don quixote - new DVD from Spain
We've had some diametrically opposed views concerning Jess Franco's cut of Welles neglected footage. I love what he did, and the voice actors, and the music. I think the bullfight section is weak, with neither the Spanish vices or virtues being too well delineated and Sancho annoyingly bumbling about bothering everybody. But I'm grateful somebody finished the film, since Orson couldn't be bothered to. Fear of completion or sloth? (I don't mean that.) :angry:
Sto Pro Veritate
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jaime marzol
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like you, store hadji, i also love Don Q, but i like welles' footage, i find very little to appreciate in what i can see franco did.
i don't know why, but i feel like franco sort of pissed on it.
from what i've read, welles never intended to finish it. he had the footage, and loved locking himself in his editing room and cutting, and recutting, having a blast. in audrey stainton's poignent article she writes that the film was like a child he didn't want to hold up for public scuitiny.
like you, store hadji, i also love Don Q, but i like welles' footage, i find very little to appreciate in what i can see franco did.
i don't know why, but i feel like franco sort of pissed on it.
from what i've read, welles never intended to finish it. he had the footage, and loved locking himself in his editing room and cutting, and recutting, having a blast. in audrey stainton's poignent article she writes that the film was like a child he didn't want to hold up for public scuitiny.
Good heavens! I just saw, or rather fast forwarded through most, of Franco's butchering of Don Quixiote. What an embarrisment. It was beyond belief. I do remember some of the previous posts on this, but had no idea it was such a mockery. How did Oja let this happen? Doesn't she own all the footage, or is it Franco? Gadzooks! I actually found it depressing to hear the Horrible re-dubbing job and the dreadful state of the footage used, and the general shoddy way it was put together. Please tell me more as to how this happened. Also, does the sound track to the film exist at all?
Michael
Michael
Michael
Oja and her team collected almost all the known footage, including some that Suzanne Cloutier had been holding onto, back c.1990 when they put this version together for a film festival. Welles had shot the film mostly from 57 to 61 (see Rosenbaum's timeline of OW's life in "This is OW") and had been editing DQ with Mauro Bonnani for about a year from April 69 to March 70 in Italy when a scandal broke in the papers about OW's affair with Oja (detailed in the Italian documentary "Rosabella"); Welles packed Oja off to America and closely followed with his family, to settle in Las Vegas. He never worked on the film again, though, encouraged by Cloutier in 1985 to finish it, he contacted Bonnani and arranged for Cloutier to ship her copy to America; Welles died with the film enroute (according to Cloutier in an extended tv interview for French Canadian tv for a broadcast of Othello). The Kodar team managed to track down most of the footage for their version, but they couldn't get their hands on footage held by Bonnani: this is because of something Welles mentioned to Kodar shortly before his death: he had decided to change the framing device for the film. Originally, OW is seen sitting in a park reading Don Quixote; a little girl, played by then famous Patty McCormick, comes up to him and asks him what he's reading; he tells her DQ, and proceeds to read her some passages. The movie we see is the movie as seen by the little girl: she becomes the heroine, Dulcinea, and gets involved in the story. For example, there is a sequence (described by Rosenbaum) where DQ and Sancho go to a movie theatre and the Don attacks the screen to kill the villain who is threatening the damsel in distress; the Don slashes the screeen to shreds.; Patty and her mom are in the theatre, watching.The Don and Sancho are seen in the modern world, and they are both voiced by Welles, as he is telling the story to the girl, and we see her imagining of the story. At some point in the 60's, Welles decided that he would reshoot the Patty McCormick scenes, using his daughter, Beatrice. (Of course, if they'd had Beatrice on their team in 1990, they would have gotten ALL the footage!) But this was never done as Beatrice quickly became too old, and OW decided to use an entirely new framing device, which he never seemed to get around to creating. So, in c. 1990, the Kodar team hired Jess Franco (a second unit director on Chimes, also known for soft-core) to put together a version of DQ for a film festival. Everyone handed over the footage they had, except Bonanni: he refused, on the grounds they were going to follow OW's late wish, as expressed to Oja, and excise anything having to do with Patty McCormick; the only problem was, they had no new framing device to replace it with, so they used some footage of OW from a documentary he made on Spain c. 64, "In the Land of Don Quixote".
