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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.
death. Furthermore, like the Grey Wolf, Baba Yaga is never rattled by violence or brutality, either her own or that of others, inflicting no moral judgements on human behaviour with the exception of the behaviours that break her own unique code of ethics. And yet, despite her ferocious demeanour, Baba Yaga often assists the hero or heroine in their quest, as the Grey Wolf does for Ivan Tsarevich. Fairy tales or folktales featuring Baba Yaga and the Grey Wolf were popular, and continue to be so, in Russian culture. Alexander Afanas’ev, who collected
translated authors in the world along with Shakespeare and Karl Marx”’. 1 He travelled widely in Europe and Asia Minor, contributed to genres such as travel writing, drama, autobiography, poetry and fictional prose of different kinds and gained international recognition during his lifetime. Both then and today, he was and is most appreciated as a writer of fairy tales and stories for children or, more accurately, a crossover audience, and the first part of this chapter will focus on three of his most famous fairy tales
. Lissar’s long-enduring distress at her father’s brutal attentions is powerfully evoked, as is their physical cost in terms of bodily hurt and eventual miscarriage. In Donkeyskin, Deerskin , Allerleirauh: The reality of the fairy tale, 9 Helen Pilinovsky argues that the queen, Lissar’s mother, was abused by her own father, since he sought to repel her suitors and died of a broken heart once she married
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
Idyllic gardens so lush and blooming as to seem almost mystical take on an ominously Gothic tone when their grounds or plant life are revealed to have startling power over the human beings who enter their space or alter their layout. In this manner, Joseph von Eichendorff's 1819 romantic fairy tale, The Marble Statue , with its enchanted yet threatening garden of Venus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe's famously enigmatic novel from 1809, Elective Affinities , with its transformation of the Baron's lands into a vast English garden that results in
the vampires of paranormal romance, have emphasised the subjectivity of the werewolf, casting them as victims of ineluctable urges and as lovers, very often female. 1 This turn was anticipated by Angela Carter in her ‘beast tales’, by which I mean ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and most of the tales in the 1979 collection of transformed fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories . In these tales, metamorphoses between animal (often wolf) and human explore what costs are incurred in being animated, conscious flesh
Sadeian text. Return of the Mother The mother’s return to save the daughter from the Sadeian libertine is dramatically restaged in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, an extravagantly literary re-writing of Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale ‘La Barbe Bleue’ (‘Bluebeard’) (1697) that is firmly entrenched in the structures of the Sadeian pornograph. Traditionally interpreted