"Go on Singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter, all that much."

Last night I watched Orson Welles' F for Fake, which is a unusual and spectacular film from 1974 that he wrote with Oja Kodar about fakery in the worlds of art, biography, and film. It is also Welles' confessional about his own past as a kind of charlatan--as a "failed" artist, and as an accidental actor. His final statements about art and identity are astounding.



This is the film's original trailer (the trailer, for whatever reason, is in black and white, while the film is in glorious color).



Welles' had a career-long passion for magic, and the film begins with a series of magic tricks. Here is a clip of some of Wells' earlier work as a magician.