F for Fake

Dir. Orson Welles. 1973, 88 mins. 35mm. With Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, François Reichenbach. Welles’s groundbreaking essay film presents a hall of mirrors portrait of professional art forger Elmyr de Hory, as well as literary fraudster Clifford Irving, at the former’s home in Ibiza. It’s a film that gleefully topples society’s accepted notions of aesthetic value, authorial authenticity, the relationship of powerful men to society, and the very nature of truth in art. Engaging his own relationship to trickery from his sideline as a magician to his infamous 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, Welles’s film is a cinematic confessional that’s also an alibi, and finally an inventory of cinema’s capacities to reveal and deceive in the same breath.

Includes Museum admission and access to Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen exhibition.

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). Order online. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.