In the last two years, Peter Greenaway has made two films about Rembrandt. More accurately, he’s made two versions of the same film about Rembrandt – a tableau-vivant period piece (“Nightwatching”) and an academic video essay (“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse”) – both of which come stocked with all the director’s signature tics. They also intensely plumb the same topic, analyzing the master’s famous “The Nightwatch,” the circumstances around its painting, and all the mysteries contained therein.

Of the two, “J’Accuse” instantly seems like the more spurious work — a CliffsNotes version of its older brother, culled from its footage and makes roughly the same textual and subtexual points, albeit via an art history lesson instead of a standard dramatic narrative.  Rembrandt discovers a conspiracy, slyly reveals it, and then is just as slyly ruined by the conspirators.  Greenaway himself appears as narrator to explain the evidence, prompted by visual cues present in the painting.  Paired together, the two offer a strange experience, like watching “Citizen Kane” followed by a documentary on William Hearst by the same director, using footage from the first film as evidence for its points.  This is in itself an interesting concept – the documentary as reductive reinterpretation – and its novelty is partially why the movie so deftly prowls the border between fact and fiction.

It’s this balancing act that makes “J’Accuse”  the superior effort.  Because in commenting on “Nightwatching” and Rembrandt’s painting, it also comments on cinema, even storytelling itself, drawing us into a story with a potentially false pretense.  “Nightwatching” makes the same comments through dialogue clues and its fanatic mise-en-scène, with most scenes shot indoors on dark, cavernous sets, the characters posed like they’re on stage (or in a painting).  But it cannot help being trapped inside the form on which it is commenting.  “J’Accuse,” however, is not a work of fiction but a supposed representation of the truth, a lecture with the express purpose of delivering facts.

By nature of their form, “J’Accuse” is therefore the true work.  “Nightwatching” is the false one.  But assume for a moment that all the theories Greenaway presents are false.  Then the equation is flipped.  “Nightwatching,” cosseted by the bounds of fiction, remains fundamentally unchanged.  “J’Accuse,” with its suggestion of actual information, becomes an outright lie.  This dynamic leaves us with a well-constructed trap, a willful invocation of the limits of both the suspension of disbelief and its less-discussed counterpart, where we grant a measure of credence to information offered to us as fact.

The clash of art criticism and cinematic trickery recalls another Orson Welles film, “F for Fake,” where truth and fiction are twisted into an equally confounding knot.  There we follow an ostensibly true story – about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger, and Clifford Irving, his biographer – the veracity of which becomes increasingly difficult to establish.  The biographer, for one, is also a forger; his next book was the scandalous invented biography of Howard Hughes (inspiration for 2007’s “The Hoax”).  Welles plays off this complication, playfully labeling himself a magician and a charlatan, leaving us with a particularly unreliable game of telephone where no one can be trusted.

“F for Fake” works as a wonderful cap for Welles’ career, which he refers to and parodies throughout, pointing to the deep strain of dishonesty in his own work, starting with an infamous 1938 radio broadcast.  These allusions are also a reminder that all films are the products of twinned goals, to inform and to entertain, and that these elements are often doled out in wildly different proportions.

Reductively, we can say that there are three kinds of films.  Supposedly non-fiction works tend toward the informative side of the spectrum, aiming to teach.  Popcorn movies lie at the other.  Somewhere in the middle lies “realism,” which ideally does both in equal measure.  Yet the tricks employed by Greenaway and Welles reminds us of the inherent unreliability of all of these forms, regardless of their intention.

Despite the feel of a creaky parlor game, the combination of “Nightwatching” and “J’Accuse” makes real assertions on the ability of the form to transmit information, as well as how that information should be processed.  This exchange between the two echoes Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil,” a veritable travelogue that ends up being a far more elusive meditation on memory.  It’s an equally thorny smoke and mirrors exercise, where we’re presented the director’s words filtered both through a female narrator and an invented persona, the filmmaker Sandor Krasna, whose idea for a movie he will never make shares its title with the one we are seeing.

In “Sans Soleil,” the medium is all words and images, no narrative structure, and these images are presented more as memories than any form of concrete exposition.  Sometimes the words refer directly to what we’re seeing, but not always, and this divide forces us to wonder about those similarities.  Are they intentional, coincidental, or combinations forced by our own minds?

Thus Marker assigns the filmed story and memory to the same plane.  Both, no matter how much they strive for exactness, are imperfect representations of things that can never be entirely represented.  Like the complicated structures of these other films, they create their story on a meta-textual basis, through archly constructed examinations of story itself.

This leaves us with three very different, but also very similar, examples of narrative transgression.  In each case, story is exploited to show how easily it may be exploited.  In each case, fact and fiction are blended to the point of an indistinguishable smear.  Together they add up to a strangely paranoiac image of cinema, where the urge to be entertained and informed clashes with the inherent deceitfulness of the form.  Viewed in this sense, Greenaway’s paired films end up as inextricably linked, spectral opposites that draw significance by commenting on each other.