Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen.
In a massive list of films, many of which are strange, F for Fake (sometimes called Verites et Mensonges) may be the strangest, or at least the most unclassifiable. Is it a documentary? Sort of. It is closer to being a filmed essay on the nature of art and forgery. It is also a fortuitous collection of coincidences that, if believed, are almost impossible to reconcile. In a film that is itself about hoaxes, it might be the supreme hoax that everything worked out for Orson Welles the way it did.
The upshot of the film is a profile on the world’s greatest art forger, Elmyr de Hory (who appears in a great deal of the film) Welles, in front of the camera for some scenes and “behind the scenes” but still in front of a camera in an editing room, tells us about the strange career of de Hory, who manufactured a number of original pieces of art in the style of famous artists, passing them off as the work of others.
