Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Del Toro on Fascism, Violence, Mexico, Kidnappings & Catholism - Auteur
- Translation: What interests me about fascism is that it is a black hole of free will. It is a system which isn’t necessarily unique, but it absolves brutality, it absolves the lack of morals and it absolves people of their own decisions. When they tell you ‘you can kill these people because they are Jews, reds or homosexuals, or whatever!’ In this world you can permit a brutal action on the base of collective advice; that is what scares me. Interview with Guillermo del Toro on 10/23/2006. [3]
Fear they (fascists) inject into people - 2 farmers in Pans
Not allowing you to express yourself & an expression of masculinity juxtaposed with the innocence of a child
'we were only following orders' - Nazi soldiers
absence of father figure? Masculinity is tyranny
A dark fairy tale ... Pan's Labyrinth
For those with a weakness for the beautiful monsters of modern
cinema, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro has earned a deserved
reputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film. Gregarious
and personable, with an almost photographic recall of faces, he has
charmed both the hardcore horror fans, who gave him a hero's welcome at
London's Frightfest in August, and now the upmarket critical
cognoscenti, who snapped to attention following his Palme d'Or
nomination for his new film Pan's Labyrinth at Cannes in May.
- Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno)
- Production year: 2006
- Countries: Latin America, Rest of the world, Spain
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 112 mins
- Directors: Guillermo del Toro, Guillermo del Toro
- Cast: Ariadna Gil, Doug Jones, Ivana Baquero, Maribel Verdu, Sergi Lopez
Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, Pan's
Labyrinth is a dark fairy tale that distils his distinctive mix of fact
and fantasy, poetry and politics, pain and pleasure. It's an epic,
poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and
mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely
beautiful monsters - a transformative, life-affirming nightmare which
is, for my money, the very best film of the year.
Since the early
1990s, del Toro has divided his film-making between personal European
projects (the modern vampiric chiller Cronos in 1993; the ghostly
Spanish Civil War fable The Devil's Backbone in 2001) and big-budget
Hollywood hits (ongoing comic-book franchises Blade II in 2002, and
Hellboy in 2004). Those familiar with the guilty ghosts of The Devil's
Backbone will recognise key motifs in his new fable, about a young
girl's exploration of a labyrinthine underworld in Franco-era Spain.
The
young heroine of Pan's Labyrinth is Ofelia, whose widowed mother,
Carmen, has recently married Vidal, a vicious captain in Spain's Civil
Guard, involved in policing anti-fascist Maquis resistance in the
mountainous wooded northern region. Vidal's housekeeper, Mercedes,
befriends Ofelia, protecting her from her stepfather's wrath while
maintaining secretive connections with the Maquis. Meanwhile, Ofelia
meets an alarmingly devious faun who suggests that she may be the lost
princess of a beautiful and terrifying netherworld. While Mercedes
attempts to help the Maquis in their struggles, Ofelia embarks on a
quest that will test her true nature.
This quest involves a
journey through a labyrinth, a word with which the Civil War has become
intrinsically linked (think of key historical accounts such as Gerald
Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth) and which served as the 'perfect
metaphor' for del Toro's endeavours.
'A maze is a place where you
get lost,' he explains. 'But a labyrinth is essentially a place of
transit, an ethical, moral transit to one inevitable centre. You think
of the transit of Spanish society from the 1940s to the incredible
explosion of the post-Franco period. The 1980s in Spain were like the
1960s in the rest of the world! In the movie, Ofelia is a "princess who
forgot who she was and where she came from", who progresses through the
labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to
know the name of their father - the fascist. It's a parable, just as
The Devil's Backbone was a parable of the Spanish Civil War.
'I
was also trying to uncover a common thread between the "real world" and
the "imaginary world"through one of the seminal concerns of fairy tales:
choice. It's something that has intrigued me since Cronos, through
Hellboy and now to Pan's Labyrinth: the way your choices define you. And
I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of
choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose, which the girl
takes in this movie.'
