 I'll be honest, I thought when I came over here I was wondering who has read the novel in San Francisco other than when we forced students to read it, you know? And I'm glad to see that so many of you have read it. I'm going to talk about the influence of Cervantes in film a little bit on TV. It's a little bit different from what Adrian did. I go more into the, let's say, storytelling techniques or the filming techniques of many films which come from Cervantes, which many people do not know. Anyways, I said that every time we discuss the Quixote in an undergraduate class, sooner or later some students begin to complain that the story has no plot. Nothing happens, they say. Just lots of long dialogues and strange situations. This reaction is understandable due to the fact that nowadays critics consider the Quixote a seminal novel, a classic of high literature, thus students approach the text with the expectation that the narrative will have an intricate plot and lead to some deep revelation about the human condition, the way you say Shakespeare presents in Hamlet or Macbeth. Well, the Quixote does speak to many important facets of the human condition. I do agree with the students that the principal narrative of the novel does not have such an elaborate plot and on purpose. When faced with this discussion, though, I point out that during Cervantes' life, the novel did not enjoy the stature it has today. It was poetry where writers endeavored to excel. As Don Quixote makes clear when he highly praises this genre in the adventure of the Gentleman of the Green Code in Part 2, Chapter 17. For this reason, it is possible to surmise that in the day or in his day, the Quixote resided more in the realm of what we call today popular culture. I then ask the students whether any of them like the popular sitcom Seinfeld, which of course many do like it. I immediately remind them that this program is famously known as the show about nothing. But being a novel and a sitcom about nothing is not the only thing that the Quixote and Seinfeld have in common. In the following pages, I will briefly explain connection Cervantes' novels has with popular culture in the western world, specifically in the realm of film and television. It is well known from the publication of the first volume in 1605 of the Quixote that the hero or main protagonist of the story gained a reputation of being a madman par excellence. He went mad according to the narrator, the first narrator, because of his massive, today we will call it addiction to, reading of novels of chivalry. I would argue, however, that instead of seeing Alonso Quijano as going mad on a kind of his reading, that we interpret him as a person transformed by the technology of his time, namely the book and the new means of production of the same. It is obvious that in his novel Cervantes was calling attention to the role of writing in society that until recently, in a society that until recently had been and was still to a large degree primarily oral in his communication. But what happens when someone consumed books in mass quantities, now that they were readily available and accessible to a large part of the community? What effect did the reading of books have, especially the reading of profane books, on a person's worldview, her or his relationship to society and that of what we call reality? It is as if Cervantes realized that there was a danger lurking in what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy. And the author saw the need to lure the reader to this danger. It is for this reason that from the beginning to end, the Quijote is full of readers, authors, texts of different genres, both oral and written, and we also encounter many discussions and interpretations of profane literature and sacred texts. There appears to be an imperative need to understand this medium, the book, which had proliferated thanks to the invention of the printing press and had the potential for wreaking havoc by making it difficult for readers to discern between the fictional and the real or the sacred and the profane. To attain this understanding of the medium, Cervantes takes apart the process of creating a novel. In the words of the Russian formalist, Viktor Shlovsky, by laying bare the technique and creates self-conscious or reflexive texts that continuously reminds the reader of his artificiality. So what I'm saying is that Cervantes is aware that literature could be dangerous and he wants to make sure he takes it apart and shows people how it's made in order for them to handle it better. This laying bare of the device is largely influential in literature after Cervantes prominently uses it in the Quijote. Ironically, his experiment with the reflexive novel found few followers in Spain during the 17th and 18th century, not so in England and France, though, where Lawrence Stern, Henry Fielding, and Denis de Troyes among others immediately took the narrative innovations to another level in novels such as Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, and Jacques de Fataliste. Respectively, Flaubert, Madame Bovary, is a prime example in the 19th century, but it would be in the 20th century when Cervantes' narrative experiment would permeate literature throughout Western Europe and the Americas. It was also in the 20th century that he made his way into film, the visual art