Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics.

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RERERENCES

Orson Welles, F for Fake
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2
Elmyr de Hory, art forger
Clifford Irving, American writer
Howard Hughes, American aerospace engineer
David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
Pauline Kael, Raising Kane
“War of the Worlds” radio drama
The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse”
Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974)
Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius
Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Sokal affair, hoax
Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration”

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