Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón
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Media Representations of Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón Sonya S. Gupta lamia Millia Islamia Don Quixote de la Mancha is a foundational text of Western literature and can undoubtedly be considered the master narrative of Spanish culture. During the four hundred years of its publication, the novel has not only lent itself to varying critical perspectives, but has also, as Anthony Cascardi puts it "spawned a range of suceessors:.I Cinema is one medium through whieh the text has reaehed mass audienees eutting across cultures and languages. In faet, ever sinee the birth of cinema, the Knight of the Mournful Countenanee has inspired filrnrnakers around the world. Their visions of Miguel de Cervantes' novel and his delusional devotee of ehivalry and romance have brought to the sereen innumerable representations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza whieh, together with Gustav Doré's rnid _19th century engravings, and later, Picasso' s drawings and the Lladró company' s international line of Quixote figurines, have created a "cumulative I Anthony Cascardi, Cambridge Campanian ta Cervantes, Cambridge, Cambridge Universíty Press, 2002, p.I Sonya S. Gupta iconography,,2 that has shaped the protagonists of the seventeenth century Spanish classic in the popular imagination.3 2 See Augusto Manuel Torres, Conversaciones con Manuel Gutierrez Aragón, 2d ed., Madrid, Fundamentos, 1992, p 218-19. 3 As early as 1902, the French pair of Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Noguer became the first in bringing Cervantes' text to cinema in a 16 seconds film. Their compatriot George Meliés did it again in his film entitled Les aventures de Don Quichotte (1908/Star Film, 355 feet. BW. Silent). The Catalan Narcis Cuyás was the first Spanish director to take up the challenge in 1910. Edward Dillon directed in 1914 the first North American version of Don Quixote and Amleto Palermi, an year later, the first Italian version called Il sogno Don Chisciotte. After these early adaptations in silent cinema, the Quixote was brought to the screen in the first sound track version in 1933 by the German Georg Wilhelm Pabst . In 1947 Rafael Rivelles and Rafael Gil gave cinema the first Quixote who spoke the language of its author. The 1957 Russian film, directed by Grigori Kosintsev with Cherkassov as Don Quixote, is said to be a masterpiece. More recently, the ballet versions of Barishnikov and Nureyev have been made into films. Hollywood has presented Quixote in several versions ranging from musicals to melodrama. The 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha with Richard Kiley as Quixote (Rex Harrison was cast as the original lead) became a huge success and was made into a film version in 1972 with Peter O'Toole as Quixote and Sophia Loren cast as Dulcinea. Hollywood's continued interest in Cervantes' masterpiece also produced the TNT tele-film, Don Quixote (2000) with John Lithgow as Quixote, Bob Hoskins as Sancho Panza and Vanessa Williams as Dulcinea. But the most ambitious project as far as Hollywood is concerned was Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2000), a film that had to be abandoned just a few days into the shoot. On day one of the shoot, in northern Spain, 70-year-old Jean Rochefort, who had landed the part of Don Quixote, began feeling ill. On the second day, while the film's main star Johnny Depp prepared to shoot his initial scenes, the heavens opened and a flash flood washed away the entire set. On day four, while the crew tried to rebuild the set and scrape layers of mud from costumes and props, GiHiam realised that the entire landscape had changed colour. The f:32 million film project thus feH apart after illness, financial problems and floods. Lost In La Mancha (Documentary ,1 hr. 378 Media Representations 01 Don Quixote by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón This paper will look at recent attempts by the Spanish filmmaker Manuel Gutíérrez Aragón's at cinematic adaptations of the novel and the polítical and cultural contexts of their production. More specifically it will focus on bis recent film El caballero Don Quijote released in November 2002. Gutíérrez Aragón had earHer done a TV adaptatíon of Cervantes' masterpiece for Spanish national television, the RTVE, which was broadcast in 1992. Gutiérrez Aragon's Cervantine inspiration, however, can be traced back to sorne of his earlier films. His 1984 film La noche más hennosa (The Most Beautiful Night) is inspired, for example, as far as the plot is concemed, by the short novel El curioso impertinente (The Curious Impertinent) intercalated in the Part I of Don Quixote (Book IV, Chapter VI too VIII). I shall try to trace Gutiérrez Aragón's recent film and the TV adaptation of Don Quixote as moments in the last two decades or so of Spain's contemporary cultural history in which Cervantes has been invoked as a cultural icon for the articulation of Spanish national identity in democratic Spain. 