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  • I think it's okay to start my analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth with a spoiler.

  • Ofelia, the main character, she... dies at the end.

  • I feel fine doing that because del Toro does the exact same thing with his movie.

  • The first shot of Pan's Labyrinth is the ending.

  • And it's also the first way in which del Toro complicates that ending.

  • But before we get into that: a few things about fairy tales.

  • For most of us the authoritative source for fairy tales is Walt Disney.

  • And that's no accident. Disney set out to claim that authority when he made films like:

  • Snow White, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty,

  • by adapting folk tales in the public domain and copyrighting the adaptations.

  • Still, because film was a relatively new medium

  • capturing the authority he wanted required Disney to remain faithful to the original versions of these stories

  • popularized by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

  • He made the transition from print to cinema as smooth as possible for the audience.

  • Even going so far as to begin his movies with the opening of a book.

  • Disney was smart. His films are now regarded as classics.

  • And yet, by remaining so faithful to the stories' 19th century antecedents,

  • he inherited - and furthered - their 19th century morality

  • a conservative, patriarchal, value system,

  • in which the prince always comes to save the helpless heroine.

  • A value system that was antiquated even then.

  • In this way Disney limited the kinds of things a fairy tale can do.

  • In Pan's Labyrinth Guillermo del Toro attempts to explode these limitations

  • and he does so by re-contextualizing these stories.

  • Instead of pulling from a single authoritative source

  • del Toro pulls from a huge number of sources, giving none precedence over the others,

  • and letting them all play against one another to create meaning.

  • The film tells the story of the little girl, Ofelia, and her mother, Carmen,

  • as they go to live with the hyper-fascist Captain Vidal five years after the Spanish Civil War.

  • Vidal is trying to snuff out the last remnants of rebellion in the mountains,

  • awaiting his child's birth, by Carmen.

  • While Ofelia becomes ensnared in a magical quest after a faun tells her she is the lost princess of an underground realm.

  • From here the story spins out into two parallel narratives,

  • the magical quest and the political drama.

  • Crucially, neither of these narratives becomes reduce-able to the other.

  • del Toro makes a point of this by entwining them in ways that makes any totalzing explanation problematic.

  • At the end of the film, for example, we get what seems to be the nail in the coffin for the magical quest

  • Vidal approaches Ophelia speaking with the faun, and when the camera cuts to his point of view:

  • The faun is not there.

  • This appears to be solid evidence for those that read Ofelia's quest as a coping mechanism for her sad life.

  • But if we back up we can see how del Toro complicates that reading by remembering that Vidal

  • has just been drugged with a heavy dose of sleeping medication.

  • In other stories drug-induced hallucinations are used to explain away why people see the supernatural.

  • But in Pan's Labyrinth it's the opposite.

  • del Toro uses the device to destabilize our trust in Captain Vidal's point of view.

  • Here - and elsewhere - the film refuses to obey our desire

  • for an all-encompassing explanation.

  • Of course disobedience is a major theme in this film.

  • Whereas in many fairy tales disobedience is the act that sets the story in motion

  • here disobedience is framed as a vital and important quality.

  • There's the disobedience of the rebels who seek to free Spain from the grip of fascism,

  • The disobedience of Mercedes who works with the rebels,

  • and - of course - the disobedience of Ofelia.

  • Who, by turns, questions and disregards the commands of her mother, the Captain, and the faun.

  • But the most effective and - I think - impressive disobedience here is that displayed within the very text of the movie.

  • And this is where del Toro's intense referencing comes into play.

  • The name of the game here is multiplicity.

  • Undermining a single authoritarian master narrative, like those championed by Vidal and fascism in general

  • by setting up a network of intertexts that make meaning a matter of choice.

  • Think of all of the linking references in the pale man scene, for example,

  • you have the ogre himself, nodding to other child-eating ogres in other mythologies, like Krampus,

  • it also refers to the Greek Titan Kronos who devoured his god children in order to -

  • like fascist Spain - keep the young from replacing them and coming into their own.

  • Also it should be noted that Cronos is the title of del Toro's first film. One of many things that links his body of work together.

  • The table itself links back to the banquet scene earlier in the film,

  • putting the pale man in the same position as Vidal,

  • who'll go on to kill a child.

  • The pile of shoes link forward and will go on to re-contextualize Ofelia's red shoes,

  • itself a link to the Wizard of Oz,

  • and the 1948 film by Powell and Pressburger.

  • Re-contextualized as images reminiscent of the piles of clothes from Nazi concentration camps.

  • And the scene itself functions as a metaphor for how

  • beauty, like, say, the beauty of old fairy tales, can enchant us into certain lines and ways of thinking

  • that may not be in our interest.

  • Here you have constructed a vast network of citation that reaches elsewhere in the film and, outside of it.

  • The lines of that network are for the viewers to follow as they see fit.

  • del Toro laces these references together with camera work and editing to achieve a narrative momentum

  • that's undeniable when you watch his movies.

  • It was the purpose of Vidal, like it is the purpose of all authoritarian regimes, or patriarchal, moralistic, fairy tales

  • to limit the number and kind of stories that can be told from a set of facts or events.

  • Indeed limit it to one story.

  • The only thing for it is to disobey.

  • In old fairy tales the stories were closed out and contained by two words:

  • The End.

  • del Toro's genius is to use - perhaps - this most formulaic genre of all

  • and disobey our expectations of how it should unfold and how it should end.

  • The rebels capture and kill Vidal, but Spain will continue

  • under authoritarian dictatorship for thirty years.

  • Ofelia is murdered,

  • but completes her quest

  • and returns to the underground realm.

  • You can read that as a poetic ending to a sad story,

  • a happy ending to a fairy tale

  • or Ophelia's final choice of the story she wants to tell for and about herself.

  • Of course, she doesn't have to choose at all.

  • No single story could contain her.

  • For even when she returned to the world of magic, it is said, she left small traces

  • of her time on Earth.

  • Visible to those who know where, and how, to look.

  • Hey everybody, thanks for watching!

  • Pan's Labyrinth has been one of my favorite movies since I saw it in theatres, so this was just a blast to make.

  • If this is the type of content that you don't think you're seeing anywhere else on YouTube or the internet

  • you can support this channel by pledging to my Patreon page right here, everything helps you guys have been amazing!

  • with that and that really is what makes this channel possible and keeps it going.

  • I'm going to Paris for the next couple weeks. I might miss a week, I'm talking to you from the past right now.

  • But if I don't see you next Wednesday I'll see you the Wednesday after that.

I think it's okay to start my analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth with a spoiler.

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パンの迷宮不従順なおとぎ話 (Pan's Labyrinth: Disobedient Fairy Tale)

  • 160 6
    irene Hu に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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