that would gain dominance in popular culture. We can cite many films that fall into the category of reflexive film. From French new cinema through Hollywood classics like Sunset Boulevard, Adaptation, and The Player, to name just a few that represent from the 50s to the new millennium. However, it is Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, where the imprint of Quijote is most notable. On the surface, Blazing Saddles is a lampoon of the myths, stories, and characters of Western films, which he accomplishes rather brilliantly, demonstrating how filmmakers of this genre had turned the ethnic and cultural, the ethnic and diverse cultural of the all West into a pristine white world where everyone's last name was Johnson. Brooks' use of satire is not the only influence of Cervantes. For example, there are also strong echoes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the relationship between Bart the Sheriff and the Waco Kid. And the Dominican world of the books of chivalry is replaced by the good and bad cowboys who joust with guns instead of lances. But where Mel Brooks draws most heavily from Cervantes is in the storytelling. From beginning to end, there is a stream of references to film meant to remind the audience of the movingness, if I may call it a word, of film, of the film we are watching, thus forcing the viewers to maintain a healthy distance from the fictional world. This reflexive mode, which we can clearly trace back to Cervantes' Quijote, is prominent at the end of the film. At this point, or most prominent at the end of the film, I hope most of you have seen it, but I'm going to keep it a little long description. At this point, the people of Rock Ridge construct for all white, of course, but I think at this point they have included the Chinese and the Mexicans and a whole bunch of other people to help them build the town. But anyways, at this point at the end of the film, the people of Rock Ridge construct a false version of their town with carton images of themselves and momentarily fool the bad guys into believing it is the real thing. A large conventional brawl breaks out among the real residents of the town and the bad cowboys. In the midst of the free-for-all, the camera draws upward to give us a panoramic view of the fight, but it keeps rising until the view includes the city of Burbank. In this take, we discern the fictional space where the movie is being shot, Warner Brothers Studios, artificial spots surrounded by the historical city of Burbank. Then, the camera zooms in but diverts toward another building in the lot where the spectator ends up watching the making of the musical film. Suddenly, the walls between the sets come crashing down and the cowboy fight, that is, the fictional world of the western, spills into the genre of the musical, whose director stops the mayhem and asks, not the character but the actor playing him, Slim Pickens, what are you doing? This is a closed set, to which Slim Pickens responds, I quote, blank you, I'm working from Mel Brooks. The cowboy brawl continues to engulf the characters and crew of the musical, then spills into the commissary, where the actors, or where actors still in costume from a variety of film genres, are eating lunch and waiting to get back to the respective sets. At this point, Headly Lamar, leader of the evil cowboys, walks out of the studios, hails a taxi, and as a driver, I quote, get me out of this picture. End of quote. The sheriff chases him down on horseback and catches him at Grumman's Chinese Theater, where the marquee announces Blazing Saddles as the movie being shown. The wake-up kid arrives just at the time that the sheriff kills the bad guy. Then they both decide to go in the theater, buy some popcorn and watch the ending of their own film. In one of the last shots of the movie, the kid is waiting for the sheriff at the edge of town and the kid has in his hands the popcorn he bought at the movie theater. Then they both take off into the sunset, not on horses, but on a limousine. That's the end of the film. The resonance of Don Quixote in Mel Brooks's film is deafening to say the least. In Blazing Saddles, the director brilliantly bears the narrative technique and, among other things, creates an implosion of genres and blurs the line demarcating fiction and reality, reminiscent of episodes in Don Quixote, such as the story Grisostom and Marcela, in the first part of the novel. But it is an episode toward the end of the second part that most resounds in the film. In chapter 62 of the second part, Don Quixote is walking to the streets of Barcelona. He comes upon a shop with a sign that reads, books printed here. The night steps into the place and, I quote, sudden printing in one place, correcting in another, type setting here, revising there, in short, all the procedures that can be seen in a large printing house. End of quote. The workers are busy printing a translation of a book. Don Quixote walked through the shop, marbling at the process, talks to the translator with whom he discusses the problems with translations, and he also discusses with him the pricing and selling of books. Finally, he sees some recently published titles, among which is the apocryphal second half of the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, which he repudiates as being a false fiction. What we have