F For Fake

F for Fake is the last directorial role of Orson Welles, And has a rather complicated subject. According to Welles in the Documentary, the subject is on Charlatans and Fakery. It looks at a famous biographer, who chronicles the life of a Famous art forger, Elmyr. The biographer Clifford Irving is also a man of hoaxes, who published a fake biography of Howard Hughes. They discuss both how easy it is, and how justified it is to perform fool people for profit. So to recap, Orson Welles who performed the amazing hoax of convincing half the nation we were under attack by martians, directs a documentary on a biographer who is famous for publishing a fake biography, who charts the life of an art forger who puts out fake Picassos and Modigliani, and everything is 100 percent true.

One of the most incredible points that this film makes, is that they can only perform these feats of fakery only if there are experts. If there was nobody who could say what was a true Modigliani painting, there would be nobody to fool into buying a fake one. Only when somebody positions himself into being an "expert on the subject" can they actually be convinced that they know, because a layman knows that he doesn't.

At the same time, These experts suck away the lifeblood of the creators, both the real ones and the forgers. Art critics sell art at a much higher rate than what they buy them at, making millions of dollars on works that they never created, while the creator gets very little. Their position as an expert means that they et the artificial "final say" on what is good and what is bad, even though they only know a thing superficially. They don't know an Elmyr from a Picasso, but Elmyr does. He does because he painted it. He can spot the difference between his own work and another simply because he painted it. he knows it gesturally. These people can't, they can only pretend to, and if they pretend to well enough and long enough, others start to believe them. And then he's able to make money off of what people believe. They are just as much a charlatan as an art forger. Which is the true irony explored in this movie about fakery. The fakes are just as good as the originals.