DVD of the Week: Orson Welles’s “F for Fake”

Orson Welles reinvented the cinema with “Citizen Kane,” and then kept going, though the industry itself hardly helped: most of the movies he made thereafter were the work of an outsider who scrounged financing where he could—including, sometimes, his own earnings as an actor. Many of his films remain unfinished. With “F for Fake,” from 1973, which I discuss in this clip, Welles made a film seemingly out of the uncollected fragments of his life and his work. One of the many distinctions of “Citizen Kane” is its editing—Welles was fanatical about it, which renders all the more poignant the numerous instances of studios recutting his films. “F for Fake” is a masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop. It’s also a film that highlights the artifice of performance even as it affirms the sometimes tragic, sometimes tawdry authenticity of a life devoted to it. The movie is a love story, a crime story, a comedy, a picaresque travelogue, and a paean to art. In short, “F for Fake” is as grand, multitudinous, and original as Welles himself.