Images without words

I watched the Terry Gilliam film Brazil a few days ago. It was so completely absurd! I loved it.

I wish I could buy the”executive decision maker” with the pendulum that randomly falls on Yes and No…

I especially like the dream sequences inside Lowrey’s head. He imagines himself a great winged god-creature who fights against… a giant samurai? Very interesting. No dialogue, just his crazy dream. The movie delves into his subconscious several times and it gives the main character richness and depth. The movie has many layers which is why I enjoyed it.

and his dreams come back to haunt him…

(as a side note, wow! Why go to all the trouble designing a prison for Magnito in xmen, when you can just copy Brazil)

I was thinking today, after reading some books mentioning that pictures in a fairy tale story limit your imagination… I do agree with that, and it would seem to be an argument for not making a movie out of a fairy tale. Most people who fall in love with a book are disappointed by the movie made from it, since it never captures what they imagined. But if you activate your imagination from images without words (or few words), your imagination fills in the details and then it speaks to you personally. You become part of the creation and an active participant. The imagination has to be engaged in some way!

I think books-to-movies often fail because the translation is too concrete…The Golden Compass was such a disaster. Why not focus on the feeling you get from reading the book, not cramming in all the plot details. If it’s too wordy, you are crippling your story by putting images to the words that were designed to invoke the images you’ve already made. (!)

I love this scene in Edward Scissorhands with Edward’s inventor. There’s no dialogue but the meaning is so clear.

Max Lüthi says fairy tales are “simbolic poetry”, art in its beautiful simplicity, and fairy tales “transform everything internal into something external, to portray the intimate relationship between two people in an image.” pg 74, 66, 56 . Tim Burton did just that.

Pan’s Labrynth: interviews with Guillermo Del Toro

I love Pan’s Labyrinth. When I saw it the first time I felt like it was something completely unique. Here was a fairy tale, dark and violent, aimed squarely at adults (and even subtitled), that somehow received enough financial backing to get made into a movie.
I wanted to find some interviews with Guillermo Del Toro to see if he had anything to say about how this movie was made. I was also hoping he would comment on the decision to make a movie with fairy tale elements for an adult audience, and if he was discouraged from it.
It’s not surprising that he also has a lot to say about the fairy tale genre.

This interview is interesting because it mentions his influence as a “lapsed” Catholic and how no matter what, he’ll always be looking from that perspective (of being Catholic). It’s an imprint from a young age that will always influence his thoughts. And he talks about what I’ve always felt about stories, that they tell something different to everyone, which is part of their power. The movie works like a “storytelling”.

http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008507.html
Twitch film interview:
Del Toro: […] The movie is like a Rorschach test where, if you view it and you don’t believe, you’ll view the movie as, “Oh, it was all in her head.” If you view it as a believer, you’ll see clearly where I stand, which is it is real. My last image in the movie is an objective little white flower blooming in a dead tree with the bug watching it. So….
….
MG: I’m glad to hear you say that. This is the dispute going on among people who have seen your film. Was Ofelia in her fantasy world? Was it a real world? I keep saying such questions pose a false dichotomy.

Del Toro: Yes, of course. And it’s intimate. If the movie works as a piece of storytelling, as a piece of artistic creation, it should tell something different to everyone. It should be a matter of personal discussion. Now objectively, the way I structured it, there are three clues in the movie that tell you where I stand. I stand in that it’s real.

from guiardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/nov/21/guardianinterviewsatbfisouthbank

GdT: […] When I was a kid, I would get bored during the sermons in church, except when they would read a parable. Parables were interesting to me – I’d rather hear about the grain of mustard or the talents than hear about this guy who walked on water. I was moved by stories that taught you something and I think that parables and ideas were, in the oldest ways, transmitted through tales about demons and angels. And I think that’s the way I like to talk about things.

MK: That’s clearly the root of the fairytales that later influenced Pan’s Labyrinth. There was a book that came out at the turn of the last century that stripped back the fairytales to their original sources. What was that?

