Reception
F for Fake faced widespread popular rejection in the United States upon its release, though it fared better commercially in Europe. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be indulgent or incoherent. F for Fake has, however, grown in stature over the years and is now often considered not only a film classic, but a precursor to modern editing techniques as well as a popularizer of more avant-garde methods. As the film embraces everything from self-conscious notation of the film process to ironic employment of 1950s-era B movie footage, Welles in essence was creating not so much a documentary as a "new kind of film," as he once told writer Jonathan Rosenbaum. F for Fake is now sometimes referred to as a "film essay."
Read more about this topic: F For Fake
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)