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Don Quixote
F
acing povertyto use Orson Welless frequent description
of his own situationfor much of his career, Miguel de Cer-
vantes reluctantly yielded to the popular fashion for ridicul-
ing existing genres with episodic picaresque narratives. Within two
years his brisk 1605 account of a gentleman farmer, whose infatua-
tion with chivalric romances leads to his persuading an unassuming
neighbour (Sancho Panza) to serve as squire to his knight errant
(Don Quixote), won admiring French and English translations and,
soon enough, adaptations by the likes of Shakespeare. Even so, the
poetry-prone Cervantes only succumbed to his publishers pleas for
a continuation when a spurious sequel appeared in 1614.
Residing periodically in The Land of Don Quixote, the title
he gave to a series of television episodes, Welles shared a Quixotic
national obsession that runs from preserved locales to oft-quoted
figures of speech. He is riding through Spain even now, he c onfided
to Peter Bogdanovich (p. 96), as he extended the two decades he
had already devoted to his piecemeal adaptation of the novel across
four countries. It never achieved a definitive form, even though he
completed features in this period treating such Cervantes-influ-
enced figures as Kafka, Blixen and Picasso. Adalberto Mller, who
has methodically sifted through footage in many national archives,
implies that Welles riffs on his erstwhile critic Jorge Luis Borges
whose Pierre Menard, finding it impossible to capture the essence
of Cervantes satirical use of anachronism without literal quotation,
leaves his translation incomplete (2015a, pp. 7475; 2016, pp. 4546).
Although Welles combines the novels episodes and invents oth-
ers, his narrative commentary adheres to Cervantes self-referential
intercessions. Mller suggests that Welles may have known Cer-
vantes in Spanish (2015a, p. 47), thus explaining the inability of a no-
table Welles proponent, Jonathan Rosenbaum (p. 304), to locate spe-
cific sources. In fact, Welles reverted to a technique he had perfected
in earlier radio-broadcast literary redactions by seamlessly incorpo-
rating narrative bridges into alternating passages from translations
that Samuel Putnam (in 1949) and J.M. Cohen (in 1950) undertook
during Spains 193639 Civil War.
Through Cervantes Welles comments on Spains grand, tur-
bulent history and his own. In 1937 Welles narrated Joris Ivens
anti-Falangist propaganda film The Spanish Earth (1937) and later
sojourned in the once-Republican stronghold of Ronda, but he was
constrained to shoot the principal footage outside the country be-
cause his assistant Juan Luis Buuel and his chosen Quixote, Fran-
cisco Reiguera, opposed General Francos regime. Welles may also
have wished to renew his collaboration with the composer for his
1948 Macbeth, Jacques Ibert, whose Don Quixote song cycle had in-
spired G.W. Pabsts multilingual cinematic experiment of 1933.
In the Bogdanovich interviews, Welles emphasised the creative
use to which he put Cervantes techniques (p. 96). Combining the
novels feisty female characters (Altisidora, Dorothea, Zoraida) into a
waspish Vespa-rider and alluding to iconic episodes (windmills taken
for giants, sheep for enemy combatants and marching penitents for
the infernal forces of enchanters), he adopts 1960s direct cinema
techniques that involved hand-held shooting and wild sound audio
tracks. Kafka claims that Quixote is Sanchos personal nightmare, and
in separating them midway Welles launches Sancho (Akim Tamiroff)
on a voyage of discovery beset by technology-induced traumas: in
an unfamiliar urban world, the rural farmer must familiarise him-
self with compound lenses (telescopes), talking boxes (radios) and
moving screens (television) that contextualise festive gatherings by
spouting news about arms races and rockets.
The deaths of his leads in 1969 and 1972 compromised Welles
intention to reveal the films technical deficiencies as the result of
its being a screen projection in a provincial movie theatre, compel-
ling him to shoot what remained around them (2016, pp. 4951).
His last partner, Oja Kodar, sold her rights to a Spanish produc-
tion company, but those aware of more authoritative compilations,
notably director Juan Cobos and editor Mauro Bonanni, refused to
cooperate with the chosen director, Jesus (Jess) Franco whose 1992
cut has been compared to Avellanedas fake continuation of the
novel that so incensed Cervantes that he has Quixote enter a print-
ing house to denounce his traducer (2016, pp. 4446). In order to
assemble a rough cut prior to dubbing the actors voices, Welles re-
corded the dialogue components, according Reiguera an upper-class
M i g u e l d e C e rva n t e s aaa