Reality and artifice truths and lies the means and the ends - these are the poles traversed by Orson Welles in his landmark examination of the nature of authenticity and artistic essence: F For Fake. Described by Welles as ""a new kind of film"" F For Fake is a prism of a movie a kaleidoscope in which fiction documentary and the poetic essay interlock fragment and recombine to form one of the most entertaining and profound works in all of cinema. How to describe a film so unlike any other ever made? In a nutshell F For Fake opens with a couple of magic tricks... segues as though by sleight-of-hand into the story of master art-forger Elmyr de Hory and his relationship with biographer Clifford Irving (a sequence ""remixed"" by Welles with extant footage from Franois Reichenbach's documentary work-in-progress Elmyr) then hones in on Irving when word gets out that his purported biography of recluse-mogul Howard Hughes is a first-class hoax in its own right. Here the film erupts in all directions as Welles contrasts the sprawl of 1970s Hollywood with the halcyon Tinseltown that produced Citizen Kane; contemplates the continent that provided him with an artistic refuge some 800 years after the anonymous construction of the cathedral at Chartres; and lastly recounts a meeting between that most un-anonymous of artists - Pablo Picasso - and Welles' companion Oja Kodar which took place in her youth and during which......the nutshell here clamps shut; the film itself however opens up onto infinite space. Exhilarating hilarious and marvellously idiosyncratic F For Fake comes to us from that late period of Orson Welles' cinema which although perhaps less widely known than his Hollywood years nevertheless found one of the movies' greatest masters at the top of his powers. [show more]
F for Fake is a labyrinthine film of almost truths, half truths and sometimes plain old lies.
Orson Welles masterfully weaves this labyrinth in the form of a film around another, Clifford Irving, the faker of a biography of mogul recluse Howard Hughes and incidentally biographer and friend of infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory. Of course Elmyr and his own lies add another ring of deception to F for Fake which becomes an incredibly witty occasion for thought.
And this DVD is a good one providing great context to ground what is a movie genuinely worthy of context.
Great fun; intellectually stimulating; occasionally touching; and very cool.
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