In his book, Discovering Orson Welles (2007), Jonathan Rosenbaum recalls eating lunch with his eponymous figure in early July 1972. The outsized artist was nearly finished with his latest film, to be released the following year under the tide F for Fake (1973). Welles mentioned his movie during their mealtime conversation, telling Rosenbaum that it was "'a new kind of film,' ... though he didn't elaborate"; Rosenbaum adds that despite the pomposity of Welles's claim "it's turned out to have been accurate" ("Orson Welles's Purloined" 289). By and large, however, few filmgoers at the time oî F for Fake's release responded well to this "new kind of film." Not only did the movie fail to find an audience in the United States and England, but "[m]ost American reviewers simply didn't get it. Stanley Kaufmann derided F for Fake in the New Republic as 'a piece of gimcrack japery, an ad hoc pastiche that Welles is trying to pass off as a planned work of chicanery'" (McBride 249-50). Despite being a commercial and critical failure upon its debut, F for Fake has aged well (McBride 250) and found new audiences with its 2005 DVD release as part of the Criterion Collection.

Besides his co-writing, directing, and editing credits on this curious film, Welles also takes the on-camera roles of narrator, guide, and magician, as he tells the astounding true story of art forger Elmyr de Hory, whose paintings done in the styles of various twentieth-century masters purportedly still hang, falsely attributed, in some museums and collections. Welles's direct addresses are interspersed into cleverly re-edited footage - originally shot as a documentary by François Reichenbach - of the charming counterfeiter living comfortably on the Spanish island of Ibiza and interviews with Clifford Irving, who wrote Elmyr's biography, Fake! (1969). However, Welles quickly announces Irvings own forgery: the writer later admitted to falsifying an "authorized" biography of reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, a hoax he was perhaps "cooking up" at the time Reichenbach s documentary was filmed.

As he navigates through these layers of deceits, Welles employs a maddening structure. F for Fake jumps from subject to subject, circulating among Elmyr, the Hughes/Irving scandal, Welles's ruminations on art and autobiographical reflections, and fictional pieces conceived by and starring the actress Oja Kodar - all held together by Welles's commentary. Recurrent throughout the film are evocations of magic and an obsession with voyeuristic "girl watching." Welles uses these myriad components, with the intertwined stories of Elymr, Irving, and Hughes serving as a spine, in order to question assumptions about originality and authenticity. Welles's treatment of this mélange is dizzying, but also marvelousiy inventive. The film is boisterous, playful, and occasionally poignant in its keenly self-conscious interrogation of artistic value.

Surprisingly, despite the continued relevance of the film s themes - not to mention its formal innovations - the critical literature on F for Fake remains relatively sparse. Rosenbaum s aforementioned text contains over two dozen pieces ofWelles criticism, yet only three short articles - one of which was originally published as the film's DVD liner notes - directly address F for Fake. Typically, critics seem disinclined to give focused attention to F for Fake, preferring instead to refer to it, usually briefly, within discussions of some trend in Welles's work,1 or as a counterpoint in analyses of other films. Moreover, although both Joseph McBride and James Naremore without question offer illuminating commentary on F for Fake in their respective book-length studies of Welles's career, neither author devotes more than ten pages of serious discussion to the film. This critical gap is unfortunate, as F for Fake - an odd, intriguing, yet underappreciated film - merits a larger critical conversation.

This paper, then, pushes toward correcting that absence, and initiating a more extensive conversation surrounding F for Fake. …