One of the more memorable moments in F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) has seemingly little to do with the main plot about Elmyr de Hory and art forgeries. Toward the beginning of the film, Oja Kodar walks along the street in a mini-dress, and a slew of men ogle her as she passes. “Girl watching,” Orson Welles calls it, a national sport.
Kodar is a prominent figure in F for Fake, performing the power of the male gaze before our eyes. But since F for Fake is a movie about trickery, we can’t take the sequences with Oja at face value.
In this video, I imagine Welles, Oja, and Laura Mulvey in a dialogue about the male gaze and the meaning that Oja bears (and constructs?) within the film.
F for Fake screened at the IU Cinema on two occasions: first in September 2013 and then again in April 2015 as part of the Orson Welles Centennial Celebration and Symposium.
Laura Ivins loves stop motion, home movies, imperfect films, nature hikes, and Stephen Crane’s poetry. She has a PhD from Indiana University and an MFA from Boston University. In addition to watching and writing about movies, sometimes she also makes them.