed narrative about a relationship between his then-mistress (and "magician's assistant"4) Oja Kodar and Pablo Picasso. The story is entirely ficitious, a bit of what Welles calls "art forgery." He details his reason for creating the story and including it in the film and, at the same time, underlines the meaning of the film and details its influence on future filmmakers:
"The truth, please forgive us for it, is that we've been forging an art story. As a charlatan, my job, of course, is to make it real. Not that reality has anything to do with it. Reality, it's the toothbrush waiting for you at home in its glass, the bus ticket, a paycheck, and the grave. In the right mood, perhaps, Elmyr has just as few regrets as I have to have been a charlatan. But we are not so proud, either of us, as to lay any superior claim to being very much worse than the rest of you. You know what we professional liars hope to serve is the truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is 'art.' Picasso himself said it. 'Art,' he said, 'is a lie. A lie that makes us realize the truth.'"
Ultimately, F for Fake is much more than just a documentary about artistic forgery. It becomes an investigation into the possibility of delivering truth in a documentary form. The critical and commercial failure of Welles' film indicates that the audience was not ready for his message of the illusion of reality in documentary and the corresponding value of truth inherent in fiction. It would take nearly another twenty years for Welles' message to finally be heard, and it would take another panic-inducing film to bring it to light. That film was Ghostwatch. Ghostwatch, a 1992 horror film produced and broadcast by the BBC, shared many similarities with Welles' 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. It was a television drama, broadcast on Halloween night that was presented as an actual news magazine program focusing on an investigation of a supposedly haunted house in North London. The program moved back and forth between a newsroom with an anchorman interviewing parapsychology experts (portrayed by actors) and on-location footage from reporters in the field. Because the anchorman and the on-location reporters were actually portrayed by real-life BBC broadcast journalists, many people watching the show in England believed the show was real (despite having a "written by" credit and a listing within all of the local newspapers as a fictional television play). When the ghost (a malevolent poltergeist named Pipes, who is supposedly the spirit of a vicious cross-dressing pedophile named Raymond Tunstall) manifests itself and murders several people and eventually possesses the anchorman, viewers called the BBC stations in a panic. The film was so terrifying and realistic that it led to a suicide (an 18-year-old man named Martin Denham from Nottingham who heard his pipes banging (a sign of the show's poltergeist) and believed himself to be haunted by the program's ghost) (Dent 2) and received the dubious honor of being the first television program in history to be cited in the British Medical Journal (February 1994) as having caused Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children viewing the program (Volk 32).5 As was the case with Welles and the War of the Worlds broadcast, the panic that ensued took the cast and crew of the film completely by surprise. Craig Charles, one of the journalists that had a role in the program, stated that he felt that the viewers would pick up on the influence of Welles' original broadcast while watching the film: "In many ways it was harking back to Orson Welles and his famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. I hoped that the public wouldn't figure out that it was fake, but assumed they would" (Brown 3). Like Welles in both War of the Worlds and F for Fake, the film's director, Lesley Manning, used the conventions of a "factual" format (in this case, the "tabloid" television news magazine) to tell her fictional story in a way that broached the whole subject of television's relationship with the "truth":
We wanted to expose the power of TV and suggest that you shouldn't believe everything you see on TV. Strangely, it confirmed the nation's position, causing anger and outrage…. If we don't like a radio program, we turn it off; but if we don't like a TV program, the broadcaster shouldn't have made it! Somehow, people don't like to take responsibility for their own viewing. Of course, there were many people who enjoyed the conceit and saw the irony in Ghostwatch, and I'm sure it helped pave the way for all sorts of other work like Blair Witch or My Little Eye" (Volk 48). As Manning stated, the popularity and notoriety of Ghostwatch led inexorably to the rise in the popularity of horror mockumentaries (also known as "found footage" films). The Blair Witch Project in 1999 was not the first of the "found footage" horror films (it was predated by such films as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Last Broadcast (1998)), but it was the most popular, becoming, in its time, one of the largest money-making films of all time (based on the ratio between the cost of producing the film and the ultimate box-office gross of the film). The line between Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project was clearly established with Blair Witch's directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, claiming numerous times that Ghostwatch was a major influence on the making of their film (Volk 34, Darke 9). And, like Ghostwatch, The Blair Witch Project, at its heart, is concerned with an issue near and dear to Welles in F for Fake: the relationship between art and reality. Welles tells us, in his film, that "[a]lmost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie” and that "art" is both "real" and "a lie." For Welles, the most important element in evaluating the quality of a piece of art (whether it be a painting or a film) is not the source of the art (whether it is "real" or a "fake"), but, as Clifford Irving says in the film, "whether it's a good fake or a bad fake." The film suggests, as Picasso states, that the fiction inherent in artistic works (such as novels, plays, and films) presents us with a realization of the truth in ways much more direct than that of supposedly "non-fictional" works.
