(Editor’s note: The following article first appeared on the Italian website Quinlan rivista de critica cinematografica on July 10, 2015. The following translation was conducted by Mike Teal. The Don Quixote workprint will be screened in Paris again on July 27).
By ALESSANDRO ANIBALLI
and DARIA POMPONIO
Projected last June 29 at the Paris Cinémathèque, was the “working copy” of Don Quixote: a unique opportunity to view one of the unfinished masterpieces of Orson Welles, whose last public screening dated back to the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.
If you opened a gap between our reality and a hypothetical mythological universe, we may perhaps finally see a polymorphic chimera and understand how many animal species have been made; and if it was a fairytale world that was our destination, a galloping unicorn might cross our path. In the dream world of cinephiles, however, it is some of the unfinished films by Orson Welles that would be shown, in a final cut of the author.
Unfortunately, it is well known that too much of the filmography of the director of Citizen Kane is made of non-finished works and other fragments of often excruciating beauty. This significant portion of the filmography of Welles, to return to a Platonic reference, thus pertains to an “ideal” world that is not accessible to sight but rather to the intellect; indeed, to one intellect in particular: his.
In fact, to merely view the unfinished works is certainly not enough, so we must also rush to their rescue with historical and philological reasoning, inevitably mixed with a film fan appreciation that brings a compulsive and passionate love for film. It’s a bit with this attitude that we must approach the vision of unfinished Welles, so that in this (so far) hot summer of the first centenary of his birth, we can hope to capture the attention of more scholars and enthusiasts.
Among the various celebratory initiatives planned, the Cinémathèque Française kicked off a rich retrospective last June 17, including all the films directed and completed by the author (with often inappropriate final editing and manufacturer; just think of the pride of the Ambersons), a selection of those simply acted in (including Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, Ro.Go.Pa.G., and the indispensable The Third Man), and the addition of some tasty treats (Too Much Johnson, the work print of The Deep, a fragment of Macbeth with the African-American actors Theatre, an interview with Roger Hill), that runs until the 2nd of August. Meanwhile, Il Cinema Ritrovato of Bologna has put on their schedule Portrait of Gina and an extract of an unpublished interview by Welles with Gina Lollobrigida. Also,from 7th July until 2nd August, there is being plannied a tribute organized by the Munich Film Museum, an institution to which Oja Kodar, last companion of Welles, donated all the material shot by the American filmmaker in the later years of his activity (from about 1970 until 1985).
But among the things seen and not seen, the flagship of the Parisian retrospective, was undoubtedly the projection, on the 29th of June, of the famous “Don Quixote” working copy, unseen by most people since 1986, the date of its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival. This was an opportunity so rare as to justify a trip across the Alps. To introduce the copy, in a crowded room in each place order: the artistic curator of Cinémathèque, Bernard Benoliel, who has provided some technical and historical data on the copy, and Director F.J. Ossang (author, among others, Dharma’s Gun), big fan of Welles.
To see the unseen, is a paradox therefore possible, although not realistic. If it would have really been the Don Quixote of Welles is not given to know, although we know that it certainly doesn’t look like the version mounted by Jess Franco, the only one now available on Home Video. The projected copy at the Cinémathèque was the confirmation of that (both versions were shown) and contains a rather explanatory sequence that somehow sums up both it’s status and the desire of viewers. This is the moment in which Sancho Panza is completely bewitched by a telescope, the powerful optical instrument able to enlarge or shrink reality, and includes a peddler who, for payment, promises he will be able to see the Moon. But Sancho just can’t see it through those lenses and a magical effect happens when, the man asks slyly “Do you want to see the Moon?”, and suddenly there gleams the Moon, rising behind him, invisible and unfathomable.
Probably we too find ourselves now in the same condition of Sancho Panza in front of the whole collection of unfinished Wellesian legacies: we have now several tools, hours of footage, but we are not able to see what we want. What we have to do is analyze, dismember, decompose and recompose, and brew in our imagination, animated by the unquenchable lust for completeness that, just like the moon to Sancho Panza, we cannot accept not being able to have.
Certainly from the vision of the “working copy” at the Cinémathèque emerges for the first time some essential data, such as the fact that the “Don Quixote” is (or could be) a film about ages past, where the fight against the “windmills” assumes the valence of rebellion against a modernism increasingly hostile if not dangerously despotic.