Del Toro's faun is just one of the film's
menagerie of fantastical creatures and monsters, drawn from sources that
range from Goya's paintings to Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Amazingly
for a film that features around 300 effects shots and boasts complex
creature designs, Pan's Labyrinth was completed for a mere £10m, a feat
del Toro attributes to the lessons learnt on Blade II and Hellboy ('I
love to play with the big toys... and to learn from them'). As always,
the director sketched each character in the notebooks that are his
constant companions, extraordinary documents of his mind at work and his
obsessive attention to detail. Here we find the original drawings for
the 'vegetable baby' which Ofelia places beneath her mother's bed,
nurtured with milk and magic, and the terrifying 'pale man' whose ire
she arouses by stealing from his table.
'I wanted to represent
political power within the creatures,' del Toro says. 'And that
particular character somehow came to represent the church and the
devouring of children. The original design was just an old man who
seemed to have lost a lot of weight and was covered in loose skin. Then I
removed the face, so it became part of the personality of the
institution. But then, what to do about the eyes? So I decided to place
stigmata on the hands and shove the eyes into the stigmata. Having done
that, I thought it would be great to make the fingers like peacock
feathers that fluff and open. That's how that figure evolved.
'The
faun proved more difficult. The idea was to make him very masculine,
not aggressively so, just sinuous. I remember talking to Doug Jones [who
plays both the faun and the pale man] when he first started working on
the role and saying, "More Mick Jagger, less David Bowie!" I wanted the
faun to have a rock star quality. Everything about the faun and his
personality needed to be masculine because you had to pit the female
energy of the girl against something monolithic.'
In essence, del
Toro is a divided soul, a realist attuned to the strange vibrations of
the supernatural, a lapsed Catholic ('not quite the same thing as an
atheist') with an interest in sacrifice and redemption who turned down
the chance to direct The Chronicles of Narnia because he 'wasn't
interested in the lion resurrecting'. Crucially, like the artistic
refugees from Franco's Spain who first inspired him, the writer-director
considers himself an exile from his home country, Mexico, not least
because of the 1997 kidnapping of his father, at the height of a vogue
for such ransomed abductions. He was released after 72 days.
'I
was 33,' el Toro recalls. 'The perfect age to be crucified! I had lived
my life believing two things - that pain should not be sought, but, by
the same token, it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in
facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in
a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don't relish it,
but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God
sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own
dictionary.'
This willingness to confront pain and to forge his
own cinematic dictionary has informed the blend of innocence and
brutality that is a trademark of del Toro's phantasmagorical cinema.
From the crushing addiction of Cronos, whose ageing anti-hero is reduced
to licking blood from the tiled floor of a public lavatory, to the
redemptive fantasy of Hellboy, whose titular demon takes an industrial
grinder to the horns on his head in a bid to take control of his
destiny, del Toro has returned compulsively to these twinned themes. Now
in Pan's Labyrinth, which he wrote, directed and produced, he has
created a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema, a masterpiece made entirely on
his own terms.
Del Toro is working within the same tradition of
cinematic horror that spawned A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's
seminal reinvention of the 'classic dark fairytale', in which Freddy
Krueger emerged as an 1980s incarnation of the Big Bad Wolf. 'I think
that really is one of the best fairytales of any decade, because Craven
understands the roots of those myths,' says del Toro. Pan's Labyrinth is
being promoted in America with a classic horror tagline: 'Innocence has
a power that evil cannot imagine'.
That power is also
self-generating. 'Pan's Labyrinth is a movie about a girl who gives
birth to herself into the world she believes in,' del Toro continues.
'At that moment, it doesn't matter if her body lives or dies. And this
is something I have experienced. I remember the worst experience of my
life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic [del
Toro's first Hollywood feature, in 1997, which was severely compromised
by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the
movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at
least there are rules. Now when I look at Mimic, what I see is the pain
of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful.'
Pain
and beauty, brutality and innocence - once again, del Toro's
conversation finds a way back to the central duality of death and
rebirth. 'Those things are one and the same,' he says. 'It would be a
cliche to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain
way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than
the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I
had to go through to get to work. I've seen people being shot; I've had
guns put to my head; I've seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated
... because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that
some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.'
Like
the heroine of Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro's career now seems to be at a
point of rebirth and regeneration. 'Hopefully, this movie will allow me
to start a new path,' he says. 'The way I see my craft, and the way I
see the stories I tell, has completely changed as a result of this
movie. Shooting Pan's Labyrinth was very painful, but it also became a
war about me not compromising.
