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Vol. IX No. 4 December, 1932
A NIGHT PROIVL IN LA MANCHA
The stills from " Don Quixote," used throughout this article are by Roger Forster.
Wandering among outdoor sets where night-scenes are to be made, I wonder if any film will be able to give a fraction of the fascination of tliis particular " backstage."
Across mv shoulders balances the hyaline glow left over by the evening, and like a lemon on a stick on a nose, the quite full moon is perched above tlie eyes. I am standing for a moment, taking it in. No, I am not taking it in exactly. I am caught in a sort of pause — such as we most of us know — a sort of split-second where evervthing flows freely in and through. I feel, for instance, that I am no more here than an}-where else in the hills, which have grown black behind, and tumble headlong down the moonlight to the sea. Mv mind is filled with visions of olive-slopes with their chromium glint in the moon and the blackness of the stone-pines of the ]\Ioyenne-Corniche. Eze, a kind of Sphinx, was no less pasteboard than all this. Cap F"errat, far below, was far less real. And now, on my left is the silhouette of a sound-stage and above me lifts a sudden clatter, like hail, of wind in palm branches. In front the darkness is riven by sun-arcs, blinding the night-sky.
The flimsy lath and plaster of the wrong side of a village street is a high wall cutting this oft', but the light streams up and bats zip past and crickets squeal a kind of morse code all the wav to Monte Carlo and to Cannes.
Picking my way among cables, I am thrown back into the past. Enormous oil-jars lie in a barn among straw. For a moment I am alone in the crazy street of an ancient village and the moon carves pale-blue zigzags on the white walls.
But this is just as momentary, just as unsettling, as my previous sense of hills, just as abiding and unreal. For, suddenly, voices are raised, a hurricane of human tongues — I sort out German, English, Russian, French, the patois of the Coast. Lights fizz and sputter, sun-arcs punch and pummel the dark.
Dazzled, I probe into a world of fantasv.
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