F for Fake

The film starts with the art forger Elmyr de Hory, a man who sold fakes to the world's great museums. His biographer Clifford Irving is another forger, the one who tried to sell a fabricated Howard Hughes autobiography as real. Welles braids the two stories together and opens the question of authorship, value and who is genuine, folding in his own history as well, from the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast to the fabrications of his early career. Welles described what he was doing as a new kind of film: the personal essay, as opposed to the documentary. Its best-known trick is at the end. He promises the audience that everything in the next hour will be factual. Then he turns around and confesses: for the last seventeen minutes, I have been lying my head off. The section built on Oja Kodar and forged Picassos is invented from start to finish, placed there precisely to measure the audience's willingness to believe. It was rejected on release and its standing came later. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 88 percent. Who it is for: viewers who like the border between fiction and documentary and enjoy being fooled. Who it is not for: anyone after straight exposition. Welles keeps the cutting deliberately restless and never stays anywhere long.