On Cinema — Deleuze

VIII. The Powers of the False

Reading notes, Fall 2021

Deleuze's discussion of the powers of the false centers on the distinction between truthful narration and falsifying narration. Truthful narration assumes the existence of a pre-given real that the narrative is accountable to: facts can be verified, events have a stable identity, and description corresponds to something that actually occurred. Falsifying narration refuses this assumption. It does not simply lie — it operates in a register where the question of truth versus falsehood no longer has stable ground to stand on. The falsifier is not a deceiver but a figure who demonstrates that every account of reality is a construction, and that different constructions can coexist without one of them being definitively correct.

Orson Welles's F For Fake is the exemplary film. The film is a documentary about Elmyr de Hory, a celebrated art forger, and Clifford Irving, who fabricated a biography of Howard Hughes. But Welles folds the subject of forgery back onto the film itself: he acknowledges that the footage has been selectively assembled and edited, that the apparent authority of the documentary form is itself a kind of construction, and ultimately that he, as filmmaker, is another figure in the chain of fabricators. The final section of the film narrates a story about Picasso and Oja Kodar that Welles then reveals to be invented. The revelation does not restore a stable real beneath the fiction. It only adds another layer, and the viewer is left holding a film that has systematically dismantled its own claim to truth.

This is what Deleuze means by the power of the false as a creative force. The description that creates its object is more generative than the description that merely points to something already there. When narration becomes falsifying, it does not record the world — it produces new possibilities of the world. The forger, the filmmaker, and the philosopher who thinks in images all share this capacity: to make something that did not exist before, and to make it in a way that raises the question of what counts as real in the first place. For Deleuze, this is not a failure of cinema's relationship to truth but its most powerful potential.