Instead of calling this a “film testament” however, it is preferable to use the proposal made for Don Quixote by the same Welles to a young Mauro Bonanni (editor of the film between 1969 and 1970; in this respect, see our interview), of “film son”: rebellious, insufferable, but certainly much loved. In the sequences viewed in Paris we sometimes discover a Sancho Panza intent on attending to the “Master” (and this is what he calls him): that is, as in the early shots, to pick him up and carry his full weight along the streets of a village, to make him a thorough bath in a tub, or even to save him from a flock of sheep, making the shepard’s angry.
In addition, this copy finally (as it is difficult to grasp it fully in the spurious version of Jess Franco) conveys the body and meaning of Welles’s intention to transfer the inspiration of Cervantes’ novel into contemporary times. Fundamental to this time change of the protagonist not understanding his new reality, is that it is often embodied in an object that was then new (shooting started in ’57 and finished in 1969), but was already the harbinger of nefarious omens: television. There are two sequences dedicated to this demonic instrument: in the first, the most eloquent and impressive, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza look probably (the reverse shot is absent) at a television, perhaps in a showcase, perhaps positioned on a roadside. Their faces stand out against the background of a palace and their glances often go straight toward the camera (or on a TV with a blank screen), you can hear the stentorian voice of a speaker over which overlaps the harsh words of the master: a real excommunication addressed to this modern devilry. But it is too late, as Sancho Panza is already hypnotized, as we can see in his rapt eyes and his greeting that addresses that object which is invisible to us.
The other sequence on the theme of the new “opium of the people” is precisely a second encounter between Sancho and the TV, this time in what appears to be a bar: he watches a woman and her lover, while she looks at the camera; Sancho does not know what is transmitting. It seems that Welles wanted to include the shooting of the Moon landing, echoing therefore what was in the scene of the telescope. This hypothesis that there is a connection between the sequence at the bar and that of the telescope has already been proposed by Elena©deric Dagrada in his essay, “Orson Welles’s Second Don Quixote” (this is the link).
Then add the numerous antennas that dominate in many shots of the characters, violating their atemporal purity and that of the surrounding landscape. Therefore Welles is long dabbling with the meaning of television, and his opinion appears to make it look like a net of anesthesia.
We ultimately guessed at another fundamental link with current events as represented by the references to Francoism, another dictatorship that managed to create a lethal partnership with the nascent monster of Television. These are veiled hints, yet eloquent: Don Quixote lies in a cage and imparts libertarian precepts to his disciple. Later we will see him even with his fist raised, while under the gaze of a worried Sancho Panza. It is impossible then, not to notice the military presence in the midst of the festive chaos of a bullfight, since the soldiers are the only ones among the bystanders to be completely unexpressive, sort of like masks of wax.
Truthfully, there are not many scenes that are fully mounted in this copy work, which every now and then hits some repeated shot (obviously Welles wanted to reserve the right to decide later which to insert) together with many moments of travel, with our villains in the saddle. However, these are moments that are unable to glue together the various “completed” fragments. Therefore, there is a persistent feeling that the position of the various sequences are interchangeable.
Of course, in certain shots of the film, and in some of the prolonged discussions, a Wellesian taste is well distinguishable, starting from a dialog in the desert, which sees Sancho Panza speak to the master (the audio is absent in this fragment) who is sitting on the ground, putting on his socks: the low angle, and the pan focus, starting at the feet and going up to heaven, are the impeccable trademark of the director of “Citizen Kane”.
The two “urban” sequences then, certainly constitute the moments in which the genius of Welles occurs without hesitation. One in particular, in an astonishingly shrewd judgement of modernity, shows the two making their entry into a city governed by a totalizing “mise en abyme”(scene of abyss): everywhere their effigies dominate, celebratory and at the same time ironic, since they are tastefully “posthumous”. There are the tiles painted with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on their steeds, then a playful sign that advertises a “Don Quixote Beer” falls on the two, while the disciple helps the master to bathe in a humble tin tub. But most striking of all is the crowd that welcomes them, cheering when our heroes make their entrance into the city: street children who come barefoot, students in uniform, a parish priest who – amazed – uses eyeglasses to better see and understand what is happening, women in aprons and men who are removing obstacles from the path of the newcomers.
Sancho and Don Quixote thus appear as eternal icons, always recognizable from masks, and other simulacra, prematurely emptied of meaning and identity. Don Quixote was in fact designed already by Cervantes as an anachronistic character, out of touch with the world, too obsessed with romances to accept his brute reality. Welles, by moving him and Sancho into the contemporary world, does nothing more than emphasize this anachronism. Thus, in the eyes of the people that rush into the piazza, the two evidently embody actors appearing in costume, as in a carnival out of season, while in the fictional film it really is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. This is the ridiculous tragedy of the two characters.
