It is impossible to make art entirely separate from reality - entirely fake. Any story written in a language is linked to the etymology of each word you use. Any painting you make, no matter how fantastical or abstract, occurs in our world. It is also impossible to make something entirely true, completly accurate to reality. A singular, personal written account cannot accurately paint the entire truth of an event. Not even a picture can truly capture the reality of a moment, it is a representation. (Further, the world as representation. We interpret and create an image with our senses but that isn't necessarily the true state of things.)

Close-Up (1990) is a film that blurs the lines of what is fiction and who are actors, highlighting the lack of a clear divide between reality and unreality. All the world's a stage right? Shakespeare made the fictional performers become the audience in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), our lives a collection of plays we are players in (as well as linking dreams to the waking world like Zhuangzi).

The point of view as an actor or writer is a very strange thing to experience. In the act of playing someone else it creates a mirror that allows you to realize the self you take for granted is a series of acts you are playing. In that space of play (created and bordered through ritual) you can suddenly try and do things usually impossible or taboo in 'real' life. Animals also play in this way, it allows them to practice such things as fighting and hunting that normally would be harmful when not in a safe environment (and it can be fun). Dreams are similar, you can practice running away from a tiger or handling a car with broken brakes that you could otherwise not practice. I am very interested in this definition of play being expanded to the everyday where we are aware of the ritual border lines that we create to allow such things to happen a la, "You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men."

In a final scene of F for Fake (1973), Orson Welles speaks of how a charlatan tries to make fiction real - professional liars are servants to truth who create art (defined as lies) that make us realize the truth. Knowing what's not real narrows what can be real, a la Apophatic Theology. If the appearance of the world is a representation, then by negatation we reach what is beyond our perception through the mirror.