Layers of Fake

Orson Welles's last finished movie is the anomalous pseudo-documentary F for Fake that I need to see at least one more time in order to make a complete analysis. The film involves, among others, notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, his biographer and fellow faker Clifford Irving (whose story involving the fabricated autobiography of Howard Hughes is told in the film The Hoax starring Richard Gere), and Orson Welles himself, who variously purports to tell the truth "strictly based on the available facts" and confesses to falsehoods while simultaneously creating others. The result is less illuminating than further confounding; rather than fully expose de Hory and Irving's lies, Welles appears in some sense to join forces with them or even attempt to beat them in some sort of faker competition.

The film gives an odd sense that fraud has a sort of viral quality, that either exposing fraud turns the exposer into a fraud himself, or that only fakers can see the falsehoods of others. I wonder to what extent the exposer of fraud feels he has power over the exposed, even that his exposé allows him to then commit his own frauds. It's difficult for me to discern truth from lies in a film that lies about telling the truth and lies about lying to its viewers, and perhaps this is the point. I'm comfortable with fiction because it does not say it is truth, but F for Fake, which seems to flip-flop the ideas of truth and fiction with varying amounts of success, makes me all sorts of uncomfortable.