F For Fake

Made in 1974, and his last completed film, Orson Welles' F For Fake is the sign-off from a master. In control of the viewer from the first frame to the last, Welles as self-confessed "charlatan" weaves together a tale of fakery, forgery and film-making. A re-edited documentary about "the greatest art forger of the twentieth century" Elmyr de Hory turns into an interrogation of his 'outer', the author of of a fake biography of Howard Hughes Clifford Irving which turns into a history of Hughes and a history of Welles himself and a connection with a girl, a girl who set up a grand fake, a fake that is possibly fake. A fake fake.

F For Fake is alive with the lightness of touch of the French New Wave, the playfulness, the knowingness, the lack of seriousness and the conviction that "in a sense, each story is a sort of lie". It also features what's been called "the most profound moment in cinema history", a rumination on artistic signatures set amongst the mist swirling around the unclaimed Chartres cathedral:



Of course Welles is the perfect narrator of this story within a story within a story... As he himself owns up to (the whole truth?), he has a history of fakery himself, beginning in Ireland, at the age of 16 when he managed to convince members of a repertory theatre in Dublin that he was in fact a famous American actor. Of course he was soon to become just that, by way of one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century, never mind Elmyr! Welles's great War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 that sent thousands into mass hysteria. Or did it? Uncertainty is everywhere in this film, round every corner, in every frame, in every utterance. It would be good to remember that hall of mirrors sequence from The Lady From Shanghai. It might do you some good.

It says something about Welles' genius that he can laugh raucously at the absurdity of the rabbit hole of confusion and forgery surrounding Elmyr, Irving and himself one minute and compose the Chartres ode the next. Perhaps they're not that different. Perhaps that's the real sign of genius, the realisation that life, as a friend of mine once said, is "far to serious to be taken seriously".