Moreover, in the documentary “Rosabella The Italian history of Orson Welles”, by Ciro Giorgini and Gianfranco Giagni, the editor Renzo Lucidi – who worked on an early version of Quixote at the end of the fifties – said that Welles, after discarding the idea that he would introduce this version of the film to the public (a bit like the unrealized “Heart of Darkness” project), decided then that Don Quixote would have to begin with a costume party in which at one point appear the two protagonists, receiving praise and congratulations for their perfect disguise. Except that the knight and his squire, a bit ‘surprised by the attention, would then revealed that this was their real identities, unleashing the hilarity of present course.
Then, this simple deception by Welles – faced with a scene like that of the people that welcomes its protagonists, or in front of the capitalistic “branding” of the quixotic icon, is slowly stratifying: on the one hand there is the ever-changing (Spain in the twentieth century, however closed in an eternity, and it is apparent that the Franco regime, like any autonomous dictatorship, claimed to “stop time”). The other is the ever-present, and the everlasting, crystallized in these two characters. And, faced with trying to make sense of it (that of Don Quixote and beer which is the pre-Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”), the two meet – unknowingly and unconsciously – with their archaic rituals: the tub for wash, spear checked, the nag, the mule, the armor falling and decaying, water resistance against the change history.
But why do we remember these two characters? Why for Welles are they eternal? Not for their success or their world fame. Sancho and Don Quixote are eternal because they embody the nobility, as well as the ridiculousness of defeat. Don Quixote is a man who always loses; who is always hopeless, who is wrong every time, and Sancho, rather than setting him straight, ends up following him in his errors. Moreover, it is known that the losers in Western society automatically become anachronistic, annoying, pathetic, irritating, since history is always made by winners.
But then you cannot help but think, that the label of loser that started with the disastrous and condemned Welles production of The Magnificent Ambersons on, became like the key characters in many of his films, from Falstaff to Jake Hannaford of “The Other Side of the Wind”, from the same Charles Foster Kane, to the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan, floating among the open sewers while just beyond, celebrating victory – ridiculous and far from heroic – is the dilletante Vargas, embodied by Charlton Heston.
And, in this dimension of defeat, it turns out that Don Quixote acquires even a Christological dimension, as a lay preacher. Not only do we see, in fact, a succession or series of personal tragedies that may well establish itself as a kind of passion; stations of the cross which leads not to paradise but only to yet another chapter (in a sort of infinite repetition of the defeat), but we also see – in a sequence of excruciating beauty – Don Quixote rave in the night, shouting against the wind, or perhaps because of the wind, but with no one listening to him, because Sancho is dormant. A preacher unheeded, Don Quixote is seen in this piece – which is also without sound – fidgeting as the foliage occupyies, right next door to us, almost half of the frame, while he is on the second floor of the picture. A little ‘Shakespearean fool, a little’ like Christ in Gethsemane while the apostles sleep, the Quixote here is crying alone against the world, probably aware of the meaninglessness of existence.
In this workprint of the Cinémathèque, we find not only visual epiphanies or narrative lives, but also one of the few sound sequences (unfortunately we know that the original audio track has been lost), in which Orson Welles dubs both of the main characters, with different voices, prodigiously: on the one hand, clean, deep, and polished English tones for the mystical knight; and earthy, folksy, American croaking for his faithful squire. But seeing the film and seeing most of the sequences silent, the overall feeling – perhaps misled by the recent discovery of the “silent film” of Welles, Too Much Johnson – is that the film could exist that way, without sound, given the evidence of visual construction, the perfect geometry of the staging and perhaps even the futility of dialogue at times. At least two sequences are in this state of mind: one in which Sancho dances grotesquely to amuse a group of children before being discovered by his teacher, and one in which Sancho tries to remove one of Don Quixote’s teeth.
So the question that arises spontaneously is whether Welles, once he lost the audio track, and after working for so long on the assembly of certain sequences, wanted things to work just as they were, without further additions of sound. Moreover, just as mentioned in the introduction of the film by the curator of the Cinémathèque, Bernard Benoliel, Welles was, according to Jean-Luc Godard, one of the few directors with editing talent in his genes, like Sergei Eisenstein (and the same Godard). A practice that, in a certain sense, became mandatory for him with Othello (to try to give continuity to the fields and reverse shots filmed in different parts of the world), but from then on it was the main feature of his films (What is “F for Fake” if not an admirable essay film about prohibited editing?)
