F for Fake

In this funny and provocative film, we meet a motley crew of creative liars, frauds and forgers, with Orson Welles as the master of ceremonies. Take counterfeiter Elmyr de Hory and his biographer, “literary criminal” Clifford Irving. With his fake Picassos and Braques, De Hory deceived the art world. Just a few years after Irving had written a book about De Hory, his biography of Howard Hughes, which he claimed to have based on “exclusive and secret” interviews, was discovered to be a hoax. One month before the book was published, Irving and two collaborators were exposed and imprisoned. Welles was fascinated by this scandal and bought the rights of an earlier documentary on De Hory made by François Reichenbach. Welles cut the film to snippets, which he cleverly recombined to emphasize the questionable nature of its protagonists, and interwove this material with his personal ideas about De Hory and Irving. He reminisces about his own work, including and , and muses about the relationship between faking and making art, and the extent to which audiences like to be deceived.