1 propose that while the 1984 film La noche más hennosa was a daring adaptation of Cervantes's work, representative of the hybridity of the Spain of the 80s, the 1992 TV adaptation was a reverential retelling packaged by the officialist cultural project of the Spanish Socialist govemment. The recent film, El caballero Don Quijote, attempts to move away from that officialist stamp as well as the "cumulative iconography" around the protagonists of the novel that we have tried to trace earlier. 32 min, January 31st, 2003 LAlNY) records the "unmaking of the film". (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe). 379 Gutiérrez Aragón and bis Cervantine Inspiration Without elaborating in this essay on the huge corpus of writing by modernists such as of Américo Castro or Miguel de Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset, it would suffice to say that there exists an entire twentieth century discourse in Spain, in its literature and historiography, on what constitutes "Spanishness" in which Cervantes has been invoked in a major way in the articulation of Spanish national identity. This iterative invocation of Cervantes and bis texts, particularly the Quixote, has continued even in present day Spain at the level of official as well as popular culture in reimagining a national identity at a time when multi-nation federalísm has tended to erode the old model of nation-state in the polítical climate obtaining in Post-Franco Spain. As Dona Kercher points out in her essay "The Marketing of Cervantine Magic for a New Global Image of Spain," 4 on March 21, 1991, the Spanish Cortes institutionalized this articulation by passing a law establishing the Instituto Cervantes, an international network of Spanish cultural centers whose chief patron and honorary president is the king himself. Jt is therefore not surprising, she says, that in the most symbolic year of 1992, when the U.s. and major European film industries were celebrating the quincentenary of the so called "discovery of America" by releasing new films on the life and deeds of the explorers, the Spanish Ministry of Culture had acquired the rights to Orson Welles unfinished movie Don Quixote and was releasíng a montage of it done by Jess Franco, and Spanish TV was broadcasting Gutiérrez Aragón's adaptation of the first part of Don Quixote. The montage of Orson Welles's footage 4 See Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation, Ed. By Marsha Kinder, Durham, London, Duke University Press, 1997, pp 99-132. 380 was projected as a part of a commemorative project for the Expo '92 entítled "Don Quijote y Don Juan: la seducción de la utopía" (Don Quixote and Don Juan: The Seduction of Utopía). In connection with thís event, the Asociación de Directores de España (Association of Spanish. Stage Directors) published a cornmemorative volume on Welles's film, Don Quixote, which included a Spanish translation of sequences from Welles's script and artícles by film critics Juan Cobos and Esteve Riambau.5 We have said aboye that Gutiérrez Aragón's engagement with Cervantes dates earlier to the RTVE project that he was comrnissioned to directo However, Cervantes may, in fact, be the key towards understanding his cinematic credo. Vicente Molina Foix, in a recent book on Gutiérrez Aragón,6 has said that though he is considered a surrealist, Gutiérrez Aragón's cinematic fantasies are actualIy allegories of the real Spain. A graduate of the EOC (Escuela Oficial de Cine), Gutiérrez Aragón's filmography now spans more than three decades. He began his film career in the 70s. His films of the late seventies are rooted in specific moments 5 Welles's film is now available in a DVD edition brought out by Vellavision in 2003. Most with more than a passing interest in Welles know all about the piecemeal filrning of Don Quixote, a film that Welles eventually appeared to treat more as a personal project for his own enjoyment, rather than any kind of commercial enterprise. Quixote was not a studio product, and Welles was under no obligations to deliver it to anyone at any time. Welles's is a "modero" Quixote. The film transposes the action to a city full of cars and motorcycles, drugstores and junkyards, radio, televisions and movie carneras. Even though the "finished product" offered by Jess Franco may be nowhere near a Welles original, scenes such as the one in which Quixote tries to rescue a woman he perceives to be captured by a dragon (and is actually just riding a Vespa) do give a glimpse of the hybrid nature of Welles's emerprise. 6 Vicente Molina Foíx, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Madrid, Cátedra, 2003 381 of polítical protest during the Franco era: Camada negra (Black brood, 1977), Sonámbulos (Sleepwalkers, 1978), El corazón del bosque (The Heart of the Forest, 1978), though ínspired by actions of polítical protest, have been considered surrealist.