Sightlines · a concept

le faussaire

the falsifier/counterfeiter as the genetic figure; a chain of metamorphoses.

On screen: a protagonist who forges/creates truth; serial shifting identity

F for Fake (1973) — The relay of forgers — de Hory, Irving exposed in real time, Welles as caped magician — each authenticating the next, with Welles as Deleuze's central exemplar of the forger.
Mr. Arkadin (1955) — Arkadin is a criminal who forged himself into a financier, played by Welles in his late thirties under a false beard and heavy prosthetics that turn the face into a mask; Van Stratten is an…
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) — Mabuse's four complete, internally consistent personas (psychoanalyst, count, old man, croupier) — a will inhabiting bodies, identity instability as his weapon
Nanook of the North (1922) — Flaherty fabricates a vanished pre-contact life rather than reporting one; the gramophone-biting scene stages innocence in a man who knew the device well.
Dishonored (1931) — X-27 serially becomes prostitute, peasant, society woman, prisoner with no true self beneath; reading coded music makes truth itself a composed performance
Fury (1936) — Joe survives and conceals it, allowing the mob's ringleaders to be tried for a death that did not occur — the victim manufacturing a truth and forcing a court to ratify it, while the film evidence…
Citizen Kane (1941) — Welles — the War of the Worlds broadcaster — builds the film so its most authoritative image is a manufactured forgery, casting the narration itself as creative forging
The Lady Eve (1941) — Jean returns as 'Lady Eve Sidwich' on nothing but a changed accent and the dare that no man falls for the same woman twice — a forger who wills a thin fabrication into a real marriage.
The Tale of the Fox (1941) — Master Fox, whose habit is to trick and fool everyone, is summoned before Noble's court to answer for it and works by fabrication; the picaresque trial ends in accommodation rather than judgment…
To Be or Not to Be (1942) — Joseph Tura as serial shifting identity — vain ham actor who forges colonel, spy, and self to create the truth that saves the resistance
Hangmen Also Die! (1943) — The underground's elaborate counter-plot to fix the blame for the assassination on Emil Czaka, the Gestapo's own informer — truth manufactured collectively as a tactic and certified by the occupier's…
Detour (1945) — Al takes Haskell's wallet, license, car and name, living as a manufactured identity; Vera's 'You're making noises like a husband' punctures one performed role from inside another.
Scarlet Street (1945) — 'Kitty's forged signature on Chris's canvases is staged as the story's moral hinge' — and the forgery takes: the art world accepts the pictures under her name, manufacturing an artist who does not…
Gilda (1946) — Gilda forging her own shifting identity in front of men who would rather she be guilty; misread, lied about, punished for a reputation she performs
Dark Passage (1947) — Parry undergoes plastic surgery to forge a new face and a new identity, remaking himself so an innocent self can pass — a flicker of the false, though the film keeps his innocence undoubted
The Lady from Shanghai (1947) — Grisby forging his own murder, Elsa forging a blank self, Bannister forging innocence — a film populated by serial forgers of truth
Fort Apache (1948) — York as the protagonist who forges truth — not lying so much as making a usable past, the painting of Thursday becoming more real than the man
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) — Louis counterfeits a duke out of a draper's assistant while Guinness counterfeits eight aristocrats; the film contains two forgers and no genuine article.
The Third Man (1949) — Harry Lime fakes his own death with a substitute corpse and shifts identity to evade capture; the man mourned is the man hunted
All About Eve (1950) — Eve serially manufactures selves — fabricated war-widow backstory, devoted fan, understudy, Broadway sensation — with no stable identity beneath; Addison admires her "perfect pattern of deceit"
La Ronde (1950) — The master of ceremonies changes costume and identity scene to scene and snips the celluloid 'for reasons of censorship,' fabricating the ellipses that make the round's decorous 'truth'
Rashomon (1950) — Machiko Kyō's wife shifts from helpless victim to calculating manipulator depending on the narrator, with no scene marking which is the lie — each witness forges a truth and a self to match
Stage Fright (1950) — Eve plays 'Doris' the maid, Charlotte performs grief and innocence, Jonathan performs the wronged man, and the Commodore stages a bloodstained-doll ruse — a chain of shifting, performed identities.
Sunset Boulevard (1950) — Norma forging her own comeback while Max forges the fan letters that sustain the dream; the whole household maintains a falsehood no one may puncture
The Strange Ones (1950) — Paul and Elisabeth author a private 'game'-truth and live by it; serial doubling of the wounding face
Othello (1951) — Iago manufactures a counterfeit reality out of suggestion and circumstance (the handkerchief, the overheard-but-misheard Cassio conversation), forging truth rather than reporting it.
Bellissima (1952) — Walter Chiari's Alberto Annovazzi, the smooth studio operator who exploits Maddalena's hopes and takes her money, doubled thematically by Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore on the soundtrack — an opera…
Singin' in the Rain (1952) — Don Lockwood invents a suave silent-star biography from his vaudeville-stuntman past; the film adores his fabrications even as it exposes Lina's.
Sudden Fear (1952) — Lester's possibly-feigned ardor and Myra's fabricated counter-plot — protagonists who forge truth, ardor undecidable as act or feeling
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) — Monroe plays Lorelei as a comic construction whose apparent dimness is a working screen for shrewd, unembarrassed self-interest — a persona produced rather than a truth concealed, in the same year…
