Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

popcorninhell What is art? What appeals to our senses and informs our worldview? What doesn't? What is considered forgery and how does that relate to artistry? Is there a link and if so, which is more legitimate? These questions and more are what Orson Welles attempts to illuminate in his irrevocable final finished film F for Fake (1973). It's a movie without equal and goes right into the heart and soul of the self-described charlatan of the stage and screen.This film is not a story, nor is it a documentary; it is an essay film, considered the first of its kind. F for Fake is a supposedly true film about falsity that examines the value of forgery to find deeper artistic meanings. It begins with Welles arriving at a train station doing magic tricks for kids, attention drawn on actress Oja Kodar. He makes a promise to the audience, "For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact." F for Fake is part autobiography of iconoclast Orson Welles who made a name for himself directing, producing and acting in "The Best Movie Ever Made," Citizen Kane (1941) (perhaps you've heard of it). Yet the film also encapsulates the life's work of Elmyr de Hory, arguably the most infamous art forger to ever live. Over his 71-year lifespan, de Hory had sold over a thousand forgeries to art galleries all around the world. His exploits are chronicled not only in F for Fake but the book Fake by Clifford Irving. As if things weren't strewn enough, the film also expands on Irving who served a prison sentence for attempting to publish an unauthorized "official" biography on billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.Hughes and Pablo Picasso are also in the mix but the film avoids clutter by throwing away a linear narrative in favor of stream of consciousness rumination. The editing jumps playfully from subject to subject while Welles makes the occasional on camera remark. He toys with the presumption of reality and scoffs at the pomposity of words like "art" and "experts". His main subject de Hory shares Welles desire to pull the wall over people's eyes and show that the emperor has no clothes but does so while asserting he had never had the passion to become a true artist. His exchanges with Welles and Irving remind me of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) when Michael Caine's character admits, "As a younger man I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good…I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent." Yet all the people exposed in F for Fake do have enormous talent even if that talent is limited to creating fakes and forgeries. de Hory paints a Picasso within minutes then signs it with Welles's signature. Welles produced the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast which caused a public panic and Irving produced fake letters and recorded hours of fake "interviews" with Howard Hughes. Did they do these things for recognition? Perhaps cash; de Hory does explain he got more money from fakes than his own original works. Likewise Orson Welles explains that the first time he joined a travelling theater show professionally he pretended to be a huge Broadway star to make it in.F for Fake is Welles's "Finnegans Wake" and I dare not try to analyze it anymore. I leave you with a quote from the film that I think captures the point of the film succinctly: "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, 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."http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com

secondtake F is for Fake (1973)Like many, I'm an Orson Welles fan. Not just his films (the best of them are among the best ever made) but also the man, for his rebellious side and his persistence. And his flaws, undermining his own best purposes.But this movie struck me as affected, overly long, baroquely complicated, and finally just off-putting. Yes, it's incredibly well edited, and for that, if that's your thing, you should see it. But to me editing is part of something larger, and this larger thing is troubled.I saw no reason to really care about the subjects here. The deliberate confusions (borne from the editing, in part) are half art and half avoidance, in a way. The documentary truth about the subjects, the supposed subjects, a French painter of forgeries and a writer about Howard Hughes and a forged check, is not really the goal. Nor is it possible. So what we have instead is the ride, the process of talking about these various man and their rich compatriots from all kinds of colorful places.There is a limited range of footage at use here, most of it home-style 8mm color stock of the two or three main participants (call them suspects, call them actors, call them fakes) which was shot by a different filmmaker and turned over to Welles. This is interspersed with high quality footage of the narrator, Mr. Welles, in his deep voice and characteristic hat. And there is a little additional footage, including the dubiously connected opening scenes where Welles's own young attractive partner parades in a mini-skirt on a public street, only later to comment that such an act came out of her "feminism."Okay. Maybe this is all part of the lie that gets incorporated as the truth. When you play games with truth and lies some interesting conflicts are intended. But for me, this beginning and the long end where a fictional series of paintings has been made by Picasso (not actually) of this same Welles companion (whose name is Oja Kodar) is pure voyeurism on the part of the director. Why he wanted to share his woman publicly I couldn't say (but can guess), but in fact the filming at these points takes on a very different sensibility. In style, the rest of the movie strikes me as stunted, though endlessly interesting because of its constant cutting and jumping from one scene and format to another. In content it all seemed circuitous for effect without the necessary thrill of caring. The result avoids clichés beautifully, which is good (in fact, what the film has most of all, in a Welles way, is originality). But it also ends up being at times more style than effect. That is, the effects, which are so evident, are superficial. Which leaves very little. Without a compelling subject and a convincing formal presentation, what is there?So what about the huge reputation this movie has? Let's assume it's more than just Welles worship. I think for one it has anticipated the growing public interest in art forgery. It also creates a fascinating zone where a documentary isn't about establishing the truth, and so is a kind of third category--the fiction film using found footage. (To some extent this is the core of it--Welles has used existing footage and led our reading of it to create his own subjective "truth" of it.) There are aspects here all over the place. Aspects and aspects of aspects. For this, there is a formal invention that might have been enough when I was younger. Now, for whatever reason, it feels self-indulgent and, like the first scene in the movie, pure deception.Maybe that's the point.