GdT: It was called The Science of Fairytale and it’s a really interesting 19th century book that systematises – without a particular agenda, which is what troubles me about the psychosexual or megamythic approaches to mythology, which seemed to me to have an agenda; they needed to prove a point. But this guy just did a really studious and thorough systematisation of mythology from throughout the world, not just fairytales but also oral traditions and the heroic narrative. It talks about Inuit mythology and Indian mythology, from everywhere, and finds the common thread, without the desire to prove that there is a single hero with a thousand faces. It’s more open than that.

ooo ooo that sounds like a great book for me to read…

Del Toro on Hellboy:
“At the same time, the adventure is one that’s very much like in Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s about the real world mining and undermining fantasy and magic, and how tragically we are destroying magic everyday. It’s a battle for Hellboy to find his identity, and where he belongs as an adult. And all this is conducive to the third movie, which if we ever make it, would be quite heartbreaking.”

This is a fascinating opinion on the power of video games and narrative. I have often thought this about *good* video games, not just the Grand Theft Auto where you go on destructive rampages (although this is fun) but more like bioshock, or from what I’ve heard, Shadow of the Collosus.
“I remember when I was growing up people used to say “a comicbook movie” to say what a piece of shit it was. They don’t say it any more because it’s become a more respectable narrative form and it makes money. Both things silence one camp and the other. Now they say “a videogame movie” with the same blind authority of someone who, at the most, may have played Pac-Man. And I do believe they are genuine narrative forms and we would have to be very stupid not to be immersed in and understand. We complain about them but we don’t do anything to solve it. In the next 10 years, I see a huge shift whether we like it or not. It’s going to take you either by surprise or you’re going to be there to do it. It’s going to be like going from silent films to sound. There are going to be a lot of us that cannot do the talkies because we are not familiar with the form. I think it’s urgent that you get familiar with them. The art direction, soundscapes and immersive environments in videogames are as good, if not superior to, most movies. I’m not talking about [Krzysztof] Kieslowski or Bergman. I’m talking about most movies. They are far more advanced and far smarter about it, so I think it’s something we all can learn from and it’s urgent that we do.”

Apparently someone asked about aiming the movie for children… I’m glad he kept it as is. There’s too much push to reach everyone in the proper demographic to get the most money from the movie. I feel like Pan’s Labyrinth was uncompromising.
“Somebody said to me, in a very well-meaning way, at a screening, “We love the movie but it’s too violent. If you tone down the violence you could reach a great audience of kids.” But that is totally self-defeating, isn’t it?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/nov/17/2
Another interview from guardian:
I think that all fairytales have a grim setting. Hansel and Gretel is essentially about a famished family who send their children into the woods to die. Cinderella is about a child being tortured. You can go right up to the Narnia stories, which take place against the bombing of the second world war, or Harry Potter being an unloved orphan. Fairytales pit harsh circumstances against a fantasy world. Pan’s Labyrinth is no different.

Fairytale logic is not linear, it’s random. When people ask, “Why does the Pale Man have his eyeballs in his hand?”, I say: “Hey, because that’s the way things are.” I suspect that the linear, logical mind is going to have a tough time with Pan’s Labyrinth.

telegraph.co.uk
‘I try to pour a lot of me into every film’ By Will Lawrence
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3656718/%27I-try-to-pour-a-lot-of-me-into-every-film%27.html

“Fairy tale and fable are the most important method of communication,” del Toro says. “These tales are the highest form of story-telling, the rest is just gossip.”

interview on mtv about experiencing through the eyes of a child:
http://www.mtv.com/videos/movies/200980/the-tv-show-that-made-del-toro-pee-his-pants.jhtml#id=1578597
you are never as open to wonder or horror as when you were a child. when you are a child you can really be enthralled and reach an absolutely ecstatic state of joy with any wonder in the world. And by the same token you can reach an incredibly deep pyrolysis, or a panic of horror deeper than any adult. It takes a lot for an adult to regress to those intense emotional status […] and in the movies, the best way to show a myth or a fable is through the eyes of a child who can experience it fully.

fairy tales are a way to cope with the world:

interview with Del Toro, from NPR fresh air
Mr. GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Well, you know, I believe that fairy tales are a way for us to understand the world. I mean, they were originally intended to be for adults and then eventually, through the ages, when they were compiled by the Grimm Brothers especially, they became children’s literature. But originally they were created to tackle sort of inner struggles in the outside in a fable. And I thought that war is such an overwhelming reality that I wanted to situate a fairy-tale universe within the most harrowing context I could find. Originally fairy tales were created in the middle of plague, famine, war, you know, and I wanted to pick up on that.

