WHY I CHOSE THIS STUDIO? WHAT WOULD I LIKE TO LEARN IN THIS STUDIO?
By undertaking the course, Real to Real is the studio that I believe can improve the skills in shooting the documentary in my studies and future career. Likewise, I’m interested in studying film shooting. Real to real is different from fiction films. It focuses on non-fiction like we use our lens to record the most authentic stories in life in front of eyesight. The stories have not been created before the filming. Non-fiction is more in touch with the audiences’ hearts and minds.
In further studies in the course, I would like to learn many more skills in cinematographing. And the style of shooting I can get some inspirations and the production I can do for it. In my knowledge, the target of interviewing and the story of background both are important, and the preparing is quite hard so I would like to learn how to create a beautiful non-fiction documentary can touch people’s heart that it has the excellent backstory structure. There are few interesting characters in the story I can build it up. Achievements can challenge me in the course, like improving the mise-en-scene studying in the non-fiction documentary shooting. And the ability to catch up the b, which is the cue for creating a real story in the 5 minutes documentary, I maybe try to use less interviewing and dialogues that images are the most crucial sequences that are linked with the audiences. So creating the photos is meaningful that is hard. So there are lots of skills that should be learning in the course. One image includes lots of things like actors, setting, lighting, and camera, and even some after-effects need to use. In short, I am glad to try my best to learn the new skill in shooting the documentary from this studio.
F for Fake
F for Fake used interviews and recollections to discuss the authenticity and deception of art. The documentary F for Fake is the last work of director Welles and significant work in the history of documentary. It breaks the documentary-style based on observational narrative. Most of F for Fake‘s lens material comes from the BBC’s documentary about the fake Hungarian painter. This new approach to creation by Welles also provides an original path for the production of documentaries. In addition to some of the transitional chapters and the final “Picasso” incident, the director Welles was all filmed in the BBC documentary. In addition to the genius painter of Hungary, he also interspersed with a sensational fake scandal of American tycoon Howard Hughes.
This F for Fake provides a new perspective for documentaries. The film often appears to be pulled from a particular screen, and the audiences see the monitor and find that it is the director watching the playback footage. These are always reminding the audience that there is a difference between real life and the life shown by the media. With a large number of fixed shots and repeated repetitions of the actions of these authors, Welles made the montages of these pictures to create new meanings to remind the audience to be wary of such post-production methods. Welles’ narration tells the audience from time to time what is real and which is false so that the audience can understand more deeply what the Fake is. In the Picasso clip of F for Fake, Welles uses the approach of playing and replaying history Welles lets Oja play a woman who is addicted to Picasso, and deeply attracts Picasso to the ocean of love. Welles cleverly placed in the back of Picasso’s portrait, through different angles and scenes to show Picasso’s facial expressions, to express Picasso’s obsession with girls. Then Picasso did 22 works for girls. There are often historical clips in documentaries. At this time, appropriate interpretation has become a critical means of documentary shooting. F for Fake uses this portrait to trace the past. Welles used the same painting to use different scenes and editing methods, to produce a rich meaning, to express to the audience the story he wanted to tell. The 22 so-called Picasso paintings of Oja are, in fact, fakes, and the story is interspersed with it, pushing the surface to the profound truth.
Reflect on the accompanying reading for F for Fake
Combs wrote this work in 1994. It is a film review on Orson Welles’ F for Fake. The first part of this review is not all about the film itself, but the information about characters, film styles, and working experience of Welles. If the reader does not have enough background information about Welles, he/she might be confused because the information in the review is too complicated and fragmented. Films like Citizen Kane and other articles by Welles are reviewed and analyzed. However, this may be an excellent setting for the analysis of the film F for Fake. The review summarizes the film style of Welles as that “Welles’ is a cinema gesture and effect that is theatrical in the broadest sense–the spectacular staging, the visual and verbal rhetoric, the fascination with larger-than-life figures” (Combs 1994 p. 51). This kind of appraisal on Welles can explain the style and directing techniques of Welles in F for Fake.
The writer has a contradictory view on F for Fake when comparing it with Welles’s other film Citizen Kane. On the one hand, Welles argued that F for fake is hardly a reprint of Citizen Kane. Still, it may be more radical: retell it, confirm its meaning in other ways, record the documentary of its production process, and what Welles did (Combs 1994 p. 53). I agree with this point of Combs. This remark correlates two films on the feature of the documentary. Citizen Kane is a standard documentary recording life of Kane and evaluates him. Though there are fabricated ‘facts’ about Kane in the documentary, it seems real and believable. However, as Combs remarks, F for fake is more radical in expressing the boundaries between true and false from the perspectives of film content, the narrative technique, and the representation of the lens. Playing the documentary “truth” in F for Fake is a subversion of the forged documentary evidence in Citizen Kane. In the movie, stories and stories intertwine, characters and characters are intertwined, and Welles’s narration reminds the audience from time to time what is real and which is false. This is not only a new step in documentary editing technology. It is also the beginning of the documentary’s move towards artistic re-creation, which provides a unique perspective for the documentary. Welles defines art and film even in this radical way, that “art is an illusion, a cheat, a fake, a lie – the product of what Welles, thinking of them as magicians rather than artists, calls’ hanky-panky men'” (Combs 1994 p. 53). F for fake conforms to this definition.
However, on the other hand, Combs criticizes that F for fake scoffs at the presence of “authorities” in museums and art markets like de Hory. However, F for fake even further undermines the authority of creative behavior itself. F for fake begins with some characters in real life, and then gradually deviates from the theme. They create fraud and mythical processes in the maze of fiction. Irving’s story is closely related to de Hory’s story, not to explain their connection, but to turn each other into a mysterious fantasy. Finally, the riddle and ambiguity of the subject matter were not as famous as the saddle structure imposed by Welles, until F for fake evolved into a strange, puny, free communication structure without internal coherence.
References
Combs, R. 1994. ‘Orson Welles’ F for Fake’. Film Comment, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 50-59.