This paper offers a thorough analysis of two film adaptations of Don Quixote - Don Quixote and Honor of the Knights -directed by Vlado Kristl and Albert Serra, respectively. After comparing these films with their authors' other film adaptations, the paper illustrates the unique possibilities which Cervantes' novel offers to those who chose to adapt it and which largely stem from the fact that, as André Bazin points out, Don Quixote transcends the novel itself. Thus, Don Quixote and Honor of the Knights abandon those events depicted in the novel - they foreground images and sounds in order to re-think the act of adaptation, its artificiality. Kristl's animated Don Quixote shows the titular protagonist as a hollow water pipe (a mobile sound drawing) so as to emphasize his re-conceptualization within a new medium, as well as his core emptiness, while Honor of the Knights focuses on the lead actor's body and the costume which turns him into the character without whom the fiction film's illusion would cease to exist. Moreover, both films insist on the keeping the sounds split from the images; in doing so, they point to crucial differences between how literature and cinema handle illusion. The last part of the analysis of each film is dedicated to the quotes and paraphrases through which Kristl and Serra bring their auto-reflexive films head to head with other auto-reflexive works of art, establishing an intertextual dialogue not only with their own literary source, but also with other images.