Welcome To The Desert Of The Real’ consists of a series of reenacted scenes from John Ford’s western ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence’ (1962). Liberty Valence puts in place a framing flashback structure, an inspired invention that offers a distance that if not Brechtian nevertheless provides a basis for contemplation of the Old West, and an enquiry into the question of how histories are made. Ford‘s melodrama is set in a kitchen/saloon, a location which functions as a cramped national stage on which America’s domestication is performed. In Desert of the Real the continuous cross-over between (imagined) history and reality results from the cast of Western re-enactors. The cast is watching the John Ford film in a saloon, an imagery location they cut and pasted together with all sorts of Western gimmicks. After a while it becomes clear that Ford’s Liberty Valence provides the input for their Western alter ego’s. The film documents the re-enacted scenes that were played out in the location of Texas City, a Western village in Belgium, whose origin dates back to the world exhibition in Brussels in 1958.

From the credits we also know the fragments were directed by ‘Alain Smets’. The name may be a reference to the Anglosaxon Alan Smithee. Smithee has a complete oeuvre to his name in the film business, but actually he is a fiction and his name a pseudonym coined in 1969. Directors who wanted to distance themselves from the fruits of their labor could apply for an Alan Smythee-credit with the Directors Guild of America. The reasons for applying remained in-doors.