Both sequences mentioned above have, among other things, the characteristic of having been shot and edited by Welles – slapstick style. And if, on the one hand we have confirmation of the importance of this style from the “Too Much Johnson” discovery (concrete proof of Welles’s passion for comedy), on the other hand we have support for the hypothesis of the epiphany of defeat. We know that Welles loved Buster Keaton above all; so why not try to think that the quixotic anachronism was also the film itself, which was to become a silent film by force of circumstances and by which means he was to honor and rewrite the epic defeat of the twenties comedians such as Keaton?
But in all this, Don Quixote is still an enigma. And after watching the Cinematheque, everything is even more difficult to unravel. Whether it is correct to define it as a “working copy” or not, is in fact hard to say. Beyond it’s official title as such, there are several doubts that arise spontaneously during the viewing. It starts first with the absence of what is now the most famous and important scene in the film, which is when Don Quixote rails against a movie screen just as Quixote, in the novel by Cervantes, did with the windmills. Given the aesthetic and metaphorical power of this scene, it is difficult – if not absurd – to believe that Welles wanted to cut it off from the final cut. Unless I’ve thought to postpone its symbolic value on the television medium, so markedly present here and, most obviously, a much more menacing enemy against which to point the spear. But even in this case, we must admit that these scenes cannot help but raise a hypothesis which is not confirmable, neither is a possible reintegration of the scene into the body of the film.
It seems that Welles had also decided to remove from the film the character of Dulcinea, the girl he loves the Quixote, typical of that courtly love in the romances of the time, and that Cervantes had shrewdly parodied, making him perhaps the most pathetic and yet most fun of all protagonists. Well, over the years, the actress who played Dulcinea at the end of the fifties, Patty McCormack, had grown too much and therefore could no longer embody the role. Welles had therefore decided to delete the character Dulcinea. It is precisely in the scene in the film, even if its actual weight in the sequence does not seem crucial (the scene where recoils looking at the movie screen, alongside Sancho Panza). And when he decided to cut this sequence only to meet the desire of internal coherence of the story, it still appears an excessive sacrifice. But, even in the face of this, we cannot help but repeat the usual assumption: only Welles knew.
Moreover, the absence of the character of Dulcinea in this workprint shown at Paris, also seems to imply that we can partially attempt to decipher the film’s starting point and ending. Everything begins and ends in fact in the same location, a village with a castle in the background, and in both the opening and closing, we sometimes see Don Quixote’s intention to write a letter. Whether it’s just a letter to deliver to Dulcinea, episode after all this in the novel by Cervantes? To confirm this is the fact that Sancho – in the last few frames of the film – takes delivery of the letter and heads to the castle. He meets three ladies, maybe three nuns, and then asks for something (no sound exists even in this fragment). Then, when the women turn away, he decides to tear the paper. Perhaps Sancho understood that Dulcinea is a mere chimera?
Moreover, the circular structure is characteristic of almost all the cinema of Welles, Citizen Kane throughOthello, to The Other Side of the Wind, or even for Falstaff, which among the films made by Welles is undoubtedly the most similar to Quixote, both for the almost-concurrent dates of processing, both for the prevailing location – Spain – which was obviously because Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaneous. And Falstaff precisely is built on a story almost circular: it begins with the protagonist who reminds an old friend that they “have heard the bells of midnight”. (“Chimes at Midnight” is the original title of the film) and goes back to the end – just before the coronation of Henry V and humiliation of Falstaff – with the same exchange of dialogue.
Finally, seeing this workprint makes the work done by Jess Franco in 1992 appear, if anything, even more harmful. This is evident in particular from the assembly: if Welles plays with ellipsis, with sudden shifts in perspective, based on a continuous reorganization of the look, Franco instead in his spuriousness proposed a classic editing field and reverse shot, working statically redundant. The fact remains that – just to complicate even more the question – in the version of Franco there are lots of sequences that are absent in that of Welles. One in particular, in which Sancho is cooking a bird on the spit and Don Quixote initially refuses to eat it (for assumed superiority of the intellectual needs of the physical ones), but then ends up yielding. Had Welles decided to remove it? Impossible to know.
There are thus more questions than answers to be emerging from this vision. There remains, however, to keep looking, maybe armed with a checked spear, hoping that sooner or later we can at least unite all the existing material of the Quixote, now scattered around the world. And knowing that defeat is part of the order of things. But then, to go against the windmills is a very human and inalienable right.
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