For many critics, the value of The Blair Witch Project (and other, subsequent "found footage" films) is that they tear apart the seeming factual nature of documentary film, revealing all films, fictional or non-fictional, as "fake." The only essential difference between fictional and non-fiction film is that the makers of documentary films attempt to create a covenant of trust with the audience, one which states that the film will be an objective examination of the "truth." However, such objectivity is an illusion, made impossible by the very nature of the films themselves. The use of editing and sequencing of shots, choice of camera angles, and the addition of diegetic music and other sound effects show a construction to the film that requires subjective decision-making and indicates an authorship behind the text that is at odds with the objective stance the film is attempting to take (Coffelt 2). In F for Fake (and in all subsequent "found footage" films), the camera and the editing booth—and the filmmakers who control them—are revealed to be the greatest fakers of all and the deceptive game they play is possible only because of the willing and joyful complicity of the audience (Nowlin 10). Ultimately, however, the goal of the "found footage" film is not to enhance credibility (since many of these films contain elements that are clearly not credible based on the audience's knowledge of that which can and cannot exist in the "real world"6) but to explicitly question the believability of what the audience is watching. They provoke the audience to be on the lookout for narrative deception in each film (or television show, or news story) they see, even—and perhaps most especially—where they may least expect it, for example in the discourses of those (such as "documentary" filmmakers or journalists) who are posing as authoritative purveyors of meaning (Nowlin 12).
In addition to the challenge of the notion of fiction and reality, the influence of Welles' F for Fake emerges in "found footage" horror films through Welles' distrust of "experts." In Welles' film, art experts are mocked throughout the work. Welles refers to the experts as "the new oracles…. And we bow down before them. They are God's own gift to the faker." Elmyr de Hory openly admits that he duped all of the art experts and, thereby, exposed the fallibility—the "fakery"—of their so-called expertise as arbiters of artistic authenticity and cultural/monetary value (Nowlin 9): "Well, my opinion about experts is that there is something far too overestimated, that it should not exist that one single person makes a decision about what's good or what's bad." The experts, used by the institutions that profit from the buying and selling of art, are exactly, because of their supposed objectivity in judging authenticity, what allow fakers to exist by means of inventive forgeries (Nowlin 11). As Oja Kodar says in F for Fake, "As long as there are fakers, I guess there have to be experts. But if there weren’t any experts, would there be any fakers?"
Many (though certainly not all) "found footage" films make use of "experts" (although they are frequently actors posing as experts) in order to specifically discredit them or expose them as ultimately worthless (just as Welles does in his film). The psychologists in The Poughkeepsie Tapes whose expertise lies in the study of serial killers do nothing in the film to reveal the killer's motivation and, in fact, obfuscate the audience's understanding of the killer's purpose. The experts here become little more than talking-heads which serve the purpose of demonstrating how little the experts (and the audience) can really understand the mind of a serial killer. The "experts" who examine and authenticate the photographs of the ghost in Lake Mungo are shown to be doubly incompetent. Not only do they authenticate as valid the images of the "ghost" that are later revealed to be fake (having been created by the dead girl's brother) but also fail to notice the images of the real ghost that appear within the same photographs (as revealed at the film's conclusion). Finally, those "experts" who actually appear as characters within some of the films (such as the "ghost expert" in Paranormal Activity, the scientists from the Centers for Disease Control in Quarantine, the priests in The Devil Inside, and the military in Cloverfield) ultimately can do nothing to halt the "monster" within the film and actually, in many cases, end up making things worse rather than improving them.
