[Read our review of the documentary “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” about the making of this film.]

As Bogdanovich continues, a shot of Hannaford fades out, supplanted by an image of the young Bogdanovich in a transition that puts one of the themes into visual terms. Welles takes on a lot in “The Other Side” — men, women, the decline of Hollywood, the persistence of vision, and the charms, torments and betrayals of close male friendships. “For years, I personally didn’t want this document shown,” Bogdanovich continues, as a lonely horn wails, “frankly, I didn’t like the way I came off in the piece. But I’m old enough now not to care anymore how my role in Jake’s life is interpreted.” That this seems unlikely is presumably the point.

Then again, maybe not; it’s hard to know, exactly, because of the film’s sly ambiguity, which is part of its pleasure, and because Welles did not actually finish it. A handful of others did, including Bogdanovich and the producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza, who relied on memories, script notes and a postproduction team that included the editor Bob Murawski to put Welles’s presumed intentions into commercially acceptable shape. It’s an admirable undertaking, though what relation it bears to the project that Welles carried around in his head — and that he shot and edited for years, massaging it like sculptor’s clay — is a question that only a séance could answer.

What we have is something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses. Its most successful section takes place over a single day that ends in death. Shot in different film formats, it centers on Hannaford, a gruffly appealing macho director based partly on Hemingway. Hannaford, who enters dressed in safari-style clothing that suggests that filmmaking, perhaps life, is an exotic adventure or maybe a blood sport, has recently returned from Europe, where he’s been making a film, also titled “The Other Side of the Wind.”