'I gave back my entire salary in
order to get the film made the way I wanted it. I probably should have
abandoned it the moment the funding fell through the first time, but I
stuck with it for almost two-and-a-half years and refused to back down.
It's the first time in the six movies I've directed where I've said: I'm
doing this one my way, no matter what.
'Financiers ran out on me
and everyone involved in my career was saying it was the biggest mistake
I could make. But I'm very happy with the result. And for me, nothing
will be the same again.'
· This is an edited version of an article from the December issue of Sight and Sound, on sale from Tuesday
Goya influence on Pans (Spanish Culture)
The dark Spanish melancholy
that informs director Guillermo del Toro’s small masterpiece of magic
realism, gives this film unforgettable power. As dark as any Zurbarán or
Ribera, Pan’s Labyrinth interweaves two worlds and two realities — that of a child’s fairytale longings, and the ruthless fascism of Franco’s Spain.If it sounds like a marriage of hope and hell, it is — but the ending alone, which spins yet another uncanny twist, is pure enchantment. Del Toro’s imagination (Hellboy) provides visuals that evoke Cocteau and Buñuel, with a healthy dose of Brothers Grimm as visualized by Frida Kahlo. The deeply saturated colors of the film stock add to the mood of otherworldly adventure.
Our protagonist is a dreamy young girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who goes to live at a rural millhouse occupied by Franco’s soldiers. Ofelia’s mother has married Capitan Vidal (the astonishing Sergi Lopez), a cold-blooded monster who cares only for the fact that the mother is pregnant with his child. Very quickly we, and Ofelia, encounter a secret underworld, complete with labyrinth, crumbling ruins, gossamer fairies — amazing art direction — and a spirit guide. The latter is the Pan of the film’s title, a harsh-but-kindly master who asks Ofelia to perform three tasks in order to take her rightful place as princess of a lost kingdom.
In Hollywood’s hands, such a scenario might amount to a sanitized Alice in Wonderland caper. In del Toro’s vision, the underworld mirrors the increasing danger to Ofelia’s household, and the brave partisans hiding out in the nearby forest. More psychological than political, Pan’s Labyrinth reminds us how we felt when we were 12-years-old, especially in dangerous, or unsettling circumstances —when we longed to slip into another realm where beauty and magic ruled. And where we felt safe. But this dialogue between fantasy and horror refuses to comply with our Hallmark needs, and the scenes of wartime brutality are echoed in demonic corridors beneath the floors, and behind the bedroom walls. Among the triumphs of this magical tour de force is the creation of what has to be the most grotesque and mesmerizing monster brought to the screen. Straight out of Goya, this macabre creature is more than matched by the human monster, embodied by the charismatic Capitan.
It will be clear to viewers who have encountered shamanic journeying, that Pan and his shape-shifting cohorts are spirit guides. On this deeper level, the film illustrates the subterranean psychology of secrets. Secrets — both isolating and comforting. On one level of the film’s oneiric odyssey, Ofelia’s secret life creates a refuge from the pain of her loneliness. On another, the secrets kept by her partisan housekeeper breed a dangerous isolation — and threaten the very possibility for survival during the last days of WWII.
Too harsh for young viewers, this is a film for those who believe in a harrowing, and bittersweet variety of redemption. Like Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth thrives on splendid casting and ingenious camerawork. And a ravishing score by Javier Navarrete. An Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Influences Spirit of the Beehive
http://www.filmquarterly.org/2007/06/pans-labyrinth/
With Pan’s Labyrinth, however, writer-director Guillermo del Toro has built on his proven skills in fantasy (Hellboy in 2004) and Spanish history (The Devil’s Backbone
from 2001) to produce a work that is at once a logical development of
his artistic trajectory and a wholly unexpected masterpiece from a
director identified with such low-status genres as horror. Perfectly
realized within its self-imposed limits of time and space, Pan’s Labyrinth has wider implications for the key questions of nationality, gender, and identity than the bloated, star-studded excess of Babel.
And in the technical perfection of its plotting, shooting, and cutting
(not to mention its meticulous art design and expert animatronic and
digital effects), it suggests a new model for world cinema production.
