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In his book, Discovering Orson Welles (2007), Jonathan Rosenbaum recalls eating lunch with his eponymous figure in early July 1972. The outsized artist was nearly finished with his latest film, to be released the following year under the tide F for Fake (1973). Welles mentioned his movie during their mealtime conversation, telling Rosenbaum that it was "'a new kind of film,' ... though he didn't elaborate"; Rosenbaum adds that despite the pomposity of Welles's claim "it's turned out to have been accurate" ("Orson Welles's Purloined" 289). By and large, however, few filmgoers at the time oî F for Fake's release responded well to this "new kind of film." Not only did the movie fail to find an audience in the United States and England, but "[m]ost American reviewers simply didn't get it. Stanley Kaufmann derided F for Fake in the New Republic as 'a piece of gimcrack japery, an ad hoc pastiche that Welles is trying to pass off as a planned work of chicanery'" (McBride 249-50). Despite being a commercial and critical failure upon its debut, F for Fake has aged well (McBride 250) and found new audiences with its 2005 DVD release as part of the Criterion Collection.
Besides his co-writing, directing, and editing credits on this curious film, Welles also takes the on-camera roles of narrator, guide, and magician, as he tells the astounding true story of art forger Elmyr de Hory, whose paintings done in the styles of various twentieth-century masters purportedly still hang, falsely attributed, in some museums and collections. Welles's direct addresses are interspersed into cleverly re-edited footage - originally shot as a documentary by François Reichenbach - of the charming counterfeiter living comfortably on the Spanish island of Ibiza and interviews with Clifford Irving, who wrote Elmyr's biography, Fake! (1969). However, Welles quickly announces Irvings own forgery: the writer later admitted to falsifying an "authorized" biography of reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, a hoax he was perhaps "cooking up" at the time Reichenbach s documentary was filmed.
As he navigates through these layers of deceits, Welles employs a maddening structure. F for Fake jumps from subject to subject, circulating among Elmyr, the Hughes/Irving scandal, Welles's ruminations on art and autobiographical reflections, and fictional pieces conceived by and starring the...