Don Quijote

[mido505]

Roger, thank you for that lengthy remembrance/clarification. I found it intellectually stimulating and very helpful.

A scene where Sancho Panza finds Quixote in a cage felt the most complete of anything shown, but even this scene had Welles himself dubbing all of the dialog. Is this something he would have wanted for a final product or was this still at an intermediate stage?

As far as I can tell, Welles planned to dub all the dialogue of the Don and Sancho himself, having decided on the "voices" he would use as far back as the initial Mexican shoot. Interestingly, Welles made this choice for artistic rather than economic reasons. According to Mauro Bonanni, as told to Audrey Stainton, Welles, after shooting a sequence, would record the dialogue "wild", into a tape recorder, without looking at the footage. In doing this, he established a rhythm that the editor would then follow in cutting the scene, adapting the footage to the dialogue as Welles conceived it. Once the scene was cut, Welles would view it and record a guide track that was more in accord with the actor's lip movements. Welles would then listen to the guide track, and then dub from memory until the dialogue was perfectly in synch.

Welles, of course, used variations on this method on all of his movies as far back as Ambersons (including, I was surprised to learn, the climax of Lady From Shanghai).

I reread Stainton this week end, along with Esteve Riambau's excellent essay on DQ included in THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES. They are our best sources for DQ info available in English; both mention the work print, and both consider it the great "missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle" that is DQ. Stainton, who published her essay in 1988, described the footage shown at Cannes a year or so earlier (the Costa Gavras edit) as "scraps" in "pitiable condition", and that footage is superior to Franco's stuff!

Stainton does point out that the work print collected by Beatrice from Rome in 1970 was not completely post-synched, because Welles had changed some of the editing. But most of it was. Yet very little of the DQ footage made publicly available includes Welles's dubbing. That's a little strange, isn't it?

Stainton acknowledges and describes Welles's maniacal secrecy regarding DQ during his lifetime, but feels that, after his death, his secret "belongs to the world". I suspect someone feels differently.

[Roger Ryan]

In reviewing Ray Kelly's 2008 Wellesnet article on THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES presentation at Harvard, I noticed this line in reference to DON QUIXOTE...

The Munich Film Museum is in possession of an 80-minute silent work print.

So is this the same work print that was previously in the possession of the French Cinematheque? The 80 minute length seems longer than the collection of scenes shown in Locarno in 2005 (although I really have no idea how much time passed during the screening).

[RayKelly]

@Roger,
I took notes throughout the Harvard presentation and spoke (briefly) with Stefan Droessler at the conclusion. I may have saved the notebook. If I can locate it, there might be more details on the workprint. I will dig through the boxes in the basement tonight.

[mido505]

I noticed that reference too, Roger. In the book version of THE UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES, Droessler writes that "SCENES FROM DON QUIXOTE contains all the sound segments and some silent sequences of a work print of DON QUIXOTE, which was preserved by the Cinematheque Francaise in 1996".

Therefore, I suspect the Cinematheque workprint and the workprint mentioned by RayKelly are one and the same. Whether this is the fabled "missing" workprint we have been discussing remains to be seen, although the 80 minute run time sounds about right.

Whether the workprint now resides in Munich, or remains in Paris is also a question. Let's see what Ray uncovers.