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Children’s Film and Television: Contexts and New Directions Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

13. Entering the Labyrinth of Ethics in Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno

Author : Evy Varsamopoulou

Published in: The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter explores the implications of privileging the child protagonist’s perspective in Guillermo del Toro’s film, El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), a film that embeds itself in the history of children’s fantasy narratives. Ofelia, the protagonist, poses a radical challenge to the (adult) viewer in her response to human and nonhuman nature and the existence of evil. Ofelia moves between two juxtaposed but increasingly intertwined worlds: 1944 Spain and a nonhuman immortal realm. The ambiguous ending gives viewers the opportunity to either suspend belief in a rational world or to negate the child’s perspective. Bringing together ethical philosophy (Badiou), literary theory (Todorov), and aesthetics (Rancière), this chapter explores the stakes in the viewer’s visual stance.

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Footnotes
1
There is a striking similarity between the oldest and largest surviving baroque theater in Italy, the Teatro Farnese in the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, and the underground court in the film.
 
2
As Levy and Mendlesohn (2016) remark, “the wild countryside was fundamentally magical, its magic part of the archaeology of the landscape, and it belonged to all” (119). Del Toro also notes the incorporation of local beliefs that entire underworld kingdoms existed in the hills of Northwestern Spain and that the pit in the center corresponds to “pits in Portugal that have great alchemical and occultist symbolism” (del Toro and Zicree 2013, 207).
 
3
In discussing the significance of this shot, Miller (2011) says that it is “in a sense, undoing the tragedy, because the tragedy points elsewhere, to fantasy, story, art” (40).
 
4
Rancière’s discussion of the “child as director” in Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet makes use of the Schillerian concepts of naïve and sentimental poetry. This essay is absolutely of relevance to del Toro’s vision, especially in Pan’s Labyrinth. However, it exceeds the scope of this chapter. See Friedrich von Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795).
 
Literature
Badiou, Alain. (1993) 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso.
Cronos. 1993. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Film. CNCAIMC et al.
del Toro, Guillermo. 2016a. “Foreword.” In Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth: Inside the Creation of a Modern Fairy Tale, by Mark Cotta Vaz and Nick Nunziata, 8–9. London: Titan Books.
———. 2016b. “Foreword.” In Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters; Inside his Films, Notebooks and Collections, by Britt Salvesen and Jim Shedden, with Paul Koudounaris, Keith McDonald and Roger Clark, 6. London: Titan Books.
———. 2018. “Guillermo de Toro.” Guillermo del Toro interview by Nick James, Sight and Sound, March: 26–30.
del Toro, Guillermo, and Marc Scott Zicree. 2013. Guillermo del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections and Other Obsessions. London: Titan Books.
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Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRef
Joshi, S. T. 2015. “The Magical Spirituality of a Lapsed Catholic: Atheism and Anticlericalism.” In The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro: Critical Essays, edited by John W. Morehead, 11–21. Jefferson: McFarland.
Jost, François. (2004) 2008. “The Look: From Film to Novel: An Essay in Comparative Narratology.” In A Companion to Literature and Film, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo and translated by Robert Stam, 71–80. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kotecki, Kristine. 2010. “Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating the Metafictional: Textual and Sociopolitical Authority in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.” Marvels & Tales 24 (2): 235–54.
Levy, Michael, and Farah Mendlesohn. 2016. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Mandolessi, Silvana, and Emmy Poppe. 2011. “Dos estéticas de lo sobrenatural: lo siniestro en El espinazo del diablo y lo abyecto en El laberinto del fauno de Guillermo del Toro.” Confluencia 27 (1): 16–32.
McDonald, Keith, and Roger Clark. 2014. Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art. London: Bloomsbury.CrossRef
Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno). 2006. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Film. Esperanto Filmoj, Warner Brothers, and Picturehouse.
Patočka, Jan. (1970) 2016. The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem. Translated by Ivan Chvatík and Lubica Učník. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. (2001) 2006. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers.
———. (2008) 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.
Richstatter, Katje. 2007. “Two Dystopian Movies…and their Visions of Hope: Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men.” Tikkun 22 (2): 78–79.
Salvesen, Britt. 2016. “Chaotic Passions: Guillermo del Toro and Collecting.” In Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters, by Guillermo del Toro. London: Titan Books.
The Shape of Water. 2017. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Film. Fox Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment, and Double Dare You Productions.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Cornell University Press.
von Schiller, Friedrich. (1795) 1966. Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime. Translated by Julius A. Elias. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing.
Metadata
Title
Entering the Labyrinth of Ethics in Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno
Author
Evy Varsamopoulou
Copyright Year
2019
Book
The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17619-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-17620-4

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_13