Search results
Gilliam’s long-time love of Grimm fairy tales, the general topic of the script was tantalising. So, no doubt, was the prospect of work, even if it entailed returning to the Hollywood system. While not normally the focus of filmmakers catering for adult audiences, fairy tales are more than mere children’s stories. Jack Zipes shows how the fairy tale evolved from earthy oral folk tales that represented and
This book argues the centrality of hybridity to Terry Gilliam's films. Gilliam had a collaborative approach to filmmaking and a desire to provoke audiences to their own interpretations as other forms of intertextual practice. Placing Gilliam in the category of cinematic fantasist does some preliminary critical work, but crudely homogenises the diversity of his output. One way of marking this range comes from understanding that Gilliam employs an extraordinary variety of genres. These include medieval comedy; children's historical adventure; dystopian satire; the fantastic voyage; science fiction; Gonzo Journalism; fairy tale; and gothic horror. Gilliam's work with Monty Python assured him a revered place in the history of that medium in Britain. As a result, the Python films, And Now for Something Completely Different, The Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, along with his own, Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, and Brazil, show him moving successfully into the British film industry. Most of his films have been adaptations of literary texts, and Jabberwocky forges an extended tale of monsters and market forces. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen builds on some tales from the original texts, constructing a complex examination of fantasy, representation and mortality. Taking crucial ingredients from medieval and older mythologies, the screenplay of The Fisher King resituates them and reworks them for modern America. Gilliam's complex interaction with Britain and America explains his ambiguous place in accounts of American and British films.
This essay examines how Alice Thompson‘s novel, The Falconer (2008), creates a richly allusive Gothic weave by analysing its symbolic languages of myth, nature, and monstrosity, and how it reimagines and reinterprets other modes and texts associated with the Gothic, namely Du Maurier‘s Rebecca and the Bluebeard fairy tale, as well as Scottish ballad tradition and popular fairy belief. Mirroring the trope of metamorphosis which thematically and stylistically informs the novel, the essay also explores how these allusively poetic uses of Gothic become politicised in the portrayal of German Nazism and of traumatic historical memory.
activated ideas for the eventual film. Having taken inspiration from one classic text, Gilliam chose to inter-weave it with a classic literary form, the fairy tale. In a comment that reaches back to his childhood and forward nearly thirty years to The Brothers Grimm , he states that ‘I was trying to make a real Grimm’s fairy tale, which are very bloody.’ 12 Gilliam reworked the traditional fairy tale
crudely homogenises the diversity of his output. One way of marking this range comes from understanding that Gilliam employs an extraordinary variety of genres: medieval comedy; children’s historical adventure; dystopian satire; the fantastic voyage; science fiction; Gonzo Journalism; fairy tale; and gothic horror. Each genre rejects or reworks the norms of realism, but in distinct ways, so that the
According to its director, Terence Fisher, The Gorgon (1964) was not a horror film at all, but a romantic fairy tale and ‘frustrated love story’ (Ringel, 1975a : 24). Although the film is set in Hammer’s usual stylised middle Europe, the Gorgon herself derives not from Gothic literature, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, but from classical mythology – unfamiliar
renewed community of friends and their creative resistance; or as Viali puts it: ‘family, the block, and friends’. For the first time, Guédiguian calls this film a ‘conte’, or ‘tale’ –later he will specify ‘contes de L’Estaque’ (‘Tales from L’Estaque’) –again echoing Bloch, for whom the fairy tale, like the daydream and happy ending, is one of the innumerable manifestations of utopian thinking. À la vie, à la mort! (1995) Like L’Argent fait le bonheur, À la vie, à la mort! aims ‘to show that one can still fight in some way or another, even if it is at a microscopic
Carrington – she comprehended it intuitively, having known it before she even met the surrealists. 15 Her rebellious lampooning of Catholicism and the nuns who expelled her from school ‘naturally’ drew her to surrealism, and later to her friend Luis Buñuel: ‘I do have that kind of mentality’, is how she once described her propensity for black humour. 16 From Poe to Carrington: The Mansion of Madness The nodes of Carringtonian surrealism align in Moctezuma’s Mansion of Madness – black humour, magic, irreverence, Gothic spaces, and figures of the fairy-tale
Juliette ou la clef des songes (1951). 8 Doomed lovers: Simone Signoret and Raf Vallone in a publicity still for Thérèse Raquin (1953). 9 Fairy tale femininity: Françoise Arnoul in Le Pays d’où je viens (1956
In the documentary L'Univers enchanté de Jacques Demy/The World of Jacques Demy, Catherine Deneuve paid the filmmaker an actress's greatest compliment when she described him as 'the charming prince who woke Sleeping Beauty'. Deneuve's fairy-tale metaphor also pays homage to Demy's own playful description of his filmmaking style. Cinéma en-chanté: the pun communicates on several levels. Demy's cinema has the rare quality of appealing to adults and to children, to cinephiles and the general public alike. In these early Demy films, enchantment communicated just as subtly the unsettling nature of the screen image that was beginning to take shape for Deneuve. Demy's Donkey Skin is arguably an equal source of the tale's iconic status in France today, and largely because of Deneuve. Against Donkey Skin's sets, Deneuve's costuming establishes the narrative trajectory of this psychedelic dream, an imposed dream that necessarily becomes her own.