The Philm Club cordially invites you to the screening of
F For Fake (1973)
by Orson Welles
89 min.
on Friday, May 25. at 18:00
in Zrinyi 14 / Room 412
Orson Welles' free-form documentary about fakery focuses on the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and Elmyr's biographer, Clifford Irving, who also wrote the celebrated fraudulent Howard Hughes autobiography, then touches on the reclusive Hughes and Welles' own career (which started with a faked resume and a phony Martian invasion). On the way, Welles plays a few tricks of his own on the audience.
imdb.com
Welles’ last finished and distributed film is really a filmic treatise on art and truth, and, given Welles’ voluminous intellect and dazzling talent, it’s a near-masterpiece, and very close to being the ‘new kind of film’ that Welles claimed it was. Of course, its closest antecedent would not be in film but in the supposed ‘nonfiction’ literary works of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Marcel Proust (Remembrance Of Things Past). (...) Welles shifts in and out of reality, mixing archival newsreels, his own snippets filmed all over Europe, and scenes from 1950s UFO films (mostly1956’s Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers)- playing off his infamous 1938 War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, to toy with his viewers’ minds. The editing in the film is magnificent, as words counterpoint with a succession of images which only show that Welles was the first MTV director, a decade before that abomination of modern culture’s lowest common denominator declension appeared. (...) But, editing is only part of this film’s success. Flat-out lying is a major force. (...) the lies serve a purpose, as setups so that Welles can tear at the now bizarrely in vogue notion that ‘art is truth’. As Welles correctly says within, ‘Art is a lie to make us realize the truth.’ Art is not truth itself.
Dan Schneider