here is the bearing of the device to the extreme. Up to now, the text has been calling attention to its own narrative construct by alluding to the different conventions of the novel. But in this episode, the reflexive text reaches a mind-boggling level as the narrator takes the fictional character to visit the printing shop, the matrix that generates the reality of the book. That is, Don Quixote arrives at the source that gives him life as a fictional entity, the womb of literature. He marvels at the assembly line process of books as they are being composed and coming to life at the same time that the reader is amazed by the fact that the night is here shown to be a character in a novel aware of its fictionality, capable of producing and criticizing the medium that allows its existence. This is precisely what Mel Brooks also accomplishes in his comical satire of cowboy films. It all ends in a movie studio in Hollywood inside the machine of fictional dreams where we see how films are put together and consumed in movie theaters along with popcorn and other candies. Once again, there is a blurring of the line between the fictional and the real where the protagonists of the movie are both inside and outside the fictional frame able to live and watch the ending of their own fictional story. As I noted earlier, the influence of Cervantes is also present in television. In the 1990s, many programs altered the way we saw them on account of how they utilized techniques that broke narrative illusion and blurred the line between fiction and reality in a variety of ways. Seinfeld fits well into both of these categories. The most famous episodes are in this regard are those dealing with the show but nothing where the protagonists come up with the idea of pitching a pilot show to SM NBC based on their lives called Seinfeld which will be about nothing. The irony of course is that the show they are peddling is the exact replica of the show in which they are fictional characters which purports to be the life of Jerry Seinfeld slightly fictionalized. The blurring of the boundaries between the fictional and the real can be found more in the early episodes of the show. Each episode begins with Jerry Seinfeld doing part of the monologue that he normally performs as a stand-up comedian. This is the Seinfeld viewers are familiar with through his appearances on talk shows and live performances. The purpose of the monologue is to introduce a theme the program will develop. Then the show starts and Seinfeld appears as one of the fictional characters. However, the story is interrupted not only by commercial breaks but also by the real Seinfeld who appears again performing his stand-up routine discussing the central theme of the fictional world we have just left behind. The monologue then has a second function. It serves to break the fictional illusion and brings the audience back to the real historical Seinfeld. This intrusion of the monologue happens once or twice during the show but the program ends with the real Seinfeld wrapping up the day's theme in his monologue. Thus the historical Seinfeld frames the fictional Seinfeld leaving many viewers somewhat confused. The process of drawing audiences into the fictional world and suddenly breaking the illusion is a procedure Cervantes exploits throughout the Quixote. The narrators in the novel constantly break the enchantment of the narration to instruct the reader on how to deal with the power of the fictional text disseminated through books. Mel Brooks and the writers of Seinfeld also shadow the fictional illusion and invite the audience to pay attention to the devices, conventions and techniques that are deployed in the making of movies and television sitcoms that pervade society. They make the audience aware of the power that the media of television and film have to construct realities which can easily spill or mingle with the spectator's own lived reality. Moreover, the lesson gleaned from the Quixote has not lost the relevance in the 21st century especially as we face the new frontier of the cyber world. Computers, iPads and iPhones pose the same challenges the technology of the book Post for Cervantes 400 years ago. For it is through these gadgets that many in the western world have access to general information, fiction, movies, television and all the new forms of social media, the forms that social media continuously invents. It is imperative that we understand these media changes, understand how they work and transform our societal relations and our identity. For it is only by being a discreet user of this media that we can establish a healthy relationship with technology and avoid suffering the uneasiness Jorge Luis Borges describes in his essay Partial Magic in the Quixote. The Argentine writer believed that a deep discomfort takes over us when we confront what he calls a site Don Quixote. When we confront a site Don Quixote as a reader of Don Quixote and Hamlet as an spectator of Hamlet. For we know that if the characters of a fictional world can be readers and spectators, we its readers or spectators can be fictitious, end of quote. Mutatis Mutandis the same is true of many films and TV shows of modern day popular culture. But by being educated and discreet users of this media, we can cease to fear that our reality can be engulfed by the fictional. Thank you.