Rhapsodies

I’m afraid I kind of botched this one. The title of my planned them was “Don Quixote will kill us all” The idea being film attempts at Don Quixote being complete disasters for the creators. Unfortunately that particular bit of karma seemed to rub off on me causing a mix up that left me not getting my center piece of this exercise, Lost in La Mancha, the tale of Terry Gilliam’s disastrous attempt.

Fortunately I did get the second film on my list, Orson Welles unfinished, Don Quixote.

This was an interesting mostly done at Welles’ level of skill. But otherwise lacking. For whatever reason be it experiment or technical difficulties, a lot of the images were extremely high contrast frequently obscuring peoples faces in other things… Frequently things seemed to be going wrong with the texture, leaving me to wonder if there was anything wrong with the film development.

The film itself was weird. For the most part it reminded me of The Gospel According to St Matthew where, for better of the worse, a lot of the original text sounds a lot different when spoken out loud.

The main conceit of this film is that Don Quixote and Sancho are existing in the modern spain as confused anachronisms. This mostly works with even more people thinking they’re crazy as they wander confused across the Spanish landscape.

The second half of the film seems to lose interest on Don Quixote himself and focuses on Sancho himself wandering though a town festival looking for his master all around the film of Don Quixote is being filmed in the background with Welles as a self referential character.

All in all while I don’t think this would have been a masterpiece if it had been successfully completed but an interesting experiment none the less.