In the end, Welles expresses in his film that "[a]rt itself is real"; therefore, one of the elements needed for "fakes" to be considered legitimate works of art is that they need "one 'real' leg" (Benamou 167) to stand on. The filmmakers of the "found footage" films have taken Welles' statement to heart. All of the films use the horror elements as metaphors for the true horrors expressed in the films. For The Last Exorcism, it is child abuse, pedophilia, and the sexual manipulation of naïve young parishioners by church elders; in Paranormal Activity, it is domestic violence (and, in the opinion of one film scholar, the current national economic crisis (Stevens 6)); in Megan is Missing and The Fourth Kind, it is child stranger abductions; and in Lake Mungo, it is the premature death of a child.
One of the bolder statements Orson Welles makes in F for Fake is there can be no transparency in film (Benamou 158), no real way to distinguish fact from fiction. At best, film can provide a hinting, a push toward historical and emotional truth. The important thing for the audience to take away from Welles' films and all of the subsequent "found footage" films that his work inspired is that they not trust the images they are shown at simple face-value. Luke Howie in his study on witnessing in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, states, "Witnessing is a deeply problematic phenomenon. It is a different, subjective, and dependent experience. The unreliability of our visual skills has the potential to make a study of witnessing a study of conjecture" (9). Witnessing through film (and television) images, therefore, becomes open to individual interpretations and can no longer be considered an objective view of the real. This is the point that Welles (and the filmmakers creating "found footage" horror films) are making, that there is no one true view of reality, that the view of reality being proposed by documentary filmmakers is only one point of view and should be evaluated as such, not merely taken in by the audience as empirical truth. It is important to doubt and question everything we as the audience sees and hears; otherwise, we can fall victim to the insidious chicanery and fakery of those individuals without our best interests at heart as easily as the "experts" fell for Elmyr de Hory's and Clifford Irving's more benign forms of fakery.

Notes
1Citations for books are noted by page numbers. Citations for Internet articles are noted parenthetically.
2Orson Welles admitted telling the cast during rehearsals for The War of the Worlds: "Let's do something impossible, make them believe it, then show them it's only radio" (Taylor 38).
3Lippe further states that Welles' claim to have been inspired by Hughes during the writing of Citizen Kane is what piqued Martin Scorsese's interest in the reclusive billionaire and led, eventually, to Scorsese making his film The Aviator in 2004.
4Kodar's status as Welles' "assistant" in his trickery is evident from the film's beginning. One of the film's earliest scenes shows Kodar walking through the streets of Rome being ogled by various men who have been unknowingly filmed. The focusing of the "gaze" on Kodar in that scene indicates her purpose here is to serve as a seductive distraction from the magician to allow him to successfully complete the trick (Miller 4, Lippe, et.al "The Chat" 49).
5The February 1994 issue of the British Medical Journal reported on a male child who was so traumatized by the program that he suffered panic attacks, refused to go upstairs alone, and slept with his bedroom light on. He had nightmares and daytime flashbacks and banged his head on the wall to remove thoughts of ghosts. He became increasingly clingy and was reluctant to go to school or to allow his mother to go out without him (Bell 6).
6These films include those "found footage" films which contain obviously unreal elements, such as ghosts (Ghostwatch, The Blair Witch Project, Lake Mungo), demons (the Paranormal Activity films, The Last Exorcism), trolls (The Trollhunter), and giant monsters (Cloverfield).
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Filmography
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. 1999. DVD. Artisan, 1999.
Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. 1941. DVD. Turner Home Entertainment, 2001.
Cloverfield. Dir. Matt Reeves. 2008. DVD. Paramount Home Video, 2008.
The Devil Inside. Dir. William Brent Bell. 2012. DVD. Paramount Home Video, 2012.
F for Fake. Dir. Orson Welles. 1973. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2005.
The Fourth Kind. Dir. Olatunde Osunsanmi. 2009. DVD. Universal Home Video, 2010.
Ghostwatch. Dir. Lesley Manning. 1992. DVD. Digital Classics, 2002.
Lake Mungo. Dir. Joel Anderson. 2008. DVD. Lions Gate, 2010.
The Last Exorcism. Dir. Daniel Stamm. 2010. DVD. Lions Gate, 2011.
Megan is Missing. Dir. Michael Goi. 2011. DVD. Anchor Bay, 2011.
Paranormal Activity. Dir. Oren Peli. 2007/2009. DVD. Paramount Home Video, 2009.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Dir. John Erick Dowdle. 2007. DVD. Poughkeepsie Films, 2007.
Quarantine. Dir. John Erick Dowdle. 2008. DVD. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009.
The Trollhunter. Dir. Andre Ovredal. 2011. DVD. Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2011.