May 29, 2024

Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

1 hour 26 minutes

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics.

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RERERENCES

Orson Welles, F for Fake

Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2

Elmyr de Hory, art forger

Clifford Irving, American writer

Howard Hughes, American aerospace engineer

David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film

David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

Pauline Kael, Raising Kane

“War of the Worlds” radio drama

The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse”

Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974)

Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius

Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets

Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Sokal affair, hoax

Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration”

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By SpectreVision Radio

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