This film is a documentary. this is some of the most impressive technical cutting, swiping, panning, scanning, freeze-framing and elaborating ever put on film. F for fake, a documentary made by Orson Welles in 1973, explaining specifically how Orson Welles used the presence of filmmaker to manipulate the narrative. The footage teases and tantalizes us – with Irving, for example, talking about de Hory’s fakes while (we now know) planning a spectacular one of his own. But step back from the film, regard it for a moment and it suggests itself on a deeper level as Welles’ musings about the connections between faker and art itself. Trent Griffiths argues, the presence of the filmmaker as a subject in the documentary frame represents a unique relationship between documentary film and history, where the filmmaker engages with social history through their personal experience of authoring a representation of it. (Griffiths, 2013). In F for fake, Orson Welles made three different types of presence. The first of these is a figure of a presenter. Just like in TV programs, the presenter in documentary mainly plays a role in interlinking different parts and their development. The presence and other footage appear alternately, but in terms of time, the duration of presence of the filmmaker is much less than the duration of the material. Orson showed up at the beginning as a magician, wearing a black hooded cloak and a bowler hat, introducing that “During the next hour, everything you hear from me is really true and based on solid facts.”  At the end of the film, he responded it. “At the beginning, I did make you a promise, that for one hour I will tell you the truth, and ladies and gentlemen, for the past 17 minutes, I have been lying.” Besides, after the girl watching sequence, he explained it and then smoothly move into the next part. Without his presence, it is not able to be organized. The presence of the filmmaker makes the entire film like a Mobiles strip, with two ends glued together.

As to F for fake, some critics still take delight in arguing if it should be cataloged as a documentary because by the time documentary are supposed to be totally authentic. At the first glance, it seems like a documentary because it is a story about Elmyr de Hory, the art forger. However, in any case, when being looked in-depth, it is a hybridized film in which heterogeneous footage can be found and mixed here. In my opinion, It doesn’t make any sense to figure out whether or not it is a documentary because the boundary of art is blurred and the ambiguity precisely shows the glamour of art. The history world in documentary is for people to seek for the truth, but at the same time, is for people to misunderstand the truth. Like what Orson Welles proposed at the end of the film F for fake, art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.