赝品1973

| Roger Ebert October 13, 1977

Orson Welles can make better movies than most directors with one hand tied behind his back. His problem, of course, is that for 35 years the hand has remained tied. His career is a study in lost possibilities: Having made a legendary film debut at the age of 24 with "Citizen Kane" (1941), arguably the best American movie ever made, he was never again left totally free to make a film just the way he wanted to.

He came close, in films like "The Magnificent Ambersons" (with its ending re-shot by the studio) and "The Trial". But a film more typical of Welles' dilemma was "Falstaff - Chimes at Midnight"(1968), a triumph of artistic will over impending bankruptcy."Falstaff" is a great film, but for whole stretches of it Welles is faking it. He shot it without sound and dubbed most of the voices himself. He recruited a great supporting cast but had to shoot them at moments stolen over the years when he was able to raise money to go back into production. He included a great battle scene but had to place his camera in its midst because he had so few warriors.

Now comes Welles' latest work, forthrightly titled "F For Fake." It's a film about fakes and frauds, including the art forger Elmyr de Hory, the biography forger Clifford Irving, the mystery man Howard Hughes and even the young Orson Welles of the famous "War of the Worlds" hoax.

The footage teases and tantalizes us - with Irving, for example, talking about de Hory's fakes while (we now know) planning a spectacular one of his own. But step back from the film, regard it for a moment and it suggests itself on a deeper level as Welles' musings about the connections between fakery and art itself.

"Citizen Kane," for example, is a film so brilliantly packed full of special effects, deceptive shots, double exposures, trick lighting, background animation and back projection that perhaps only a third of the film actually records what we think we're seeing. In "F For Fake", Welles plays with the film more obviously, presiding over a ghostly editing room, running shots back and forth in the movieola as he invites us to take a closer look (pick a look, any look… ).

It's all a bag of tricks, says the master magician Welles. If the result is the same, if the picture looks the same, isn't a de Hory as worthy as a Picasso? Doesn't, we think to ourselves, "Falstaff" hold together just as well as if it had been shot in seven weeks instead of seven years? And what about that magnificent double deception Welles paints for us at the end of this film, in which Picasso seems to be faked out of 24 erotic canvases by the grandfather of the beautiful young model Picasso has faked into his studio?

"F For Fake" is minor Welles, the master idly tuning his instrument while the concert seems never to start again. But it's engaging and fun, and it's astonishing how easily Welles spins a movie out of next to nothing. For many years, he was reported to have "Don Quixote" as a work in progress. Now, according to the program notes, the working title has been changed to "When Are You Finishing Don Quixote?" Does it matter, when "F For Fake" has such a sufficiency of windmills?

如果要用一句话来形容这部影片的重要的话，那就是：

最伟大的天电影天才，在人生后半截完成的几乎唯一一部电影。

他把他的生涯，还有浪子的生活，艺术创作，造假世界，演艺秀，全部结合在一块...

。你甚至不敢说，那一定就是纪录片，他创造了一种新的文体，亦真亦假亦幻，但是假假真真，却能教会我们很多东西。

我至今仍然被那些用粗粒质感表现的赝品画家的陈述。所吸引。

如何来判断真和假，这个问题充满在世界的任何一个角落，因此有宇宙意义。

享受它！

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？