Don Quixote, Sweded by Michel Gondry in Be Kind Rewind (2008)
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Date
2017-12-29
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Citation of Original Publication
Hogan, Erin K.; Don Quixote, Sweded by Michel Gondry in Be Kind Rewind (2008); Open Cultural Studies,1,1, 454-467 (2017); https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2017-0042/html
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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Abstract
In the spirit of poetic license from Be Kind Rewind (2008), this article argues that Michel Gondry’s
film “swedes,” its playful neologism for ersatz remaking of Hollywood and classic films, Miguel de
Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The feature follows the Sanchification of Jerry (Jack Black), Gondry’s Don Quixote,
and Quixotification of Mike (Mos Def), Gondry’s Sancho, as they nostalgically wrong cinematic rights
through sweding and try to save their working-class neighbourhood from condemnation and gentrification
through community filmmaking. Gondry swedes the Quixote through his engagement with major themes
and operations in Cervantes’s classic, including nostalgia, story-telling, conflicts between reality and
fantasy, authorship, the grotesque and carnivalesque, (anti-)heroes, race and gender-bending, genre, and
addressees turned addressers. This article discusses Be Kind Rewind’s relationship to Hollywoodian and
Cervantine classics through the theoretical frameworks of Julio García Espinosa’s imperfect cinema and
Foucauldian semiotics, respectively. Be Kind Rewind uses and abuses Hollywood stereotypes to re-purpose
them for a critique of discriminatory practices. Where casting is concerned and where Michel’s characters
diverge from Miguel’s, Be Kind Rewind advances that skin colour is not an arbitrary sign and that race has
historical and contemporary meaning in intercultural interactions.