Awesome Welles

Outside of brief mention here and there, I don’t normally plug Criterion DVDs because of a personal gripe on my end. Having essentially dismissed my website—I often wonder how much (if not all) of my work is regarded as crap—they’ve never sent review copies of films I’d expressed interest in covering. They instead assume that I’ll dish out thirty or forty bucks for a movie and provide my own webspace to promote it, so that they can milk even more money out of my experience. Capitalist snakes!

    I’m sporadically willing to overlook this stinginess, however, and the new 2-disc set honoring Orson Welles’s F for Fake is such an occasion. As the film is currently being discovered by a new generation of film people who seem to have a lot to say about it elsewhere, I’m sure my take on it would be redundant.

    The film once prompted me to track down Clifford Irving’s book, Fake: The Story of Elmyr De Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time and investigate the two principal fakers revealed in Welles’s film. Irving once received a lot of publicity (and a jail sentence) for his bogus account of Howard Hughes, but his personal involvement with Elmyr provided their book with a flavor all its own.

    Among the bells and whistles adorning Criterion’s release is the bonus feature, Almost True: The Noble Art of Forgery (1997). A thin, made-for-TV bio sketch of Elmyr, it draws on some of the footage shot by Francois Reichenbach for his unfinished documentary—footage Welles picked up and reshaped in what is ultimately a fake documentary about fakers. (With apologies to those using the buzzword, I just can’t bring myself to buy the chatter about “essay films.”) In the new film, old friends of the late art forger are informed that a Japanese museum is holding an exhibit of Elmyr’s fakes. But upon perusing photographs of the featured art in the museum’s catalog, all of them agree the exhibit is a fraud, that these are not original Elmyr fakes, but fakes of Elmyr’s fakes! Welles would’ve loved that.