The Disobedient Fairytale: How Guillermo del Toro’s Use Of Recontextualization Transforms Film Itself

 

There were two books that shaped the world of a young middle-class boy in Guadalajara Mexico, an encyclopedia of health and an encyclopedia of art.His obsession with the macabre seemed to grow from his interest in human anatomy and how the body is changed by diseases, which intermingled with the romanticist artists such as Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich and Piranesi. “All these people became to me as much a part of my childhood imaginarium as comic-book illustrators.” He told The Guardian in 2015. His interest in dissecting the human body and the transformations that can occur within them transferred to art and literature, taking an artist’s work apart in order to understand the inner workings. It was 1992 when an independent Mexican film known as Cronos (1993) went into production. With only a two million dollar budget, first-time filmmaker Guillermo del Toro solidified his place in movie history by creating a work unlike anyone had ever seen. It took influence from a variety of sources that del Toro cites in depth; Throughout this one film, influences can be found ranging from Pope Silvester II, 1970s Mexican macabre jewelry , Greek mythological figures like Cronos the Titan King, famous Latin American literature, French alchemists, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Christian lore, and so on  Del Toro continues to utilize “hypertextuality” in all his films, which literary scholar George Landow defines as “one-to-many linking” , and the allowance of “textual openness, intertextuality and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text”. Del Toro is constantly using his vast knowledge of references in this way when building the worlds and characters in each of his films.

But what makes del Toro’s work unique and “creative”  in comparison to other auteurs is found in how he recontextualizes the meaning of these references. He does not simply combine two different literary sources, but transforms what they mean entirely by subverting the audience’s expectations of them. Margaret Boden argues that creativity is divided into different subcategories known as combinatorial, exploratory and transformational, with the latter being the most “surprising” of the three and therefore the more impactful. The basis for transformational creativity having perceived dominance over the other forms comes from “radical changes to a space, not just small tweaks which Boden implies is a qualitative difference.”. Under this definition, del Toro’s work would be considered “less creative” since it utilizes already existing texts and so they are not “radically original ideas”. But what this definition does not clarify is the constraints of that space and how it makes it impossible for a work to become transformational unless it breaks the very rules of the space itself.  Del Toro’s work is transformational within the medium of film as he completely flips familiar conventions on their head to the point where their original meaning is irrelevant outside the context of the film, indicating that creative output is not lessened by the constraining factor of the space as Boden’s theory hypothesizes.

In order to consider del Toro’s work as transformative, there needs to be a clear definition of  what is considered a transformative space to work in, and how radical a change has to be to a space in order to become transformative. Boden does not clarify exactly how the “conceptual space” that creativity is to be made in is determined and even states it needs to be elaborated on. Graeme Ritchie’s Transformational Creativity Hypothesis (2006) attempts to determine the limits of  Boden’s transformational space and how it could be defined. He comes to the conclusion that transformational creativity still has to work within a medium, for if it is altered too much, it can no longer be considered to be part of that medium. “The logically possible set of games is exactly the conceptual space, so no valid game of chess can display transformational creativity – the only way that a chess player can be transformationally creative is to invent new rules”. But if new rules are invented,  it would no longer be considered a game of chess, in the same way if a film no longer utilized a video screen it can no longer be a film, or a fairy tale without a magical quest is not a fairy tale. Even Boden admits that creativity has to exist within constraints. “ It follows too, that constraints–far from being opposed to creativity—make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking”.  If this is to be believed, del Toro’s work is  transformative as it disobeys every single known convention in both textual literature and film to create a new meaning that an audience can infer, but still adhering to the constraints of the medium. Unlike other “auteurs” of his time, del Toro does not take an authoritarian role in his storytelling, he does not tell the audience how to view the story, only giving information through visuals. It is the audience that has power of meaning-making, not the filmmaker, which is counter-intuitive to what most are familiar with (Kotecki 243). In his magnum opus Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). There are many familiar references throughout the film, most prominently are a pair of red shoes worn by the child protagonist Ofelia that del Toro highlights in several shots.  Film journalist and video essayist Evan Puschak discusses the references in his analysis, Pan’s Labyrinth: the Disobedient Fairytale (2015).  Puschak states the shoes themselves are references to the glamourous fairy tales of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Red Shoes (1948), which is recontextualized when compared to the piles of children’s shoes found in the Pale Man’s lair, a monster that eats children. This is then recontextualized again as the shoes are reminiscent of the piles of clothes discovered in Nazi concentration camps, which is recontextualized when compared in the context of the wider story, as the villain in this tale is a fascist captain during the Spanish Civil War.   The audience has to draw from their own repertoire of knowledge to decide exactly what they think the shoes represent. The meaning of this one symbol is transformed into meaning a variety of things, each is neither right or wrong , and hinges entirely on the viewer’s awareness or unawareness of  these references. But the surprise comes in the comparison, in how the original meaning is now transformed and woven with other references that seem unlikely or even unthinkable.

“Surprise” is often described as something unexpected, a new discovery that leads to a feeling of astonishment. Del Toro’s films take every day familiar symbols and tropes and completely delimit the established meanings so that it becomes a completely unique and new experience, a discovery that is not lessened simply because it was built on existing material. There is no such thing as an original idea, the only thing original is how that idea is presented, and del Toro with his mastery of transforming the known into the unknown, is truly deserving of the title “artist”.