Framescourer First of all, it needs to be said that F For Fake is an entertaining film as quick witted as it is briskly edited and strongly featuring Orson Welles on superb form. The bulk of the film concerns the art forger Elmyr de Hory in a separate documentary made for the BBC in 1970 by François Reichnbach. But Welles' overdubbed introduction, his re- worked edition of Reichenbach's work and the tumbling, fragmented overlaid additions including those of his girlfriend Oja Kodar and the hagiographically soft-focused Chartres cathedral turn this into an extended solipsism of what counts as 'real'. The art 'forgeries', driven by the market might not have been forged by the artist but by the dealer - and of course, works that have been on gallery walls for years are now the art anyway. The most famous artist of them all, Pablo Picasso, is quoted as denying his own work with 'even the real Picasso can make a fake Picasso' before the film dissolves into a dubious narrative about how Oja duped the artist into producing an entire period of his own work that retrospectively he couldn't claim. All the while, Welles brings up moments in his career in his steady, articulate, confiding drawl, reminding us that he started as famous and everything declined from there - the same trajectory of fame as that 'enjoyed' by the builders of Chartres cathedral, a totem of civilisation whose provenance is entirely irrelevant. The whole film is quick, colourful, sexy and fun and rendered even more so by the light but cultured jazz touch of Michel Legrand. 7/10

Terrell Howell (KnightsofNi11) Where to begin with this strange little film here? Well basically it is just a documentary by famed director Orson Welles. In this documentary, which has been tagged under the style of "free form," Welles discusses fraud and fakery and the role it plays in art. He does this by telling the story a fraudulent painter and his biographer. The painter paints famous paintings that have already been painted by other well known names like Picasso, Matisse, and Da Vinci, signs them using the original painters name and claims they were painted by that painter. He then sells them as if they were originals. His biographer is in on the hoax as well, documenting his life as if he were really a painter. All the while Orson Welles narrates about the profundities of playing tricks on the mind and how we are so easily fooled by tricks that lay right under our noses. He even plays a few tricks of his own on his audience so that the film accumulates into one big allegorical maze. It is head scratchingly fascinating.The structure of this film can be very difficult to get behind as it is very quick and has almost a stream of consciousness type of flow to it. You have to keep up and you have to really take in everything Welles throws at you from start to finish. The movie is only an hour and a half but there are copious amounts of information thrown at you that you must follow to understand it all by the end of the film. Welles does do a fantastic job at putting the film together though and his meticulous nature in editing becomes very evident after the first ten minutes of the film. I'll admit that I wasn't as invested in this film as I probably should have been, thus I got lost a few times but was, for the most part, able to catch back up and understand it by the end.This film is such a strange departure for the norm for Welles. If you are expecting a Citizen Kane type Welles film you will be disappointed. If you are expecting something different than anything you've seen before then you should be very entertained. Welles is having a great time with this film, boasting his profound ingenuity in all things art and human nature. He wants very much to provide a strange and multi layered experience for his audience and he definitely accomplishes that. He knows what he wants to do with this film and he keeps it very lively and mind bending. The films quick pace never lets up and Welles never ceases to narrate the film with the utmost spite and poignancy. This is a film for those who want to think, and think hard.There are a lot of things at the beginning of this film that could put you off from wanting to finish it. The structure, flow, and tone of the film is all very bizarre and takes some effort to adapt to, but once you do you won't regret it. In fact after that point you will be sucked into the film and you will surely have a keen interest in finding out what it is all leading up to. And when you do find this out I guarantee it will put a smile on your face and make you realize just what a profound genius Orson Welles was. He does something so different with F for Fake, so how could you not like it?