12/19/2023 0 Comments Roger clark movies![]() The children in del Toro’s films are central to his vision, yet they are never involved in a sentimentalized way. But fairy tales often have a dark undercurrent, a subterranean world, which del Toro taps into and mines effectively.Though fairy tales are traditionally stories told to children, they often include large amounts of casual violence: poisonous apples, wicked stepparents, attempts of cannibalism of children…This representation of children and childhood is very important to del Toro. They seem incongruous but fairy tales have a darkness to them. He uses fairy tale structure to talk about deeply serious, political events, like civil wars and the death of children. KM: Del Toro uses fairy tales in a way that is totally legitimate for the 21st century. Can we consider his films modern fairy tales? Are they fairy tales for adults? In Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art, you write that del Toro radically reworks the structures and modes of fairy tale narratives. With del Toro’s work, we see the real monster, the monstrous. This is very different from how a director like Quentin Tarantino uses violence-he seduces you and his films are steeped in irony. