"Why Don Quixote?"

On Friday Night at 8pm Channel Zero, is gonna try some summer counter programming with a screening of G.W. Pabst's 1933 adaptation of "Don Quixote" starring Feodor Chaliapin. Cervantes classic novel is a wonder of the renaissance and a book that reverberates down to the current era as the "Knight of the Doleful Countenance" wanders Spain with his sidekick Sancho Panza desperately seeking a life of adventure and chivalry. In his battered comical armor and stern devotion to "staying in knightly character", Don Quixote is literally classical literature's first true cosplayer! Indeed the Mad Knight has all the symptoms, his entire world view is subverted, overwhelmed and guided by, the fiction he himself has imbibed. Don Quixote is literally the first character in all of literature to have a rudimentary self awareness of his own fictional status...hell its a book that literally breaks the Fifth Wall! Its always been a sort of wonderment to me at least,that this supremely subtle comical and multilayered book has never yet generated a definitive Hollywood Adaptation, although artists as diverse as Orson Welles and Mister Magoo have all taken a stab at it down thru the years. Some great books are strangely resistant to the full Tinseltown Treatment another example of which could well be "Moby Dick"...but I digress, this is fodder for a future post indeed. Director G.W. Pabst might perhaps be a good counterintuitive choice to adapt Don Quixote, he was in his heyday the only realist working and indeed prospering in German silent cinema, and sometimes as rich as character as The Old Windmill Tilter needs a steady hand to stave off caricature. Anyhow...this is also a film unseen in Boston as an experience of cinema, for perhaps eighty five years, so tell your friends. "DON QUIXOTE" (1933) Friday, July 20th 8pm The Somerville Theatre (Micro Cinema) 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma 617-625-5700 Admission: $7.50 (cheap!, cash only) In French, Subtitled in English