F for Fake

Fraud, fakery, and falseness: the bane of the internet. The wilds of the web, where charlatans, skulking amongst the 0's & 1's, fleece the unknowing flocks with spurious claims and unreal promises.

Ha! As if that were anything new!

Watch "F for Fake" by Orson Welles (currently on Netflix Instant) for a little perspective. Released in 1974, it was the last movie directed by Welles and another little-known entry in an oeuvre so often overshadowed by his monumental "Citizen Kane."

Critically and commercially a flop when it debuted, it is now considered a masterpiece of film editing. Indeed, Welles spends much of the movie narrating from the editing room and includes many shots-within-shots of the film flickering on a moviola editing machine.

The emphasis on the editing process was a conscious choice by Welles to illustrate that not only are all documentaries a "fake" interpretation of real events through the subjective eye of the director but, by extension, art in general.

Ostensibly, the documentary is the story of Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian painter, who is such a skilled forger of established artists that his works regularly appear alongside the genuine articles. De Hory succeeds where other forgers failed because he produces paintings in the style of the Masters, not forgeries of their known works, making it that much harder for "experts" to debunk.

Welles adds another layer by introducing Clifford Iriving, a writer researching De Hory. Irving, also, is a fraud having produced a fake biography of Howard Hughes. Then there's Picasso - who appears in the movie via animated photographs à la Monty Python - and Joseph Cotten (randomly) and Oja Kodar - Welles' Croatian girlfriend, 26 years his junior - all topped off with excerpts from Welles' infamous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast... that are completely fake.

At the beginning of the film, Welles promises to tell the truth for the next hour. The movie lasts 85 minutes. But even that is not strictly true. Welles the narrator doesn't lie, but Welles the director intercuts faked footage, intentionally misspells titles, and replaces actors with lookalikes.

In an era of digital manipulation, it's even more spectacular that Welles the flim-flam man produces all this fakery with mere sleight of hand (and cut of film). The internet may have made fraud easier for the common huckster but nothing compares to the work of the Old Masters.