In 1937, Orson Welles had a strange run-in with Ernest Hemingway. The future director of “Citizen Kane,” who was then twenty-two, was recording voice-over for the documentary “The Spanish Earth,” a Spanish Civil War film for which Hemingway and John Dos Passos had supplied a text. When Welles proposed some changes, Hemingway rasped, “Some damn faggot who runs an art theatre thinks he can tell me how to write narration.” Welles responded by assuming a fey voice and saying, “Oh, Mr. Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are!” A physical altercation ensued. Then the two men burst out laughing, and got drunk. Or so Welles claimed.

The incident lingered in Welles’s mind. He was probably aware of the sexual ambiguities that lay behind Hemingway’s macho façade. In the nineteen-sixties, Welles wrote a script entitled “The Sacred Beasts,” about a movie director who attends bullfights and becomes enchanted by a charismatic toreador. In a subsequent script, titled “The Other Side of the Wind,” the bullfighter becomes a young actor, whom the director, Jake Hannaford, has discovered, tormented, and driven away. The main action takes place at Hannaford’s seventieth-birthday party, where portions of his latest picture, a cryptic exercise in art-house psychedelia, are being screened. Hannaford drinks himself into oblivion and dies the next morning in a car crash. Welles shot the script in stages between 1970 and 1976, with John Huston in the principal role. About forty minutes of film had been edited when the project became hopelessly mired in financial and legal difficulties. It was unfinished at the time of Welles’s death, in 1985.

In the following decades, Welles obsessives, of whom I am one, experienced fleeting excitement whenever plans to release “The Other Side of the Wind” were announced, only to see the prospect slip back into limbo. In 2014, the Times reported that an agreement had been reached with various rights-holders, who included Welles’s daughter Beatrice; his companion, Oja Kodar; and the estate of the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. A year later, that effort, too, seemed to have stalled, and recriminations were flying on Welles fan sites. Fortunately, the streaming behemoth Netflix had quietly taken an interest, and the company’s resources lifted whatever curse had impeded Welles’s most ambitious late-period undertaking. On September 29th, “Wind” will play at the New York Film Festival, and, on November 2nd, forty-eight years after filming began, it will open in theatres and appear on Netflix.

Over the past year and a half, I have been observing while a team led by the director Peter Bogdanovich, the producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza, and the editor Bob Murawski have worked their way through Welles’s material and tried to surmise what this most unpredictable of auteurs would have wanted. Welles buffs will long argue over their choices, but the film is a major addition to the director’s canon, offering a sometimes harrowingly personal vision. Hannaford is hardly a self-portrait, but his predicament is not unlike Welles’s own: he is a legend whose past overshadows his present. At the same time, “Wind” is an exhilarating forward leap, its rapid-fire editing and pseudo-documentary format heralding modern styles. Ultimately, it has the Wellesian quality of not caring what you make of it. As one of Hannaford’s minions says, bringing out a stack of film cans, “Well, here it is, if anybody wants to see it.”

When Welles fans discuss the fate of “Wind,” the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and—as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established—directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film. She has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to “Wind.” Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms.

Orson Welles with actors on the set of “The Other Side of the Wind.” Photograph by José María Castellví / Netflix

She was born Olga Palinkaš, of Hungarian and Croatian parentage. Welles met her in 1961, when he went to Croatia to shoot his version of Kafka’s “The Trial.” He named her his “present from God,” and persuaded her to change her name; “Ko dar” is Croatian for “as a present.” She, in turn, coined the title of Welles’s final major film. In Woodstock, she told the story: “We walked in Cinecittà, which is a big Roman movie studio, and there was a set from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from Zeffirelli, and the day was very, very windy, and Orson had on him his big black cape, and the wind went under that cape and opened it, and he looked like a giant bat.” She went on to say, “He was more than human. He was an element of nature, he was wind.”

Kodar had written a story about a director who sleeps with his male stars’ girlfriends as a way of indirectly sleeping with the actors themselves. This neatly meshed with Welles’s scenario of the secret desires of a macho auteur. Jake Hannaford’s work-in-progress, which is ostensibly a parody of contemporaneous European films like Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point,” depicts a sexual tryst between Kodar’s character, a Native American radical, and a shaggy-haired Jim Morrison lookalike. “Wind” also includes outtakes in which Hannaford is heard mocking his blank-eyed star, who is named John Dale. (The Canadian actor Robert Random played the role; Welles had seen him on “Gunsmoke.”) Characters around Hannaford speculate on the nature of his relationship with Dale, which seems to combine erotic fascination and sadistic manipulation.

Later, I asked Kodar about Welles’s predilection for such themes. “In terms of the eroticism,” she said, “I think that it was my fault that he got into that.” But, she added, Welles sympathized with gay people and understood their predicament in the pre-liberation days. In an agonizing scene toward the end of “Wind,” Hannaford taunts an elderly, effete man who had once been John Dale’s schoolteacher. Huston’s snarling delivery of the word “faggot” harks back to Welles’s encounter with Hemingway. Huston’s grizzled charm has dominated the movie thus far—“He was the sexiest old devil I’ve ever seen,” Kodar told Rosenbaum—but Hannaford now reveals himself as a monster, a destroyer. At the end, he is heard saying, on tape: “You shoot the great places and the pretty people—all those girls and boys. . . . Shoot ’em dead.”

Until last year, no one knew how much of “Wind” there was and whether it amounted to a real movie. The negative had been sitting in vaults and labs in and around Paris, and, because of legal entanglements, very few people had examined it. In March, 2017, after Kodar signed off on the Netflix deal, more than a thousand reels of film, comprising nearly a hundred hours of footage, were shipped to Los Angeles. The labels on the cans followed an esoteric naming system that took time to unravel. Some were clear enough: “Lights Out” was the scene in which a power outage at Hannaford’s party stops the projection of his movie. “Midget Talk” was more obscure. “Wagonmaster” stumped everyone, until it was noticed that a poster for the John Ford film of that title could be seen hanging on a wall. Most of the lettering was in Welles’s block-letter hand. One could almost hear his voice booming from the storeroom shelves.