{"id":2230,"date":"1999-02-04T11:06:54","date_gmt":"1999-02-04T15:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2011-05-14T11:11:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-14T15:11:52","slug":"f-for-fake-1974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=2230","title":{"rendered":"f for fake (1974)"},"content":{"rendered":"<BLOCKQUOTE>\"I am a charlatan.\"<\/BLOCKQUOTE>\r\n\r\n<P ALIGN=\"RIGHT\"><EM>(Orson Welles)<\/EM><\/P>\r\n\r\n<P> Welles' films are mostly quite somber in tone. There\r\nis little humor, except in <em>Falstaff<\/em>, but Welles had another side that\r\ncame out in his magic act, and in interviews.  He was a trickster, a\r\nham, a gleeful illusionist.  This side dominates this film, which is\r\nmore or less a documentary (a film essay he called it, which he hoped\r\nwould catch on as a new genre of filmmaking).<\/P>\r\n\r\n<P>He set out to make a documentary about Elmyr de\r\nHoury, one of the greatest art forgers in history, whose paintings\r\nhang in museums throughout the world.  Actually, Welles saw a\r\ndocumentary about Elmyr on French television and bought up all the\r\nfootage, including outtakes, in order to expand it into a feature\r\nfilm. But the unpredictable element was that the expert on Elmyr in\r\nthe documentary was Clifford Irving, and in the middle of the making\r\nof Welles' movie it was revealed that Irving was quite a forger and\r\nillusionist himself (he wrote a fake Howard Hughes autobiography which\r\nhe sold for a tidy sum, and then the whole scam was discovered).<\/P>\r\n\r\n<P>At\r\nthat point, the film became much more of a meditation on illusion, trickery, and authorship in general, especially since Welles claimed that he had\r\noriginally intended to make Citizen Kane about Howard Hughes.<\/P>\r\n\r\n<P>But, as he said, if you told the story of Hughes'\r\nlife in a film, nobody would believe it.<\/P>\r\n\r\n<P>He also performs a bit of trickery on the audience,\r\nwhich is revealed at the end of the film.  I won't give it away.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n<P align=center><br><a href=\"index.php?p=2156\">return to the orson welles page<\/a><\/P><div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-post pdfprnt-bottom-left\"><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F2230&print=pdf\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-pdf\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" alt=\"image_pdf\" title=\"View PDF\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F2230&print=print\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I am a charlatan.&#8221; (Orson Welles) Welles&#8217; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-2230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-orson-welles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2233,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/2233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}