The trend for major directors to make films outside Mexico (Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men [2006] is also cited in this context) has of course been controversial. Mexican critics such as Gustavo García have decried a “Mexican cinema in exile.” Del Toro himself, on the other hand, has spoken of film as “Esperanto,” a universal language which, ironically, would seem to be one answer to the supposed problem of non-communication between cultures at which Babel gestures so showily. As we shall see, del Toro’s practice is a valuable example of transnational cooperation. Eluding nativism (shooting “in exile”), he also avoids facile multiculturalism, engaging deeply with the culture, history, and cinema of his host country. When accepting several awards for Pan’s Labyrinth at the Spanish Oscars or Goyas (where his feature was accepted without controversy as a “Spanish” film) he proclaimed: “¡Viva México y viva España!” This is no facile slogan. Rather it should be taken in the context of del Toro’s vindication of the Spanish Civil War as an event of vital interest for the Mexico that welcomed so many exiles from the conflict. Far from reveling in Babel-style non-communication, Pan’s Labyrinth reveals that, given sympathy and attention, films based on local events can have immediate and profound significance for global audiences.
Pan’s Labyrinth begins with a blank, black screen. We hear the sound of feverish panting and the humming of Javier Navarrete’s haunting theme. Titles briefly set the scene: it is Spain in 1944 and guerrillas are holding out in the woods against the triumphant Franco regime. In close-up we see the source of the labored breathing: as time runs backwards, a trickle of ruby-red blood retreats into the nostril of white-faced, black-haired Ofelia, the child protagonist played by extraordinary newcomer Ivana Baquero. Cinematog-rapher Guillermo Navarro’s camera, already restlessly mobile, plunges into her eye and the first fantasy sequence. The voiceover tells the ancient legend of a Princess, exiled from her underground realm, who will return to be with her father the King when she finds a portal to her lost home. The tiny figure of the Princess (Ofelia) descends the staircases of a vast fantasy set.
The screen flares up to white and the camera swoops over bombed buildings. A wide shot of a ruined bell tower shows the famously devastated village of Belchite, a drawing of which appeared on the cover of the Francoist magazine Reconstrucción as early as 1940. (The village, an uncanny tourist attraction, remains ruinous even today.) Ofelia and her sickly pregnant mother (the convincingly distressed Ariadna Gil) are traveling by official car (a Fascist symbol is prominently painted on its side) to a remote outpost. Here the girl will meet her repellent stepfather (Sergi López), a Francoist captain sent to fight the guerrillas. As mother Carmen stops the car to vomit by the road, daughter Ofelia comes face to face with a stele carved with a mysterious figure and replaces a piece of the carving she has found on the forest floor. She is rewarded with her first glimpse of this magical place’s genius loci: a chattering stick insect she identifies as a “fairy.” Soaring behind the buzzing beast, the camera follows it and the car to the new family’s fateful meeting at the decrepit mill that serves as the Francoist military headquarters.
Allusions to The Spirit of the Beehive (top left) and to Diego Velasquez, Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618; bottom left), oil on canvas, National Gallery of Scotland
© 1973 Elílas Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S. L.
© 2006 Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj
What is clear from this opening sequence is an extraordinary fluidity of movement between fantasy and reality. While the plot is placed quite precisely in a historical moment with which few outside Spain are likely to be familiar (who knew that anti-Francoist resistance continued long after the Civil War ended?), the material effects of that desperate moment (the bloodied bodies of children) are juxtaposed with, are indeed inextricable from, the fantastic realms into which the imagination retreats when confronted by real-life horror.
Moreover there are very precise Spanish references here, and not just in the expert art design with its reference to a famously devastated village. Ofelia’s mother scolds her daughter for reading fairy tales, telling her they will curdle her brain. It is a charge repeated throughout the film and one highly reminiscent of Spain’s national narrative, Don Quixote, in which fantasy literature also transforms an outcast’s experience of the mundane into the fantastic. It may be no accident that the film’s principal location (built like all the sets to del Toro’s precise specification) is a mill, albeit one deprived of the giant sails which gave rise to the knight’s most famous exploit.