Bonanni is interviewed in "Rosabella", and he looks surprisingly young, perhaps 45. But just what is he holding onto? In her beautiful article on Don Quixote in "Sight and Sound" (Autumn 88), Audrey Stainton, an assistant of Welles' from 58 to 59, describes a conversation with Bonanni, which begins at the point in 1970 where Welles had just decided to leave Italy as a result of the scandal:
"...Welles phoned to say he was sending his 16-year-old daughter Beatrice to collect the cut copy. Mauro met her in the late summer of 1971 (in Rome) where he helped her load Welles' big black suitcase containing the cut copy into the trunk of a silver-gray Austin Mini Minor.
Mauro assures me it was a complete film lasting one and a half hours. Some parts of it were not yet post-synched and some parts needed to be revoiced, because Welles had repeatedly changed his mind regarding the editing and inserted different close-ups that were out of synch. There was no music or sound effects. But all the principle photography had been completed; Fransisco Reiguera had finished shooting his part long before he died; and Welles had solved the problem of Dulcinea by a masterly combination of close-ups of Patty McCormick and long or half-concealed shots of a girl resembling her whom he had found in Spain.
According to Mauro, the only image lacking was one special effect: a newsreel shot of some spectacular up-to-date event, which Welles intended to add later to the screen of a television set that Sancho discovers in the plaza at Pamplona. Welles told Mauro that if he had added this in 1970, it would have shown the men landing on thre moon, but he preferred to wait, so that what was showing on the TV screen would be highly topical at the time the film was handed over for release.
...In the meantime,incredible as it may seem, he left the negative lying apparently forgotten in a Rome vault where, but for an extraordinary fluke, it would have suffered the fate of all abandoned material and been destroyed. Luckily, it so happened that Mauro's wife worked at the laboratory in question and in 1974 she caught sight of a letter to Anne Rogers, Welles' one-time secretary in London, informing her that as Mr. Welles had omitted to pay long overdue storage costs or communicate with them in any way, and as all efforts to trace him had failed, they were obliget to proceed with the routine destruction of the negative.
Alerted by his wife, Mauro rushed to the rescue, but without athorization he was not allowed to take charge of the negative, only to pay a cautionary deposit and postpone the destruction for three months. It took him all those three months to locate Welles, but in September of 1974 Welles sent a letter authorising him to take the negative into custody. Mauro has been guarding it ever since with loving care, along with the secret of it's whereabouts, shouldering the expense of its storage out of his own pocket all these years."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, in an interview with Lawrence French (posted on the old board, but possibly lurking somewhere on this board) had this to say:
" (Oja) had it written into the contract that they couldn't use any of the Patty McCormick footage. What was worse, was that Mauro Bonanni, the original editor of Don Quixote, who is in Rome, wanted to work on this and give his input, but they were not interested. Oja's reaction was "You've stolen all this footage, give it back." But Welles left the film with him, and Bonanni rescued it from being destroyed... Now, I think the obvious thing to do, is to put together a version with Bonanni as the editor. He was the original editor and he has some important sequences that are missing from DQ. But nobody seems interested in doing that."
As for Oja's final opinion of Franco: "I'd rather say he just threw it together...I wish Franco had a vision, but what we ended up getting from him has no vision at all." (From an interview with Lawrence French.)
Here's my two cents: put Walter Murch in charge of the project, as he has a proven track record in both editing and sound, and has also done the brilliant job on Touch of Evil (check out the great book "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film") ; have Murch work with Bonanni, who has the negative, and who was the principal editor with Welles.
Then we might get something approximating Welles' vision of Don Quixote.
P.S.: Here's a link to an interview on this site with Rosenbaum which covers some material on DQ: http://wellesnet.com/rosenbaum_interview.htm
and here's a link to a Rosenbaum review of Gilliam's Quixote doc, with much material on Welles':
http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2003/0203/030221.html
Bonanni is interviewed in "Rosabella", and he looks surprisingly young, perhaps 45. But just what is he holding onto? In her beautiful article on Don Quixote in "Sight and Sound" (Autumn 88), Audrey Stainton, an assistant of Welles' from 58 to 59, describes a conversation with Bonanni, which begins at the point in 1970 where Welles had just decided to leave Italy as a result of the scandal:
"...Welles phoned to say he was sending his 16-year-old daughter Beatrice to collect the cut copy. Mauro met her in the late summer of 1971 (in Rome) where he helped her load Welles' big black suitcase containing the cut copy into the trunk of a silver-gray Austin Mini Minor.
