Acceso usuarios
Michael Ray Solomon
Since the advent of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, the windmill has become Cervantes's most ubiquitous icon and persistent meme.2 Few discrete moments extracted from literature have enjoyed a more popular appeal than Don Quixote's charge against a group of windmills, whose intersecting blades have come to stand, inextricably, for Don Quixote and Quixotism in much the same way that the cross stands for Christ and Christianity.3 The pinning of Don Quixote to the revolving blade of the windmill, an innovative ploy developed by G. W. Pabst and repeated by subsequent filmmakers from Kovinstev to Gilliam, resonates, perhaps parodically, with images of Christ on the cross-and, more specifically, with drawings and paintings of a crucified Don Quixote from Unamuno to Dali to steampunk graphic novelists Patricio Clarey and Lara Fuente.4 For filmmakers, Cervantes's description of the adventure in part one, chapter 8 (1605)-a mere page and a half in most editions-is brimming with cinematic potential, promising an explosion of spectatorial pleasure as expectant viewers witness a delusional middle-aged man, dressed as a knight, barrel into the revolving sails of a windmill (which, he thinks, is a giant) while his perplexed squire anxiously advises him not to do so. By shooting the sequence with a diverse collection of creative angles and camera movements, and by cutting the footage very quickly, Pabst effectively elevated the sequence to what we might call, with a nod to Eisenstein, the Odessa Steps of the Don Quixote film, employing Sancho's scream to move spectators toward a contemplative mode in which Don Quixote became relevant for the twentieth cen tury. Feodor Chaliapin, a Russian opera singer who had taken on the role of Don Quixote in Jules Massenet's Don Quichotte, envisioned this cinematic project as a vehicle for expressing his interest in Cervantes's character (see figure 2). For Baldelli, Pabst had merely extracted characters, situations, panoramas, and pieces of dialogue from the literary work to promote his private elegiac contemplation of the novel, transferring the filmmakers' own defeat and lonely exile onto Don Quixote.8 Ferran Herranz, confirming Baldelli's observation (albeit in more sophisticated terms), noted that the alternating poetic flashes of chivalric madness, of light-heartedness, and of premeditated irreverence toward the literary text, combined with Pabst's slapstick staging and the extremes of the knight's insanity (from the sublime to the superficially comical) produced a challenging, self-reflexive game, a joke at the novel's expense, one that infects itself with the novel's most irreverent meaning.9 While these criticisms-abridgment, excess, ludic lightheartedness, and willful irreverence-do not bode well for those expecting a transparent transition from the literary work to the film, they do highlight characteristics that comply perfectly with a monstra8 tive imperative whose goal is to make the spectator "see something else" and delight in the visual exhibition
