Going, Going...

Was watching Orson Welles's "F for Fake" tonight, and it's kind of a scattershot lark, dodging and weaving this way and that as it talks about a famous art forger, and the man who wrote his biography (even as he was perpetrating a hoax about the biography of Howard Hughes). It's twisty, and I'm not sure there's any benefit to following it too closely. But the film does have some sequences that are treasures, including one part, late in the film, where Welles films the cathedral at Chartres and starts musing about mortality, and the impermanence of even great works of art:

"Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. 'Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.' Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Rob