 

 

 

 

 

“I claim for the image, the humility and power of the madeleine”

 

Anselm Haverkamp introduces his book The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography with the idea that: “There is no better statement ‘souvenir’ it seems, than the self-made photographic picture, which is meant to preserve individual memories from individual moments in an individual life. The universal success of this picture-taking, memory-storing activity has, in a manner of a supplement (the truest supplement, perhaps, of our world), supplanted what it is supposed to subserve, memory as well as its content, ‘life’.” There is an inherent understanding among every shared being and their individual existences that these ‘self-made images’ have a hold over us that we can neither escape from nor control. Sometimes it is a romanticized, hyperbolic version of the reality it is created from, hence its unreliability, but it serves a purpose far more important than that of its superficial one of storing information. It is when we imbue these images with meaning, sensory stimuli and emotions that they become transformational, shaping our intrinsic ideologies and perception of the world, of others and of our ourselves. Memory, is like a time machine, transporting our consciousness to another place and time, reigniting a simulation of something that is long dead and gone. I can never go back to the moment I watched my first film in the movie theatre, but I can recall the way the cold air raised goose flesh on my skin as I entered the auditorium with my mother holding my hand in a tight grip; how the darkness swallowed my little body and how alarmingly bright the giant screen seemed to glow as I clambered up the stairs to my seat.

Chris Marker reflects this understanding in his statement “I claim for the image, the humility and power of the madeleine” a reference to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  To fully grasp what Marker is referring to, we need to understand the importance of Proust and why the madeleine changed the way we thought about film and our own memories.

 

Chris Marker, Holding a Movie Camera. 

 

 Proust was a man of notable eccentricities, including lining  his living space with cork to snuff out the sounds of the world outside, and listening to the opera through the telephone instead of experiencing it live at the actual theatre. These types of unusual practices made him keenly aware of his senses, heightened his ability to process this sensual information and analyze significances in the smallest details that most often went overlooked. In the first volume of  In Search of Lost Time, Proust recounts a time when he had tea and a madeleine biscuit at his mother’s house, something he normally did not do: “ No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself.” This indescribable emotion, one that he could not pinpoint nor adequately reproduce had left him inexplicably obsessed. He wanted to know the root cause of this “all-powerful joy”, and why a material object, a tiny cake dunked in tea could invoke such an otherworldly response. He could not in that moment solve this puzzling riddle of the human condition, but only after, when he had stopped chasing this fleeting stream of consciousness, and gone back to thinking about the mundanities of the day. He remembers his aunt in Combray giving him madeleines and lime-flower tea on Sundays. His mind had associated this pastry with his aunt, as if her soul was now connected to this object long after the moment was dead:  “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”  Proust discovered this connection and the power it had over an individual that goes far past mere nostalgia, it is capable of  resurrecting the dead,  making his aunt’s grey house rise in his mind like a set piece in a theatre; this magic only capable of being unlocked by an object that he had unconsciously attributed with that part of his life.  

Roland Barthes explored how images can produce a similar effect on people which he called the punctum, latin for “point” and is used to describe something within an image that “pricks” the viewer. In his famous work, Camera Lucida he describes looking at an image of an American black family from 1926 by James Van der Zee. He explains that he understands the studium of the image, which is the cultural subject of the photo that is rooted in one’s knowledge of that culture, or what is the obvious message trying to be conveyed by the photographer, (similar to Proust’s understanding of what a madeleine is) but it is in an insignificant detail that he finds the punctum. “The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does…is the belt worn by the sister…whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and above all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes–why does this dated fashion touch me?)…This particular punctum arouses sympathy in me…and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing for (no doubt) it was the same necklace which I had seen worn by someone in my own family, and which, once she died, remained shut up in a family box of old jewelry.”  Barthes even refers to this explanation of punctum as being “Proustian” in nature, as these images unconsciously summon the past and revive a dead thing, in Barthes’ case, his family member who only exists in memory.

Regarding Chris Marker, Barthes’ punctum aids in bridging Proust’s madeleine with film and imagery, a concept explored deeply in La Jetée, one of cinema’s finest meditations on its own nature as a medium,  for it explores memory in a cyclical manner, how certain events we experience (like witnessing the death of a man) end up being impactful to our existence, inescapable and consuming. Marker wants to create this “prick” within the viewer, a reaction that will ultimately yield previously locked memories, images that “marked” us in a similar fashion to the protagonist in La Jetée, or perhaps even create a basis from which a spectator will draw from in the future, a punctum that will formulate by looking at a completely unrelated image (the twisted body of the man in death comes to mind) or even witnessing an event through the lens of our own eyes and not a camera’s.  To associate photography and film with something like the madeleine is to retake the idea of the image from its democratized state and imbue it with this emotional vulnerability, this seismic jolt to our nerve receptors that is harder to forget than the monochromatic reproduction of popular imagery that dulls the senses as the same symbols are repeated only it is in different mediums. Marker expresses this in the 1997 edition of Immemory:  “  art itself having for Proust and his generation a much higher function than the humble duty of sentinel: it was to be a link with the other world…. But today, could it paradoxically be the vulgarization, the democratization of the image that allows it to attain the less ambitious status of a memory-bearing sensation, a visible variety of smell and taste? We feel more emotion (in any case, a different emotion) before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.”  The madeleine has become a universal symbol for memory, but the object itself is replaceable. “To each his madeleine” Marker writes, for the personal meaning will always outweigh the universal, and that ultimately is the difference between watching a film living one. To have this power, this humility, to be able to enter a film like a traveller on a journey, to wade through those memories that belong to someone else but inherently feel like they are your own, as if you had touched, smelled and tasted it before, as it wells up inside you in an unreachable place that would come rushing back all at once, would truly wield a magic that had no need of French biscuits dunked in lime-flower tea.