Diabolique (1955) — Nicole (sunglasses-and-cigarette, holding the audience's trust to betray it) and the supposedly-dead Michel manufacture a death rather than discover a truth, with shifting identities.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) — The confessional framing device: Archibaldo narrates a criminal life to a magistrate, reveries included, manufacturing a guilt he never earned — the title itself naming a criminal life that never…
1984 (1956) — Winston as the functionary who forges the record — a protagonist whose work is the manufacture of false truth
A Face in the Crowd (1957) — 'Lonesome' Rhodes is a manufactured persona the drifter forges and then inhabits, folksy charm as fabricated truth — but caged by a film that still treats the live recording as evidence
Witness for the Prosecution (1957) — Christine forges letters, forges a second self as the cockney woman who sells them, and forges the testimony that damns Vole, holding several identities at once — 'loyal wife, vengeful testifier, and…
The Magician (1958) — Vogler's stacked, shifting identities — false beard over his own face, his wife Manda disguised as the male assistant 'Aman' — a serial forger with no final layer beneath the masks
Touch of Evil (1958) — Quinlan plants the dynamite in Sanchez's shoebox; his 'infallible' intuition works because he manufactures the guilt he claims to detect — yet Sanchez is likely guilty, so he forges a true verdict by…
Vertigo (1958) — Gavin Elster forges a haunted wife to mask a murder; the broken Scottie then forges her back from the dead, each man creating a false truth others must inhabit
Anatomy of a Murder (1959) — Biegler's office 'lecture': he explains the irresistible-impulse defense in the abstract before letting Manion speak, building the frame inside which a usable truth appears — the calculating advocate…
Imitation of Life (1959) — Sarah Jane fabricates a white self by performing it and shifts identity serially — new name, nightclub job in another city.
Some Like It Hot (1959) — Curtis's Joe stacks serial identities — Joe, Josephine, Junior the Shell Oil heir, the Cary Grant voice on top — a man impersonating a woman impersonating a millionaire impersonating a star.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) — Violet fabricating the legend of Sebastian the chaste poet to overwrite the truth, even at the price of lobotomizing Catherine
Testament of Orpheus (1960) — Cocteau writes, directs, narrates and stars as a Poet who exists only behind masks and emblems, judging and mythologising himself across a three-decade Orphic cycle so the self-portrait forges the…
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) — Lula Mae Barnes self-fashioned into 'Holly Golightly' — a continuous act of self-invention rather than a fixed identity, exposed but not dissolved by Doc's and O.J. Berman's disclosures
Divorce Italian Style (1961) — The delitto d'onore requires an adulterous wife the film does not have, so Fefè sets out to manufacture the fact the law demands — truth produced to order.
Yojimbo (1961) — Sanjuro improvises his name 'thirty-year-old mulberry field' from the landscape, then sells himself to both rival merchants, forging identity and loyalty rather than possessing them
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — O'Toole's Lawrence as a man who fabricates rather than discovers himself — theatrical, self-mythologizing, with a shifting identity the film never stabilizes.
Le Doulos (1962) — Belmondo's Silien is a shifting identity who manufactures the truth of his own loyalty scene by scene; his calculated impassivity gives nothing away to the end.
Lolita (1962) — Quilty/Sellers as serial shifting identity — the conventioneer, Dr. Zempf, the phone voice — and Humbert forging his obsession into the language of tenderness.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) — Stoddard builds an entire public career — schoolteacher, senator — on a killing he did not commit; his serial identities (beaten lawyer, gunman-hero, senator) are each minted from the prior false one
8½ (1963) — Guido tries on serial confessions and shifting self-accounts; the test-screen audition turns the truth-apparatus into exposure he out-runs by confessing the forgery first
Billy Liar (1963) — Billy's compulsive, world-building lies — the London job, Ambrosia, the parallel engagements — are inventions he lives inside, a serially shifting self-mythology.
Charade (1963) — Grant 'performing different versions of the same character in sequence' — Peter Joshua and his successive canceled identities, none resolving to a stable true self
Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) — Alphonse is a self-mythologizing fabulist whose stories don't hold together and who passes off Françoise as his niece.
Take It All (1963) — Jutra, a filmmaker, plays a filmmaker named Claude under his own first name, deploying charm as a defense the film presents as a failing, with masquerade, costume and direct address, and the boundary…
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) — The Man With No Name — a blank, serial identity who sells false information to both the Rojos and Baxters, winning by manipulated belief rather than superior force
Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) — De Havilland's Miriam, 'composed, gracious, and quietly ruthless,' fabricates phenomena that become Charlotte's lived history — a truth produced rather than reported, until Jewel Mayhew's confession…
Marnie (1964) — Marnie's serial stolen identities (secretary, thief, daughter), a self plural and verifiable in no single version — invoked, then disciplined back into one originary truth by the cure structure
Darling (1965) — Diana manufactures a flattering version of herself in real time as a creature of media celebrity, forging her own truth across the episodes
Simon of the Desert (1965) — Silvia Pinal's Devil shifts serially through guises — coquettish schoolgirl exposing her legs, bearded false Christ — her protean mobility set against Brook's fixity.