The replacing of the missing piece of the statue is a yet more precise reference. Spain’s most famous art movie, Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), also set in the devastated countryside after the Civil War, confronts a dark-eyed girl (Ana Torrent) with nameless horrors. Ana faces not a faun but Frankenstein’s monster, whom she has seen in a makeshift village cinema. One typically unsettling sequence has Ana, in her schoolroom, replace a missing part in a human manikin. As in the case of Ofelia, her distant sister in Spanish cinema, the missing piece is the eyes. Del Toro thus not only replays Spanish history in a Mexican mode he has perfected elsewhere; he also remakes Spanish cinema by transforming Erice’s austere and minimalist drama with gorgeously crafted mise-en-scène and deliriously inventive camerawork.
Preliminary drawing of the mill
Courtesy of Optimum Home Entertainment. © 2006 Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj
In spite of the frequent accusation that democratic Spain has turned its back on a traumatic history, wedded to a “pact of forgetting” between victors and vanquished, Spanish cinema since The Spirit of the Beehive has in fact frequently returned to the scene of Franco’s crimes. Disturbingly, as those crimes have receded in time, the treatment has become progressively trivialized. Several films have shown the post-war period (known in Spain as the “years of hunger”) through the eyes of improbably cute kids (as in Secrets of the Heart [1997] or Butterfly’s Tongue [1999]). Others deploy retro wardrobe to turn the 1930s into expertly dressed sex comedy (the Oscar-winning Belle Epoque [1992]) or the 1940s into a sporting match between Fascists and guerrillas (the soccer-themed The Goalkeeper [2000]). Only del Toro, a supposed outsider, has managed to use the child-witness device, now so hackneyed, without a trace of sentimentality. And only he has been able to make use of an extraordinarily handsome mise-enscène in such a way as to reinforce rather than reduce the horrors of history. In doing so he closely coincides with current trends in Spain, where a “Law of Memory” on the legacy of the Civil War has been bitterly debated and where mass war graves are only now being disinterred, a spectacle del Toro himself, master of the horror genre, might hesitate to depict.
When we move to the interiors of the mill, the main set, golden light slants over dark brown wooden furniture. Elderly women, overseen by steely housekeeper Mercedes (a Maribel Verdú unrecognizable from her role as the sexy wife in Cuarón’s And Your Mother Too [2001]), chop root vegetables or gut rabbits. It is a scene and an aesthetic reminiscent of Velásquez (for example, Old Woman Cooking Eggs in the National Gallery of Scotland), which is frequently reproduced in Spanish period pictures. While local directors have often been content with this picturesque art design, del Toro combines it with more disturbing and ambitious non-naturalistic elements. As mother and daughter hug in their shadowy bedroom (the warm brown palette of day has shifted to the chilly blue of night), Ofelia tells her unborn brother the story of a miraculous flower that blooms every morning. In a single, extraordinary shot del Toro tilts down to inside the mother’s womb, where we see a golden fetus mutely listening, and pans right to the fantastic blossom atop a mountain of thorns. Suddenly the stick insect, clicking and clucking, intrudes into the fantasy landscape and we follow it back to the bedroom where it transforms itself into the slightly sinister fairy of Ofelia’s imagination.
In its stress on a world of women (of mothers, daughters, and housekeepers) wholly separate from that of men, Pan’s Labyrinth is clearly commenting on gender relations. Captain Vidal, the stepfather, embodies a masculinity so exclusive it barely acknowledges the existence of the feminine. Welcoming his pregnant wife and stepdaughter to the mill he addresses them in the masculine plural form (“Bienvenidos”) on the assumption that the unborn child, his true priority, is a boy. As he brutishly announces, a son must be born where his father is, even if this endangers the life of the mother; and, in childbirth, the mother must be sacrificed to ensure the survival of the son who will bear the father’s name. His misogyny will prove his undoing: Mercedes, dismissed as “just a woman,” is in league with the guerrillas and will conspire against her tyrannical master under his very nose.
Del Toro suggests that this fantasy of pure male filiation, without the intercession of women, is fundamental to Fascism. Vidal’s fetishistic attention to uniform (black leather boots and gloves, sometimes clutching a girl’s small white hand) and his amorous investment in the tools of torture (“With this,” he gloats, “we will become intimate”) suggest a fatal narcissism which is as much libidinal as it is political. Vidal’s scenes with housekeeper Mercedes have an icy erotic menace. And it is not just sex that is perverted here. In a time of terror, nature is decidedly unnatural: Ofelia describes her mother as being “sick with baby” (pregnancy will prove a mortal burden); and the verdant landscape (shot in national parks in the region of Segovia) hides blasted trees and monstrous toads. There is no sense of the rich sensuality of nature embodied by the mythical Pan of the film’s English title.
The trend for major directors to make films outside Mexico (Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men [2006] is also cited in this context) has of course been controversial. Mexican critics such as Gustavo García have decried a “Mexican cinema in exile.” Del Toro himself, on the other hand, has spoken of film as “Esperanto,” a universal language which, ironically, would seem to be one answer to the supposed problem of non-communication between cultures at which Babel gestures so showily. As we shall see, del Toro’s practice is a valuable example of transnational cooperation. Eluding nativism (shooting “in exile”), he also avoids facile multiculturalism, engaging deeply with the culture, history, and cinema of his host country. When accepting several awards for Pan’s Labyrinth at the Spanish Oscars or Goyas (where his feature was accepted without controversy as a “Spanish” film) he proclaimed: “¡Viva México y viva España!” This is no facile slogan. Rather it should be taken in the context of del Toro’s vindication of the Spanish Civil War as an event of vital interest for the Mexico that welcomed so many exiles from the conflict. Far from reveling in Babel-style non-communication, Pan’s Labyrinth reveals that, given sympathy and attention, films based on local events can have immediate and profound significance for global audiences.
Pan’s Labyrinth begins with a blank, black screen. We hear the sound of feverish panting and the humming of Javier Navarrete’s haunting theme. Titles briefly set the scene: it is Spain in 1944 and guerrillas are holding out in the woods against the triumphant Franco regime. In close-up we see the source of the labored breathing: as time runs backwards, a trickle of ruby-red blood retreats into the nostril of white-faced, black-haired Ofelia, the child protagonist played by extraordinary newcomer Ivana Baquero. Cinematog-rapher Guillermo Navarro’s camera, already restlessly mobile, plunges into her eye and the first fantasy sequence. The voiceover tells the ancient legend of a Princess, exiled from her underground realm, who will return to be with her father the King when she finds a portal to her lost home. The tiny figure of the Princess (Ofelia) descends the staircases of a vast fantasy set.
The screen flares up to white and the camera swoops over bombed buildings. A wide shot of a ruined bell tower shows the famously devastated village of Belchite, a drawing of which appeared on the cover of the Francoist magazine Reconstrucción as early as 1940. (The village, an uncanny tourist attraction, remains ruinous even today.) Ofelia and her sickly pregnant mother (the convincingly distressed Ariadna Gil) are traveling by official car (a Fascist symbol is prominently painted on its side) to a remote outpost. Here the girl will meet her repellent stepfather (Sergi López), a Francoist captain sent to fight the guerrillas. As mother Carmen stops the car to vomit by the road, daughter Ofelia comes face to face with a stele carved with a mysterious figure and replaces a piece of the carving she has found on the forest floor. She is rewarded with her first glimpse of this magical place’s genius loci: a chattering stick insect she identifies as a “fairy.” Soaring behind the buzzing beast, the camera follows it and the car to the new family’s fateful meeting at the decrepit mill that serves as the Francoist military headquarters.
Allusions to The Spirit of the Beehive (top left) and to Diego Velasquez, Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618; bottom left), oil on canvas, National Gallery of Scotland
© 1973 Elílas Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S. L.
© 2006 Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj
What is clear from this opening sequence is an extraordinary fluidity of movement between fantasy and reality. While the plot is placed quite precisely in a historical moment with which few outside Spain are likely to be familiar (who knew that anti-Francoist resistance continued long after the Civil War ended?), the material effects of that desperate moment (the bloodied bodies of children) are juxtaposed with, are indeed inextricable from, the fantastic realms into which the imagination retreats when confronted by real-life horror.
