Word: faking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hoodwinkery... swindle... prestidigitation. The themes of Orson Welles's ninety minute film essay. F for Fake, beckon from the press releases like metaphors of easy virtue. They beg to be used--as catch-words and commentary, not only on art forgery (the movie's main topic), but on movies themselves, on Welles as a director, on the art world in general, and on life. A real come on. It's enough to give any reviewer sweaty palms and a self-conscious stutter...
...jumps to his editing room, where he's making movie magic--cutting and splicing a documentary about another sleight-of-hand expert. Hungarian art forger Elmyr deHory. But also about deHory's biographer. Clifford Irving, a hoaxster in his own right. Have it straight so far? F for Fake is thus a cinematic illusion (movie), directed by a renowned beguiler (Welles), about a world-famous flimflammer (Irving) who at the time the film was shot just happened to be assembling a life story of the modern art market's most remarkable phony (deHory). And that's just what the viewer...
...message is that art may just be a big gimmick. Unfortunately, F for Fake, as a gimmick on gimmicks, soon begins to wear thin...
...exhibitionist style cloys, because as pure documentary F for Fake has such potential. Welles tracks deHory down in Ibiza, a picturesque Spanish island, where the forger has given up his life of crime for a jolly semi-retirement. (He no longer sells his fakes--Picassos, Modiglianis, Matisses and Van Dongen--but still occupies a villa provided by an art dealer who has turned a handsome middleman's profit on deHory's imitations...
...Welles couldn't have graciously ceded the spotlight to deHory, instead of forcing himself, and his own legerdemain, to center stage. He keeps butting--reciting from Kipling, lumbering through fog in Ireland, gluttoning himself with oysters and steaks. Somehow this went over big in Europe, where F for Fake has already played. Some superstars have only to throw a little self-adulation into their work--their childhood memories, their hors-d'oeuvres, their kitchen sinks--and eager-tongued adulators lap it up. Welles and Barbara Walters...