F for Fake is ostensibly a film about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who produced paintings so
seemingly authentic that they fooled the best art critics in the West. His paintings, director Orson Welles claims, are still featured in certain unnamed museums. The film also follows de Hory’s biographer, a man named Clifford Irving, who perpetrates a fraud of his own: a biography of the famously reclusive, famously daft Howard Hughes. And the film is also in its own way its own kind of fraud; in the last twenty minutes, Welles commits a slight of hand so audacious that even now, after several viewings, it still takes my breath away.
So this is a movie about fraud, about deceit. And yet, it is also about authenticity. de Hory is an authentic fraud; so, too, is Clifford Irving. So, too, in his own way, is Orson Welles. In contrast to and competition with these magnificent hucksters–each self-created in his own way, like all great artists are–Welles ranges the unseen ranks of critics, people who hold themselves up as experts on what is truly authentic and who discover, time and again, that they have been hoodwinked. In a telling observation, both Welles and Irving assert that the existence of the critic and the art market produce the fraudster; the latter simply would not exist without the former.
For Welles, the critic cannot validate the work of art; appreciation is not based on recognition. Late in F for Fake, Welles takes his camera to Chartres cathedral, which he calls “a celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man.” The cathedral, by Welles’ account, is an unsigned masterpiece. We do not know the names of the countless craftsmen who worked on its intricate facade; we only know the work itself, still standing and destined, if Welles is correct, to remain long after the other endeavors of humanity have crumbled into dust. Welles imagines the craftsmen of Cartres murmuring “our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.”
The appearance of F for Fake on this list may raise eyebrows. And yet, at its fundamental level, faith is a kind of art, and therefore a kind of artifice. Faith seeks a sensation, a sense of oceanic wonder, a connection to divinity. And the reverse is true: art is faith made manifest: “I must believe,” says a dying man in Welles’ film, “that art itself is real. If it is not….” If it is not, he seems to suggest, then nothing is real. And so we sing on in uncertainty; we sing on, perhaps, because of uncertainty. F for Fake, with all its flim-flam and flummery, is deeply serious about that. — N. Booth (2023)
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