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A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. [...] The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips. The close-up is the soul of the cinema.
-Jean Epstein (9)
All movies are de facto slasher movies, and all cinematic bodies are subject to the indignity of decapitation and dismemberment.
-Paul Morrison (2)
ONE OF THE MOST astounding images among the tens of thousands that make up Don Quixote iconography is G. W. Pabst s close-up shot, about a second long, in which Sancho screams after witnessing his master collide with the sail of a windmill (see figure 1). The shot is unique in that it is not only the first time Sanchos reaction to the event is heard using newly developed sound technology, but also the first time Sanchos horrified face occupies a huge part of the compositional space that was designed to take on gargantuan proportions when projected onto the screen. No such closeups of Sancho or any other characters in Cervantes's novel had been de- picted in such proximity and size before Pabst s 1933 French adaptation.1 As Sancho screams, the close-up, doing what close-ups do, severs his head from his body, while the shadow of the blade from the revolving windmill disfigures his face. This is the most astonishing shot in the most significant sequence in arguably the most remarkable cinematic metamorphosis of Cervantes's Don Quixote. And it all occurs in less than 24 frames.
Since the advent of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, the windmill has become Cervantes's most ubiquitous icon and persistent meme.2 Few discrete moments extracted from literature have enjoyed a more popular appeal than Don Quixote's charge against a group of windmills, whose intersecting blades have come to stand, inextricably, for Don Quixote and Quixotism in much the same way that the cross...