April Book + Film Club: F is for Phony/F for Fake

Join us for Book + Film Club! Each month, we will read a book related to the craft of filmmaking or a literary work that has been adapted to a film. At the end of the month we will meet to watch a related film and then discuss!

Our April 2023 session will interrogate the fiction/documentary divide with F Is For Phony: Fake Documentary And Truth’s Undoing and dive into Orson Welle’s F for Fake, a documentary of sorts that is equal parts “an inspired prank and a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema.”

Book: F Is For Phony: Fake Documentary And Truth’s Undoing by Alexandra Juhasz & Jesse Lerner

– “”By far one of the most intriguing essays was “The Artifice of Realism and the Lure of the ‘Real’ in Orson Welles’s F for Fake and Other T(r)eas(u)er(e)s” (sic), by Catherine I. Benamou. She deals with the film of her title but also with Welles’ trickery in his “War of the Worlds” broadcast and his film masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Her arguments are intellectually challenging, and she employs demanding academic language filled with words that will send you to your dictionary.” Documentary.org

Film: F for Fake (1973, dir. Orson Welles)

– “F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.” – Variety

April MAILING Registration Deadline: Friday April 7. Books will be mailed within 72 hours of this date.

April PICK UP Registration Deadline: Monday April 17. Pick up from our box office during our operating hours of 2pm-10pm Thursday – Sunday. (You will receive an email when your book is ready to be picked up.)

Register by the first Friday of the month to have your books mailed to you. If you sign up after the deadline, don’t sweat it! You’ll just have to pick up your book from the cinema box office.

Private screening and discussion will take place at Sidewalk Cinema April 26th at 7 PM.