Educational Media Reviews Online

This video discusses the creation and meaning of Don Quixote, with commentary from author Carlos Fuentes, John J. Allen (President of the Cervantes Society), and others. Mario Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa (founder of the Guardian Angels) reflect on the meaning of Don Quixote and the inspiration they drew from it to overcome impossible odds. The section on Cervantes makes it clear that he wrote it out of disillusionment, as a parody of his earlier idealism. It creates something of a disjunction, then, to hear from scholars, as well as the New Yorkers mentioned above, that it should inspire one to tilt at windmills. Thankfully, this discrepancy is acknowledged by Cuomo near the end. The video then reconciles these discordant interpretations somewhat when discussing the second part of the work, which Cervantes wrote a decade later, when he had returned to some level of idealism and no longer viewed his creation as a mere spoof. The material on Don Quixote’s second part is particularly good, and I could easily see a class which had read the first part using this video to learn about the sequel.

The “Video Index” and “Thematic Units” give the teacher the ability to play only a certain portion of the video. None of the five thematic units is longer than ten minutes, providing a quick means of introducing the class to Cervantes’s life, for example. The pre-viewing and post-viewing questions (one each) that accompany the thematic units are appropriate for the intended audience (grades 6-12). “Teacher Resources” points to the Discovery Channel School Web site, and to the useful 12-page pamphlet of additional questions and activities that comes with the DVD. The technical quality is good, except for an annoying time lag between moving lips and the accompanying audio in some interviews.