More than 70 years after he shot the first few frames, Orson Welles\u2019s ambitious project to put Don Quixote on the big screen may finally be completed thanks to a consortium of European film archivists.<\/p>\n
Oja Kodar, the American film-maker\u2019s partner and collaborator, has given her blessing to the project led by archives in France<\/a>, Spain and Italy, along with the Munich film museum, to produce a coherent film out of 30 hours of footage scattered among them.<\/p>\n Welles\u2019s reworking of the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes<\/a> began in 1957 as a film for television backed by Frank Sinatra but the scheme fell through. After that, Welles worked on it almost to the day he died in 1985, shooting scenes in Mexico, Italy and Spain whenever he could find a backer.<\/p>\n The team tasked with reconstructing the film, led by Esteve Riambau, a Welles authority and former head of the Catalan film archive, have their work cut out. To begin with, the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome must digitise 50,000 metres (164,000ft) of negative to add to the 50,000 metres of 16mm and 35mm film held by Spain<\/a> and the 80 minutes of 35mm footage in France.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have a complete script but enough to reconstruct it,\u201d Riambau said. \u201cHalf the material is in the form of a negative in Rome which has to be printed before we can see it.\u201d<\/p>\n Orson Welles during the shooting of Don Quixote. Photograph: RGR Collection\/Alamy<\/p>\n As scenes were shot in three countries from 1956 to 1976, the project had to be viewed as a work in progress, he added. \u201cIt would be surprising to discover that every scene has been shot but I think there\u2019s enough. It\u2019s hard to say what [Welles] wanted definitively because in the script there are alternative scenes, but we\u2019ll work with what we have.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to invent anything or use special effects to fill in the gaps. We\u2019re not working with hypotheses. The idea is to show the original in so far as it\u2019s possible, but it\u2019s like working on a mosaic where there are missing pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n First published in 1605, Cervantes\u2019s novel tells the story of Don Quixote, a minor noble who has a series of adventures as he lives out a fantasy life as a chivalrous knight accompanied by his sidekick, Sancho Panza. It is considered the first modern novel.<\/p>\n The film is hardly a faithful version of Cervantes\u2019s work. \u201cThere are some opening scenes that are faithful to the book but there are others that are, shall we say, enhanced,\u201d Riambau said. \u201cFor example, the scene with the puppet theatre in the novel where Don Quixote thinks the heroine is in danger and takes out his sword and starts cutting off heads, in the film it\u2019s set in a cinema in Mexico where he attacks the screen to save the heroine.\u201d<\/p>\n Cervantes\u2019s novel tells the story of Don Quixote\u2019s adventures with his sidekick, Sancho Panza, Photograph: Handout<\/p>\n Most of the footage is in black and white, although some scenes were shot in colour in Andaluc\u00eda. The soundtrack is also incomplete but, where it exists, the parts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are voiced by Welles himself.<\/p>\n Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), which to this day regularly tops polls of the greatest films of all time. He went on to direct many other cinematic and stage productions, including A Touch of Evil (1958), and starred in films such as The Third Man (1949) and A Man for All Seasons (1966).<\/p>\n