Between the completion of his Chimes at Midnight in 1965 and his death 20 years later, Orson Welles remained an unquenchable artist, slumming with Muppets and appearing in whiskey ads to finance his dozens of juggled, absurdly ambitious projects. But despite this productivity, F for Fake and the more casual Filming “Othello” are the only finished films from that stretch of time. Criterion’s expectedly slick presentation F for Fake—which includes a revelatory 1995 documentary by Vassili Silovic about Welles’s uncompleted late-era work—helps to bring this aging Welles, scrapping for his art and catering only to his particular vision, into new, satisfying perspective.

F for Fake is a diabolical, perfume-scented booby-trap of a “movie” that has defied categorization since its release. It’s not a documentary, and Peter Bogdanovich’s preferred term (“essay film”) seems unsuited to the movie’s avant-garde tendencies and stretches of pure fiction. Like David Holzman’s Diary, it’s hard to say exactly what it is—which is irrelevant, since it’s so fun to bob and weave with its free association of BBC documentary footage, winkingly pompous Welles asides, history lessons, and dreamlike meditations on art and truth. The film’s several flights of fancy are grounded on an examination of the life and work of Elmyr de Hory, the world’s most notorious art forger. Arrogant, Hungarian, and in all kinds of denial, de Hory makes the perfect vessel for Welles’s exposure of the fallibility of concepts like expertise and authenticity. As does Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who soon trumped his mentor’s con with his notorious fake autobiography of Howard Hughes; lingered on thoroughly here, that scandal occurred as F for Fake was being made, which speaks to the film’s off-the-cuff open energy. Through footage culled from diverse sources and shot in various formats (then edited with jarring-but-cunning precision), we meet swindlers like these and then Orson himself, who guides us through the lies that got him on stage in Dublin (he told them he was a famous Hollywood actor) and earned his early stateside notoriety (the War of the Worlds broadcast). At the start Welles announces that everything we’ll see in the next hour will be fact, but the film’s final 28 minutes make up a fictional account of Oja Kodar (Welles’s beautiful later-in-life partner) seducing Picasso and her father stealing the painter’s identity. Not as merrily mind-fucking as the film’s first movement, this final segment provides the relaxing noncommitment that only make-believe can.

Orson Welles: One-Man Band, the aforementioned documentary about unfinished projects, is the real prize of this collection’s many minutes of extras, thanks to rare footage of everything from Welles’s Moby-Dick (which consists of him reading selections in front of a blue backdrop) to The Other Side of the Wind to London, a surreal comedy with Welles pulling an Eddie Murphy, filling the roles of several comic types (Asian shop owner, filthy postcard-selling homeless woman, etc..) A PBS-style documentary about de Hory and a 60 Minutes interview with Irving are standard fare but amusing, while a somewhat tacked-on Hughes press conference debunking the autobiography (and many of the rumors about his fingernail length and sanity) is pretty riveting. Only the commentary disappoints; while cinematographer Gary Graver sheds light on the movie’s self-invention and de Hory’s sad suicide, Kodar offers little more than repetitive “What if lies are the truth?” quasi-insights, the same ones that the film itself dances around so coyly.

Singular as they are, a small sigh of obligation still comes with sitting down to stark Welles output like Othello or The Trial. Not so with F for Fake, a viewing experience as exhilaratingly unreal as Lady from Shanghai’s Hall of Mirrors. This thorough Criterion package does more than resurrect a great film. It reminds people that Orson was not hawking snow peas in vain during all of those happily corpulent “beard years”—he was learning new tricks and staying, as since the late 1930s, so many magic steps ahead of the expected.
—JUSTIN STEWART