THE HUNT (Carlos Saura, 1966)

The following entry is en route to its place in my list of the 100 greatest films from Italy, Greece, Spain & Portugal:

Three businessmen go rabbit hunting one day thirty years after being fascist compatriots in the Spanish Civil War. They start bickering from the get-go, kill animals, and end up shooting and killing each other.
     With Carlos Saura directing from a brilliant script by himself and Angelino Fons, La Caza revolves around the metaphor of the hunt as a revival of the war from the vantage of Franco’s winners, disconsolate men burdened somehow by the past despite victory. Another of their old group, Arturo, became an embezzler and committed suicide—an act they cannot comprehend; yet doesn’t their new bloodbath comprise their own suicides by proxy? Many shots show trapped animals: caged pet ferrets; a rabbit attacked in its hole by one of the released ferrets; a beetle, in closeup, transported to a wall of rock, where it’s shot to smithereens. But the hunters themselves are trapped in that earlier time, when they hunted Loyalists instead of rabbits, and they can’t escape. One has brought along his brother-in-law, Enrique, who is way too young to have fought in the war; but he, too, it turns out, chokes on the symbolic noxious fumes that are the result of the war’s tragic outcome. Sardonically, Saura sardonically traps him in a conclusive freeze frame in mid-flight from the scene of carnage.
     In one of the close mines a skeleton resides—as one of the hunters explains, a likely veteran of the war. Are any of these men really alive, or do they creep like guilty things in the shadow of blood they long ago shed? The infected rabbits symbolize the sick Spain that the war’s outcome consolidated. The desolate black-and-white landscape: the radio’s rock ’n’ roll desecrates this hallowed ground.
     Enrique is warned: “Be careful. Aim at the rabbits.”

DON QUIJOTE (Orson Welles, 1992)

A “medieval dreamer in a sixteenth-century post-medieval world,”* Don Quijote confronts present with past. His head full of books and in the clouds, trying to right the world’s wrongs, this noble knight is grounded, if at all, by the humanity of his devoted squire, Sancho Panza. “I must follow my path despite all the world,” he says. Orson Welles might have said the same about himself.
     Welles began shooting his film of Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel in the mid-1950s. He died in 1985. In 1992 a version appeared in Spain, completed by horror filmmaker Jess Franco, who had assisted Welles on Chimes at Midnight (1966).
     One of Welles’s most massively moving, gorgeous works, the stark black-and-white Quijote begins in the style of a Soviet silent; low-hung, upwardly tilted cameras frame bony Quijote on horseback against eternal sky, here, of legend, myth, literature. Ironically, this repeated camera ploy has the effect of destabilizing the image of Quijote, wobbling it, as though only his horse could manage to keep a nearing-fifty Quijote upright. Quijote has endured, we are later told, obscurity, repression, tyranny—a reminder that Francisco Franco (until his death in 1975) ruled Spain.
     The first time Quijote, on horseback, confronts his Dulcinea, the creature of his imagination upon whom he wishes to lavish his chivalry, she is a present-day woman riding a motorcycle! Thereafter, periodically the past and the present intermix, as do the Cervantes film and Welles’s own stay in Spain while shooting it—a postmodernist delight, but again underscoring how out-of-place Quijote always was in time. Quijote concludes that humanity’s choice to be enslaved by machines, not progress, is modernity’s problem.
     Missing is extraordinary footage wherein, watching his first movie in a theater, a battle epic, Quijote charges the screen, cutting it to shreds.**

* See my piece on another great film, Georg W. Pabst’s 1933 Don Quixote.

** This is available for watching on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHQEViM3QYU