F for Fake

He may be chiefly remembered as the most talented man ever to step behind a camera (whatever the voters in Sight & Sound’s recent poll might say), but Orson Welles always claimed his purest love was magic. Not in the ‘Harry Potter’ sense – Welles’s favoured form was misdirection, sleight of hand, a craft he associated closely with cinema, and which found its fullest expression in his final completed film, a gloriously sly and slippery ‘documentary’. Ostensibly, it’s a portrait of two notorious fakers – art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer (and publisher of an allegedly fictional memoir by Howard Hughes), Clifford Irving. But, like most of his great works, ‘F for Fake’ is really about Welles himself: the consummate raconteur, enthusiast, genius, friend, lover and self-confessed ‘fake’. For all its nods, winks and witty asides, it’s a richly personal work, picking over the questions every creative artist must eventually ask: Am I ‘for real’? Does it matter? And what is all this work worth, anyway?