Mauro assures me it was a complete film lasting one and a half hours. Some parts of it were not yet post-synched and some parts needed to be revoiced, because Welles had repeatedly changed his mind regarding the editing and inserted different close-ups that were out of synch. There was no music or sound effects. But all the principle photography had been completed; Fransisco Reiguera had finished shooting his part long before he died; and Welles had solved the problem of Dulcinea by a masterly combination of close-ups of Patty McCormick and long or half-concealed shots of a girl resembling her whom he had found in Spain.
According to Mauro, the only image lacking was one special effect: a newsreel shot of some spectacular up-to-date event, which Welles intended to add later to the screen of a television set that Sancho discovers in the plaza at Pamplona. Welles told Mauro that if he had added this in 1970, it would have shown the men landing on thre moon, but he preferred to wait, so that what was showing on the TV screen would be highly topical at the time the film was handed over for release.
...In the meantime,incredible as it may seem, he left the negative lying apparently forgotten in a Rome vault where, but for an extraordinary fluke, it would have suffered the fate of all abandoned material and been destroyed. Luckily, it so happened that Mauro's wife worked at the laboratory in question and in 1974 she caught sight of a letter to Anne Rogers, Welles' one-time secretary in London, informing her that as Mr. Welles had omitted to pay long overdue storage costs or communicate with them in any way, and as all efforts to trace him had failed, they were obliget to proceed with the routine destruction of the negative.
Alerted by his wife, Mauro rushed to the rescue, but without athorization he was not allowed to take charge of the negative, only to pay a cautionary deposit and postpone the destruction for three months. It took him all those three months to locate Welles, but in September of 1974 Welles sent a letter authorising him to take the negative into custody. Mauro has been guarding it ever since with loving care, along with the secret of it's whereabouts, shouldering the expense of its storage out of his own pocket all these years."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, in an interview with Lawrence French (posted on the old board, but possibly lurking somewhere on this board) had this to say:
" (Oja) had it written into the contract that they couldn't use any of the Patty McCormick footage. What was worse, was that Mauro Bonanni, the original editor of Don Quixote, who is in Rome, wanted to work on this and give his input, but they were not interested. Oja's reaction was "You've stolen all this footage, give it back." But Welles left the film with him, and Bonanni rescued it from being destroyed... Now, I think the obvious thing to do, is to put together a version with Bonanni as the editor. He was the original editor and he has some important sequences that are missing from DQ. But nobody seems interested in doing that."
As for Oja's final opinion of Franco: "I'd rather say he just threw it together...I wish Franco had a vision, but what we ended up getting from him has no vision at all." (From an interview with Lawrence French.)
Here's my two cents: put Walter Murch in charge of the project, as he has a proven track record in both editing and sound, and has also done the brilliant job on Touch of Evil (check out the great book "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film") ; have Murch work with Bonanni, who has the negative, and who was the principal editor with Welles.
Then we might get something approximating Welles' vision of Don Quixote.
P.S.: Here's a link to an interview on this site with Rosenbaum which covers some material on DQ: http://wellesnet.com/rosenbaum_interview.htm
and here's a link to a Rosenbaum review of Gilliam's Quixote doc, with much material on Welles':
http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2003/0203/030221.html
Tony, thanks for that incredibly thorough explanation on DQ. I had thought of buying the DVD when I came across Jeff's review of it here. I thought about asking what other's thought of it, but Michael beat me to the punch with this thread. Truly a shame about Franco's cut. Here's to hoping we may one day see something close to Welles' vision.
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Lance Morrison
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wow, thanks for the description indeed, I had not learned a lot about DQ yet, as I have been trying not to learn about the unfinished works as I knew they would break my heart reading about them.....and of course this does, but it does sound like it was a brilliant film in the making, and heck the first framing device sounds like it worked just fine, classic Welles
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blunted by community
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something in what tony posted aroused my interest. tony's post mentions 'a topical event that will be super-imposed on a tv screen.' on the regularly available version is there a scene with pancho in a tv repair shop, when he sees a modern fighter jet being shot down? one of my tapes has this, but suddenly i'm not sure if the other does. has any one seen this in their copy?
