Authorship
One of the main themes of F for Fake is authorship. We see a man, Elmyr who is being accused by Irving of being a fraud. That he has committed forgery and must be put away. We see that Elmyr is able to recreate a master work of art in a matter of hours or with some works, minutes. Welles' film demands that we take a closer look at the works of art in order to determine who is the actual author. What blurs the line of authorship is that Welles introduces Picasso's philosophy about being able to tell the fakes from what is real, and that Picasso seems to play with the idea that he himself has created fakes.
Expertise
Throughout the film we hear of museums across the world purchasing works of art by Elmyr that he forged based on master works. These works of art have hung in museums for years, and been passed off as the real thing to the public who pays to see them. Welles uses this theme of expertise to demand that we see that these so called experts know little more than others. They merely are experts because they are given positions that people believe makes them one. One museum expert is said to agree with Irving that a painting is a fake when Irving shows it to him. Irving them shows the same work to another expert at a separate museum, telling that person it is the real thing. And, the expert agrees. The point is that without experts there would be no forgers, as they are the people who've created the art market.
Charlatanism
Orson Welles tells us that he is a charlatan at the beginning of the film. We come to discover that Welles has used the true story of Elmyr and Irving in order to create a fake story that ties into it. The beginning and the end of this film are lies in order to reveal a truth. They are sequences both written by Oja Kodar and placed into this free form documentary in order to show that artists use lies in order to reveal a truth. This charlatan narrator, Welles has spun it around on us and used the truth of the art forgery to tell us a lie. One which we come to believe, and one that Welles has a great deal of fun creating to cause us to question everything we see, and most importantly to question art.
