Poliglocia

These notes are a little old by now. When I watched Guillermo del Toro's highly praised film, I was writing about the concept of the fairy tale body, its grotesque flux as found in the old tales and taken up again by Gaiman and Henson. For carreer reasons, that research is unlikely to continue as such, but here's how I found its tropes in this particular movie.  1. An off voice, announcing a narration, is heard framing the entire film. The fact of using a narrative voice is in itself already a resource commonly used to distance the action from reality, as a subjective an hypermedial narration. The voice in SoW also clearly quotes fairytale tropes: "The reign of the good prince", "a faraway place" and "an endless love" refer both to an dislocation of the action in time and space, which is unspecific but distant from the narrator's current position. (Cfr. Antonsen) It also constructs the narrated space as a compensatory heterotopia (Cfr. Fo...

I believe Tale of Tales recovers the subversive potential of fairy tale. The synopsis for the movie in Germany presented it as "Fantasyfilm". It may be useful to know that the German word for fantasy is actually spelled "Fantasie", whereas the English word has come to be used by Germans what the rest of the world tries to make sense of as "high fantasy" or "swords and sorcery", thus covering the wide range from Conan to Harry Potter. But should this cover fairy tales as well? Opinions may differ. Although professor Tolkien would argue that all folk narratives, from Beowulf to Briar Rose , have a particular though anonymous author, some poet, behind them, I prefer to believe in collective creation (as posed by, for example, Levi-Strauss) that shapes a tale bit by bit like the ocean shapes a round stone. Of course, such unconscious processes can't be considered to be fantastic. I'd rather follow Stephan Frings, who claims that fan...