Orson Welles: reality and fiction in the documentary It’s all true
Orson Welles: reality and fiction in the documentary It’s all true

Summary/Abstract: The following paper brings into discussion notions of reality and fiction in Orson Welles’s unfinished pan-American documentary It’s all true, with a focus on two of the episodes which survived the project – Four men on a raft and The Carnival. Considering the definition of documentary filmmaking in John Grierson’s terms as “the creative interpretation of reality” (Grierson; cf. Ward 2006: 6), we will discuss the extent to which political interventions had a say in Orson Welles’s project, Welles’s use of Robert Flaherty’s concept of non-preconception to depict reality, and aspects of recognition, namely samba and Candomblé as Brazilian national realities reinterpreted as fiction.

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