M i g u e l d e C e rva n t e s

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

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha. Madrid: Juan de

la Cuesta, 1605. El Ingenioso Cavallero Don Quixote de La Mancha.
Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615.
aaa Reading with Welles

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

British accent and Tamiroff that of a Mexican-American immigrant.

Jess Francos film inconsistently retains portions of this experiment,
while incorporating footage that Welles did not intend as part of the
film (2015a, pp. 8182) and engaging in un-Wellesian imitations of
prior adaptations by Pabst and Grigori Kozintsev (1957).
Rosenbaum and Mller emphasise the extent to which Welles
scholars have addressed the adulterations in the four versions screen
ed to date. Acknowledging exhibitions of unreleased sequences by
Kodar, Costa-Gavras and Jean-Luc Godard, Mller has proposed the
restoration of a complete Mexican version (2016, p. 62). Even as he
anticipated Jonas Mekas and the film diary advocated by the Ame
rican avant-garde of the 1960s, however, Welles may have hesitated to
risk his reputation for technical finesse and intended his adaptation
to remain an experimental sketchbook. Cervantes multiple levels of
narration find polished expression in the films interruptions, The
Trial (1962), The Immortal Story (1968) and F for Fake (1973).
Gilles Deleuze and Andr Bazin have admired the virtuoso
treatment of deceptive mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai and Oth-
ello; but the philosopher Giorgio Agamben prefers an episode shot in
Mexico in 1957 in which Reiguera, Tamiroff and Patty McCormack
(Dulcie) meet in a movie theatre whose screen Quixote shreds with
his sword, reconfiguring an attack on a puppet theatre production
in which Cervantes mocks his own tragic history (2015b, pp. 9394).
For Agamben such intangibles as love and memory remain beyond
reason; to attempt to decipher the unknowable within us is to invite
ridicule with more doublings, simulacra and hallucinations. Here,
even as he parodies the triumphant mise en abyme that concludes the
News on the March in Citizen Kane, Welles undoes the screen-mir-
ror circuit of spectatorship posited by the likes of Christian Metz,
and it is that conclusive renunciation that elicits Agambens chapter:
The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema.
Anthony R. Guneratne
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Don Quixote, 1999.
Giorgio Agamben. Profanations <2005>, 2015b.
Adalberto Mller. Orson Welles: Author of Don Quixote, Reconsidered, 2016.
. Orson Welles: Banda de um Homem S, 2015a.
Jonathan Rosenbaum. Discovering Orson Welles, 2007.
Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. This Is Orson Welles, 1992.