Our Imagination creates horrors that become our reality – wars, political struggle, religion:

Mr. DEL TORO: I think that we–the entire world we live in is fabricated. So when I think about, you know, Republican-Democrat, left-right, morning-night, geography-borders, all these things are conceits. You know? Borders are not visible from a satellite picture. The fact that you can have a civil war where two sides kill each other and essentially, from afar, they look exactly the same, you know? They are both the same human being. They share the same taste for food. They sing the same songs, and so on and so forth. These imagined conceits can create such horrors. And I think when people talk about fantasy and they mean it, like fantasy is such a low concern, well, I think politics, religion are equal inventions for me, at least.

He makes a “potpourri of themes” and mentions Pan’s Labyrinth is an homage to Oscar Wilde, The Wizard of Oz, Lewis Carrol, Hans Christian Anderson…

…loss and fragility, horror and brutality, and only by having the dark extremes can you have the other emotions (?)

Mr. DEL TORO: […] there is a melancholy in the Gothic tradition of literature that speaks about loss and fragility, but through images of horror and sometimes brutality. And I subscribe that you need the one for the other to exist. And the pale man is a productiv–in function is a product typical ogre in the fairy tale, a devourer of children. But in appearance, I wanted it to look like essentially a monster a child could imagine, a monster from the Id.

about designing the pale man and its psychological origins

Mr. DEL TORO: […] And then one of the things I remember as a kid is one of the first things you do is you draw your own hand. You trace it and you put an eye or a mouth or a face, and it’s very often that child psychologists find that one of the first things a kid does in inventing a monster is displacing the mouth or displacing the eyes. And I came up with the idea. Since the character had stigmata, I said, `Let’s put the eyes in there.’ And what came out was instinctively an incredibly brutal, incredibly sort of Freudian or Jungian creature.

his experiences in Mexico and his thoughts on violence:

Mr. DEL TORO: And I was exposed to that, and I believe that perhaps that has seeped into my films, of course, but also I believe that there is a moment in which you have to realize that violence is part of the forces of the world, and how you deal with it is important. The girl in the film, everybody else here or there chooses violence. The girl chooses not to exert. And I feel that I have done this choice in my life, too.

GROSS: Yeah, well, what was your reaction to the violence that you saw when you were growing up? How did you deal with it?

Mr. DEL TORO: It made me value what we have, the immediacy of what we have much more. And it made me very conscious of dying and decay and fragility. I think that we live our lives sometimes believing we are immortal. And we are not. And our lives actually gain more sense when we believe in pain and when we believe in mortality. I believe that it makes us better to connect with the dark side of life. I believe so.

surviving a strict Catholic grandmother and how fantasy and stories helped him survive

Mr. DEL TORO: …she spoke to me about hell and purgatory and all the things that awaited me, and that instilled a real fear in me. I was not so much afraid of death as I was afraid of where we went after death, and I truly think that horror and fantasy saved my brain from this torment. Somewhat they were liberating and anarchistic, things that allowed me to, you know, survive.

—–

GROSS: How was it helpful to have done makeup special effects before becoming a director? Did it teach you the things that you could do?

Mr. DEL TORO: Well, what is beautiful is the craft of the genre filmmaker is to create realities that do not exist. I think film is a simulation of real life, but is more beautiful to me when it’s a simulation of surreal life, when you actually go on to creating creatures on places that have never existed outside your imagination, and it taught me how to do it. It taught me the tools to do it. I dabbled in all sorts of special effects.

what fantasy means to him

Mr. DEL TORO: […] Many times a good story has saved my sanity at the very least, and sometimes my life. I mean, there are moments in my life where I have felt so low and things have been so adverse that, all of a sudden, I read a story that moves me, that moves me to tears, and I see the world in a different way. I think that’s the power of any art, but in my case, my proclivity, of course, is towards monsters.

again about monsters…
“And, you know, as through my life I found many parallels with monsters, many of them. I think monsters were created by mankind to explain the universe around them, and when we became civilized, the universe within us.”