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A treat alongside our release of American: An Odyssey to 1947, DocHouse returns to the last film Orson Welles would complete during his lifetime - an innovative masterpiece, now recognised as a cinema classic.
Having begun his filmmaking career with the ground-breaking Citizen Kane, Orson Welles final film was another hugely innovative masterpiece, now recognised as a classic in the history of cinema.
A cinematic essay on the topic of trickery, F for Fake is ‘…too truthful to call a fiction film and too filled with lies to call a documentary, it brings together such seemingly disparate themes as authorship, authenticity, art forgery, architecture, and girl-watching into what Welles himself thought of as “a new kind of film.”’ Colin Marshall – Open Culture
The film is a multi-layered game Welles plays with the audience: featuring archive of the notorious Elmyr de Hory, who recounts his career as a professional art forger. This serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres as Welles attempts to illustrate the artifice behind all filmmaking, even that of a non-fiction variety.