f for fake (1974)
“I am a charlatan.”
(Orson Welles)
Welles’ films are mostly quite somber in tone. There
is little humor, except in Falstaff, but Welles had another side that
came out in his magic act, and in interviews. He was a trickster, a
ham, a gleeful illusionist. This side dominates this film, which is
more or less a documentary (a film essay he called it, which he hoped
would catch on as a new genre of filmmaking).
He set out to make a documentary about Elmyr de
Houry, one of the greatest art forgers in history, whose paintings
hang in museums throughout the world. Actually, Welles saw a
documentary about Elmyr on French television and bought up all the
footage, including outtakes, in order to expand it into a feature
film. But the unpredictable element was that the expert on Elmyr in
the documentary was Clifford Irving, and in the middle of the making
of Welles’ movie it was revealed that Irving was quite a forger and
illusionist himself (he wrote a fake Howard Hughes autobiography which
he sold for a tidy sum, and then the whole scam was discovered).
At
that point, the film became much more of a meditation on illusion, trickery, and authorship in general, especially since Welles claimed that he had
originally intended to make Citizen Kane about Howard Hughes.
But, as he said, if you told the story of Hughes’
life in a film, nobody would believe it.
He also performs a bit of trickery on the audience,
which is revealed at the end of the film. I won’t give it away.