F for Fake

Year: 1973

Country: France, Iran, West Germany

Plot: Welles' take on filmmaking is as a form of trickery and fakery by editing different parts of other documentary footage on a famous forger Elmyr de Hory, being interviewed by the famous biographer of Howard Hughes, Clifford Irving. De Hory claimed that he never painted a picture by a famous artist, that he offered to a museum, that they didn't buy, and Irving was advanced $800,000 thousand dollars for an autobiography of the reclusive Howard Hughes which was completely false. Welles begins F for Fake by performing several magic tricks and claiming that filmmaking is prestidigitation and tricks the viewer into seeing something that the viewer willfully accepts. The filmmaker cites his own rise to stardom as a trickster by claiming that his first entrance on the scene was with a fake radio program about invasion from Mars. As the film follows De Hory and his development as a forger, it also follows Clifford Irving as a close associate of De Hory as evidence of how Orson Welles' formula for stardom reads, regardless of what the artist does with his art.Orson Welles' final film documents fraud and fakery through the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, who made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse.

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