FOR REAL: ORSON WELLES AND THE CONFINES OF THE FAKE

Showman. Actor. Narrator. Performer. Director. Writer. Painter. Raconteur. Playwright. Imbiber. Eater. Squanderer. Magician. Huckster. Visionary. Prophet. Aesthete. Roly-poly. Baritone. Philanderer. Serial Monogamist. Progressive. Egotist. Fake. Genius.

These are just some of the words to describe Orson Welles, born over 106 years ago in sleepy Wisconsin and dead for over 35. He is best-known for his first film, Citizen Kane, a movie often called the greatest movie of all time, and one Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in, all before the age of twenty five. He never did, but great diamonds were found in the attempt.

In 1973 Welles released a curious movie, an experiment that toyed with the very nature of film language and reality itself. It would baffle audiences and critics alike. It'd be his final movie released in his lifetime, and, I'd argue, as prophetic for media in the twenty-first century as Citizen Kane was influential for cinema in the twentieth.

French Director François Reichenbach hired Welles to edit a television documentary on Elmyr De Hory, an infamous art forger. There were scores of interview footage with De Hory's official biographer, Clifford Irving. De Hoary had asked him to document his life. The result, a biography called Fake!, was published in 1969 to great sales and acclaim.

Elmyr De Hory

Clifford Irving

You may remember Irving as the journalist who nearly pulled off a great forgery himself. In the early seventies, he claimed to have corresponded with the legendarily reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He told his published that Hughes loved his book Fake!, and entertained the idea of Irving ghostwriting his autobiography. McGraw-Hill paid a $750,000 advance in a check made out to H.R. Hughes, Irving opened a Swiss bank account under the name Helga R. Hughes. Forged letters were produced. Fake meetings were recorded with a ghostly Hughes in Mexican motels. Things got complicated.

Irving gambled that Hughes, so distant and hermetic, would never even respond to Iriving's con. He lost the bet. In the first week of 1972, Hughes went public with the press over a telephone interview, the first time his voice was heard by anyone in over a decade. He denied ever meeting Irving. He denied everything.

Meanwhile, Welles had Reinbach's footage and decided to expand the short, straightforward TV documentary directed by Reinbach into an experimental feature film directed by Welles.

F for Fake (French title: Vérités et mensonges, or “Truth and lies”) is a documentary, sort of. It's a drama as well. Well, sort of. It is a film essay, in a way. It is fact. It is fiction. It is a whirlwind of editing. It is a barrage of competing and contradictory styles. It is postmodern. It is old-fashioned. If released today, it would still shake, confuse and dazzle. It is highly personal. It is full of hogwash. It is, above all else, a magic trick.

Welles loved magic. Not the supernatural kind, but the ways of illusion and trickery. His entire artistic life was an extrapolation of this desire. F for Fake's opening scene shows Welles dressed as a magician, complete with black cape. He is in a foggy European train station. He performs a coin trick for a child. A beautiful lady, Oja Kodar (and Welles' real life partner,) looks from a train window watching the scene.

“Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies,” says Welles, “Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you'll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.”

We learn about Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. Welles' own experiences with fakes are recounted. At 15 years old, he conjures up a non-existent Broadway resume for an audition at the Irish Gale Theatre and, in the process, becomes their lead performer and takes the first step of his wild career ahead. He recalls his War of the Worlds 1938 radio play that caused a national pandemonium. There's shotgun editing. Boom, boom, boom. We are thrown out of scenes completely to Welles in the editing room, the wizard behind the curtain explaining how he is moving the scene we just were thrown out of along. Is this another trick so we drop our guard? Who knows? On and on it goes, a Russian doll exposing its various sizes on a carnival merry-go-round by a graveyard. We see wine parties with De Hory, we see Clifford Irving, himself in the middle of a lie, explaining another liar.

“The the author of Fake!, a book about a faker, was himself a faker, and the author of a fake to end all fakes, and that he must have been cooking it up when we were filming him...,” muses Welles with delight.

We see footage from other films, archives, and interviews. There are paintings, both real and fake, galore. Scenes of people interacting together, from shots taken of said people who've never even met. Genres shift in minutes' time. Trickery, trickery, trickery.

Great joy fills all of F for Fake. Welles is like a child playing with sound and image. It is never boring and always interesting, a golden ideal. It questions our notions of authorship but is the most personal and autobiographical of all his work. In the most touching and poignant moment of the film, and one of the best in cinema's history, Welles walks through the fog and stares at the Chartres Cathedral in France. Welles gives the best speech of his life in a life full of speeches:

“And this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature: Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”

Welles walks away, shrouded in fog. Both him and his movie go on singing.

F for Fake can be streamed on HBO Max and Criterion Channel via subscription, and rented on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. It can be purchased on BLU-RAY or DVD via Criterion.