Film

F for Fake (1975)

Director: Orson Welles

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A triumphantly self-amused, self-aware reflection on the verities of art and creativity and the lies that sustain them, Welles' quizzical homage to forgery and illusionism is both a self-portrait and a wry refutation of the auteur principle, a labyrinthine play of paradoxes and ironies that comes off as the cinematic equivalent of an Escher painting. Starting with some 'found' footage of art forger Elmyr de Hory shot by documentarist François Reichenbach, Welles manipulates it into a mock inquisition on the mysteries of authorship, autonomy, attribution and associative editing, arriving back at Kane and the War of the Worlds broadcast via Howard Hughes and his hoax biographer Clifford Irving. Alongside the films of Jacques Rivette, the epitome of cinema-as-play.

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