Originally planned as part of an anthology of films based on stories from Isak Dinesin’s Anecdotes of Destiny, Welles’ European production was terminated after the first episode which a French television company only produced due to the presence of Jeanne Moreau. Perhaps both illustrating and prophesizing Welles’ chronic post-Kane predicaments with his producers, The Immortal Story unfolds in 19th century Macao where the wealthy, powerful merchant Charles Clay has reached the end of his life’s brutally financial frontiers and sets his bitter, aging eyes on perversely bringing an old seafaring legend to life. His dutiful accountant gathers the desperate “actors” who are to spend one impassioned night together: a young, virile sailor and Moreau’s lovely, victimized Virginie playing the estranged wife who has yet to produce an heir. Welles’ first excursion in color remains one of his more modest, tender experiments about truth, artifice, authenticity and the artist’s quandary of stories told but not lived and those lived but never told.

For his contribution to the omnibus film RoGoPaG—comprised of episodes by himself, Rossellini, Godard and Ugo Gregoretti—Pasolini fashioned an ingenious fable that is both a satire on filmmaking and a tribute to Italian Mannerist painting. Although Orson Welles stars as a director filming the crucifixion, the real protagonist is an unassuming middle-aged man working as an extra to feed his family. The extraordinary meeting of three worlds—high art, moviemaking and all-too-real poverty—leads to a collision with tragicomic consequences, a “collage,” as Pasolini called it, that allows him to effectively critique the distance between ethics and aesthetics.