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Sir Bygber Brown
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- Location: Sydney, Australia
It has a complete soundtrack - but silent may have been a better solution. We recommend turning the sound off and waiting for a good image to come onscreen (believe me, they eventually do - i'm not talking Touch of Evil images here, but some okay stuff). Orson had not finished doing the voices (he was going to do both Quixote and Sancho and any voiceover, it seems), so you can hear Orson's voice every now and then, and some French actors who are only very slight approximations fill in the gaps. Its quite shoddy because the difference between Orson's voice and the French actors is quite marked. The French actors, from memory, would have been better off to dub the entire thing, or leave it all silent with subtitles maybe.
You may remember me from such sites as imdb, amazon and criterionforum as Ben Cheshire.
DVD Beaver has published a comparison between two DVD releases of Welles Don Quixote.
Both are the Jess Franco version. :angry:
Lots of screenshots. The page takes some time to load if you're on a dialup.
Click here to go to DVD Beaver
Anders
Both are the Jess Franco version. :angry:
Lots of screenshots. The page takes some time to load if you're on a dialup.
Click here to go to DVD Beaver
Anders
The Franco version is the only one released, so no point in complaining about that. They make no mention of Jess Franco not really following Welles' conception of the film or the role Oja Kodar played, or the missing Bonanni footage and so on, but whatever. If you want the film in some (albeit misbegotten) form, it is at least out there.
"Sous le ciel de Quichotte" - A new (?) production using "Don Quixote"-material from the Cinémathèque française will be staged in France (8th/15th november in Nimes/Arras).
"The idea that the film of “Don Quichotte,” the mythical film of Orson Welles, remains unfinished and unfinishable – was for the writers of “Sous le ciel de Quichotte” a source of inspiration and strength.
Orson Welles was one of the geniuses of cinema history. He worked for twenty five years on this breathtaking project, a blend of fiction, documentary and reality, shot in black and white. His intent was to make a film that would rival the literary prowess of Cervantes. He died in 1985 before he could finish the film.
Guided by the gorgeous images shot by Welles, the evening is the culmination of three pieces, the music, the words and the staged production. The story, performed by the Orchestra/Chorus and the “keeper of memories,” intertwines with the music, a baroque fanfare. While the “dream ribbon” unspools onscreen, there are onstage games of reflection and echo, interlocking, like the unending quest of Don Quixote.
Roberto Tricarri studied both classical music and improvisation. After creating and playing live the score for a ballet at the Grand Théâtre in Nancy, he realised that film, his other passion, could be part of an amazing visual score. He began writing for “silent films in concert” and attracted a large and enthusiastic audience."
from: “Sous le ciel de Quichotte” - Création musicale , théâtrale et cinématographique sur le film inachevé de Orson Welles
further details (page 4/5): L'Autre Cinéma
"The idea that the film of “Don Quichotte,” the mythical film of Orson Welles, remains unfinished and unfinishable – was for the writers of “Sous le ciel de Quichotte” a source of inspiration and strength.
Orson Welles was one of the geniuses of cinema history. He worked for twenty five years on this breathtaking project, a blend of fiction, documentary and reality, shot in black and white. His intent was to make a film that would rival the literary prowess of Cervantes. He died in 1985 before he could finish the film.
Guided by the gorgeous images shot by Welles, the evening is the culmination of three pieces, the music, the words and the staged production. The story, performed by the Orchestra/Chorus and the “keeper of memories,” intertwines with the music, a baroque fanfare. While the “dream ribbon” unspools onscreen, there are onstage games of reflection and echo, interlocking, like the unending quest of Don Quixote.
Roberto Tricarri studied both classical music and improvisation. After creating and playing live the score for a ballet at the Grand Théâtre in Nancy, he realised that film, his other passion, could be part of an amazing visual score. He began writing for “silent films in concert” and attracted a large and enthusiastic audience."
from: “Sous le ciel de Quichotte” - Création musicale , théâtrale et cinématographique sur le film inachevé de Orson Welles
further details (page 4/5): L'Autre Cinéma
This might interest some DQ fans:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?....rl=http
http://images.google.ca/imgres?....rl=http
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Sir Bygber Brown
- Wellesnet Veteran
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- Joined: Mon Dec 15, 2003 7:17 am
- Location: Sydney, Australia
Re: DVD Beaver Compare 2 dvds of Don Quixote
This link is better if you want the entire DVDBeaver article.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompar ... uixote.htm
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompar ... uixote.htm
You may remember me from such sites as imdb, amazon and criterionforum as Ben Cheshire.
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