Moreover there are very precise Spanish references here, and not just in the expert art design with its reference to a famously devastated village. Ofelia’s mother scolds her daughter for reading fairy tales, telling her they will curdle her brain. It is a charge repeated throughout the film and one highly reminiscent of Spain’s national narrative, Don Quixote, in which fantasy literature also transforms an outcast’s experience of the mundane into the fantastic. It may be no accident that the film’s principal location (built like all the sets to del Toro’s precise specification) is a mill, albeit one deprived of the giant sails which gave rise to the knight’s most famous exploit.
The replacing of the missing piece of the statue is a yet more precise reference. Spain’s most famous art movie, Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), also set in the devastated countryside after the Civil War, confronts a dark-eyed girl (Ana Torrent) with nameless horrors. Ana faces not a faun but Frankenstein’s monster, whom she has seen in a makeshift village cinema. One typically unsettling sequence has Ana, in her schoolroom, replace a missing part in a human manikin. As in the case of Ofelia, her distant sister in Spanish cinema, the missing piece is the eyes. Del Toro thus not only replays Spanish history in a Mexican mode he has perfected elsewhere; he also remakes Spanish cinema by transforming Erice’s austere and minimalist drama with gorgeously crafted mise-en-scène and deliriously inventive camerawork.
Preliminary drawing of the mill
Courtesy of Optimum Home Entertainment. © 2006 Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj
In spite of the frequent accusation that democratic Spain has turned its back on a traumatic history, wedded to a “pact of forgetting” between victors and vanquished, Spanish cinema since The Spirit of the Beehive has in fact frequently returned to the scene of Franco’s crimes. Disturbingly, as those crimes have receded in time, the treatment has become progressively trivialized. Several films have shown the post-war period (known in Spain as the “years of hunger”) through the eyes of improbably cute kids (as in Secrets of the Heart [1997] or Butterfly’s Tongue [1999]). Others deploy retro wardrobe to turn the 1930s into expertly dressed sex comedy (the Oscar-winning Belle Epoque [1992]) or the 1940s into a sporting match between Fascists and guerrillas (the soccer-themed The Goalkeeper [2000]). Only del Toro, a supposed outsider, has managed to use the child-witness device, now so hackneyed, without a trace of sentimentality. And only he has been able to make use of an extraordinarily handsome mise-enscène in such a way as to reinforce rather than reduce the horrors of history. In doing so he closely coincides with current trends in Spain, where a “Law of Memory” on the legacy of the Civil War has been bitterly debated and where mass war graves are only now being disinterred, a spectacle del Toro himself, master of the horror genre, might hesitate to depict.
When we move to the interiors of the mill, the main set, golden light slants over dark brown wooden furniture. Elderly women, overseen by steely housekeeper Mercedes (a Maribel Verdú unrecognizable from her role as the sexy wife in Cuarón’s And Your Mother Too [2001]), chop root vegetables or gut rabbits. It is a scene and an aesthetic reminiscent of Velásquez (for example, Old Woman Cooking Eggs in the National Gallery of Scotland), which is frequently reproduced in Spanish period pictures. While local directors have often been content with this picturesque art design, del Toro combines it with more disturbing and ambitious non-naturalistic elements. As mother and daughter hug in their shadowy bedroom (the warm brown palette of day has shifted to the chilly blue of night), Ofelia tells her unborn brother the story of a miraculous flower that blooms every morning. In a single, extraordinary shot del Toro tilts down to inside the mother’s womb, where we see a golden fetus mutely listening, and pans right to the fantastic blossom atop a mountain of thorns. Suddenly the stick insect, clicking and clucking, intrudes into the fantasy landscape and we follow it back to the bedroom where it transforms itself into the slightly sinister fairy of Ofelia’s imagination.
In its stress on a world of women (of mothers, daughters, and housekeepers) wholly separate from that of men, Pan’s Labyrinth is clearly commenting on gender relations. Captain Vidal, the stepfather, embodies a masculinity so exclusive it barely acknowledges the existence of the feminine. Welcoming his pregnant wife and stepdaughter to the mill he addresses them in the masculine plural form (“Bienvenidos”) on the assumption that the unborn child, his true priority, is a boy. As he brutishly announces, a son must be born where his father is, even if this endangers the life of the mother; and, in childbirth, the mother must be sacrificed to ensure the survival of the son who will bear the father’s name. His misogyny will prove his undoing: Mercedes, dismissed as “just a woman,” is in league with the guerrillas and will conspire against her tyrannical master under his very nose.
