#173: F for Fake

F For Fake (1974)
Written and directed by Orson Welles
Starring Orson Welles and abundant mind-fuckery

"Illusion Michael! A trick is something a whore does for money...or cocaine."


Guys like David Blaine and that hair metal wannabe Criss Angel have it wrong. Magicians or illusionists need a little more charisma than the rock of Gibraltar, though what a charming rock it was. They are forcibly serious and always have a look of smug constipation on their faces. Who cares if they fool you? They're dicks.

Okay, so Orson Welles seems like a codger. A fat, bloated, drunken coot of a man whose final screen credits included the voice of Unicron in the Transformers movie. But he was responsible for one of the biggest and most successful illusions of all time.

Imagine a time when radio was the pinnacle of home entertainment. One day you're minding your own business and you've never even heard of H.G. Wells (no relation) before. Then a report comes flying in saying the world is being attacked by invaders from another planet. Hoo boy, yeah, that happened. He adapted War of the Worlds to the radio in a much more effective manner than Spielberg did to film. Spielberg is a master of cinema, but that movie was awful.

F for Fake was the last film Welles directed. It's a pseudo-documentary about liars and the lies they tell. Within the film, one of the subjects he tackles is a complete lie itself. So even the documentary is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. It's absorbing.

Never before this film had I heard of Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian born art forger. It's said in the film that at any given time in some of the most prestigious art galleries in the world, his forgeries -- many of which were Picasso reproductions -- were on display instead of the original. He would don a disguise and an alias to peddle his forgery, selling it to the gallery for a dishonest buck.

The sad part is he was never able to make it as an original artist despite attempting to quit the forgery racket to make an honest living. These attempts were unsuccessful.

Clifford Irving, another liar of a different colour, wrote a biography on Hory. Funny because his fakery centered on the biography he wrote on Howard Hughes...except the billionaire never spoke with him. This was chronicled in the film The Hoax with Richard Gere.

Welles plays with the smoke and mirrors and asks the audience to reflect about what it has witnessed. Do you believe everything you're told? Do you believe everything you see? How trusting are you that the truth is being presented at all times?

The most ballsy thing Welles did was admit that he was lying to the audience. This movie is an illusion masked as a documentary as much as it is a documentary about illusion. It's a head scratcher and probably my favourite work in Welles' directorial catalogue. Even moreso than Citizen Kane.

Ordered it over a year ago. The premise was intriguing even though at first I thought it was a work of fiction told in modern abstract style. When the documentary aspect was revealed the further I read on it, I knew it had to be mine.

Watched it for the first time with good ole Arlo at his parents' place on a cold December afternoon. Despite the lack of alcohol or other mind-altering substances this was the type of film that makes the room spin into surreality. When the smoke clears, what was real and what was fake? Is the film itself a forgery?

Check it out for yourself. Revealing the mystery to be another mystery is half the fun.