From Page to Screem

Claudia Cabrera

Professor Fernandez

ENC 1102 11:00 am

16 March 2015

From Page to Screen

      Novels and literature work have been adapted into film several times in different eras. Ideally, a novel and its film version complement each other on many levels. However, film can accomplish things that novels cannot, and vice versa. Likewise, film has limitations that a novel does not. By its nature, film is a visual medium, which makes a first-person story difficult to tell. Nonetheless the film can simulate our perceptions directly, while written words can do this indirectly. “Film is a more sensory experience than reading- besides verbal language, there is also color, movement, and sound”. (“Adaptation”) The novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes has been adapted to the screen many times, its most recent version is the film “Don Quixote” by Peter Yates. 

     The son of a deaf surgeon, Miguel de Cervantes was born near Madrid in 1547. He became a soldier in 1570 and was badly wounded in the Battle of Lepanto. Captured by the Turks in 1575, de Cervantes spent five years in prison. He was freed in 1580 and returned home. De Cervantes finally achieved literary success in his later years, publishing the first part of Don Quixote, one of the world's greatest literary masterpieces, in 1605. He died in 1616. ("Miguel de Cervantes”)

     At the start of the book The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha we meet a guy named Alonso Quixano. He is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read about medieval knights, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. He named himself Don Quixote. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an island. On his horse, Rocinante, a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain in search of glory and grand adventure. ("Chapter II")The only problem is that giants and dragons do not really exist, but Don Quixote has such an active imagination that he believes everyday objects, like windmills, are actually giant monsters. The story of Don Quixote’s deeds includes the stories of those he meets on his journey. Along the way, the simple Sancho plays the straight man to Don Quixote, trying his best to correct his master’s outlandish fantasies. At the end of the novel, Don Quixote realizes that he is nuts. But by that point, it is too late. He gets a terrible fever and dies in his bed. One of his only dying wishes is for everyone to know how stupid all those chivalry books actually were.  With his death, knights-errant become extinct.

     Miguel de Cervantes great seventeenth century Spanish classic, Don Quixote of La Mancha has been adapted to the screen by Peter Yates. Yates was an English film director and producer. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire. The son of an army officer, he attended Charterhouse School as a boy, graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for some years as an actor, director and stage manager. In 1970 Yates said he would make Don Quixote with Richard Burton but the project stalled. He did finally make a television film of the Cervantes novel in 2000. ("Peter Yates")

      A crusade for decency and truth was mounted by a man gone mad in “Don Quixote” the film adaptation of the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. In the same way as the original work, the film tell the story of Alonso Quixano, a men who decides that it was time to devote his life to battling evil in all its forms; he dubs himself Don Quixote, obtains a suit of armor, and with the help of his loyal friend and squire Sancho Panza, he sets out to confront the world's ills. Inspired by the lovely Dulcinea and pursued by a mysterious Duchess, Quixote fights his battles as he finds them. At the end of the movie, Don Quixote retires to his bed with a deathly illness, and later awakes from a dream, having fully recovered his sanity.

     Don Quixote, which is composed of three different sections, is a rich exploration of the possibilities of narrative. (“SparkNote on Don Quixote”) Cervantes created this "crazy old man" character of Alonso Quixano, to in some way, talk about the problems of the society without being hounded by the authorities. Cervantes talk about morality, human identity, honor, truth and justice. These make his literature work a social satire and parody of medieval romances, that still beloved by readers worldwide today.