Del Toro suggests that this fantasy of pure male filiation, without the intercession of women, is fundamental to Fascism. Vidal’s fetishistic attention to uniform (black leather boots and gloves, sometimes clutching a girl’s small white hand) and his amorous investment in the tools of torture (“With this,” he gloats, “we will become intimate”) suggest a fatal narcissism which is as much libidinal as it is political. Vidal’s scenes with housekeeper Mercedes have an icy erotic menace. And it is not just sex that is perverted here. In a time of terror, nature is decidedly unnatural: Ofelia describes her mother as being “sick with baby” (pregnancy will prove a mortal burden); and the verdant landscape (shot in national parks in the region of Segovia) hides blasted trees and monstrous toads. There is no sense of the rich sensuality of nature embodied by the mythical Pan of the film’s English title.
Arthur Rackham Pan's influence design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rackham
The director, Guillermo Del Toro says that Rackham inspired his work, notably the faun in Pan's Labyrinth - as well as the tree that grows out of a Scottish church altar in Hellboy which Del Toro called the 'Rackham Tree'.
Childrens perspective on Spanish Civil War: Butterfly's Tongue (1999) & Carols Journey (2002)
Butteryfly's Tongue or Butterfly (Spanish: La lengua de las mariposas, literally The Tongue of the Butterflies), is a 1999 Spanish film directed by José Luis Cuerda. The film centres on Moncho (Manuel Lozano) and his coming-of-age experience in Galicia in 1936. Moncho develops a close relationship with his teacher Don Gregorio (Fernando Fernán Gómez) who introduces the boy to different things in the world. While the story centres on Moncho's ordinary coming-of-age experiences, tensions related to the looming Spanish Civil War periodically interrupt Moncho's personal growth and daily life.
Plot
In a Galician town, a young boy, Moncho, goes to school for the first time and is taught by Don Gregorio about life and literature. At first, Moncho is very scared that the teachers will hit him, as that was the standard procedure back then, but he is relieved to discover that don Gregorio doesn't hit his pupils. Don Gregorio is unlike any other teacher; he builds a special relationship with Moncho, teaching him to love learning. Don Gregorio also builds a special relationship with Moncho's father, who is a Republican like him. Moncho's mother is luke-warm towards the Republic, her main concern being belief in God and at the end of the film she sides with the Nationalist rebels.When Fascists take control of the town, they round up known Republicans, including don Gregorio. Because of the fact that Moncho's father is a Republican, his family fears that he too will be taken away in the purge if the fascists discover his political leanings. In order to protect themselves, the family goes to the town square to jeer the captured Republicans as they are paraded out of the court house and boarded onto a truck. The film ends with Moncho, despite his continued great affection for his friend and teacher, yelling hateful things and throwing rocks at don Gregorio and the other Republicans, as instructed by his mother, as the truck carries them away, although the last thing Moncho yells are the words for the tongue of a butterfly, espiritrompa (literally "spirotube" or proboscis, in Spanish), a favourite word taught to him by don Gregorio in an attempt to let his dear friend know that he does not truly mean the words he is yelling.
External links
- Butterfly at the Internet Movie Database
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0331701/
The feature is as much a historical snap shot of Spain during the Civil War, prior to Franco's assent as it is a tale of love in a time where the lines between good and evil seemed to be a lot clearer than the current times. Carol (Claro Lago) comes to Spain with her mother Aurora ( Maria Barranco) to their homeland where their father Robert, an American (Ben Temple) is helping to fight Franco's military regime near Madrid. They settle into a small town of Aurora's birth, living with a grandfather and forming bonds with old and new friends. Aurora has come here to die (of an illness no one is made clearly aware of) and leave Carol in the hands of her sister and father. The plot livens up as love blossoms between Carol and Tomiche (Juan Jose Ballesta) and as a love of daughter for a father becomes evident. Towards the end, it becomes clear that the Franco regime has won and her father desprately seeks his daughter as a fugitive in the "new Spain". The end is tragic as Tomiche dies and Carol's father is captured but hope still exists that Carol and her father will be reunited.
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
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