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Incident from Don Quixote
Incident from Don Quixote
Directed by	Georges Méliès
Based on	Don Quixote; by Miguel de Cervantes
Production; company	Star Film Company
Release date	October 1908;
Running time	355 feet (approx. 5.5 minutes)
Country	France
Language	Silent

La Toile d'araignée merveilleuse, released in the United States as Incident from Don Quixote and in Britain as Magic Armour,^[2] and also known as The Marvelous Cobweb^[3] and as Aventures de Don Quichotte,^[4] was a 1908 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès, inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.

The film depicts a dreaming Don Quixote who fights monsters in his sleep. He approaches a female winged humanoid, but the woman's wings turn into tentacles which attack the knight. The film features a typical depiction of a tentacle monster.

Plot

In one of his dreams, Don Quixote is fighting monsters. Having vanquished them, he goes to put on his armor, only to be met with a succession of strange events: first the armor appears occupied by a creature with stretching limbs, then a lovely young woman appears and sprouts butterfly wings. As Quixote approaches her, the wings become giant tentacles and attack him. Just as Quixote is fighting back and reaching for his lance, he wakes up to find himself pummeling his servant Sancho Panza.^[5]

Release

The film was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 1367–1371 in its catalogues.^[2] It was registered for American copyright at the Library of Congress on 10 October 1908, and was first announced in the French publication Ciné-Journal on 20 October 1908. The film is currently presumed lost.^[2]

References

^ Malthête, Jacques (October 1982), "Sur les traces des 'Star' Films disparus", Les dossiers de la cinémathèque, vol. 10, pp. 52–67
^ ^a ^b ^c Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 355, ISBN 9782732437323
^ Zipes, Jack (2011), The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, New York: Routledge, p. 389
^ Hammond, Paul (1974), Marvellous Méliès, London: Gordon Fraser, p. 147, ISBN 0900406380
^ "Stories of the Films", The Moving Picture World, vol. 3, no. 16, p. 304, 17 October 1908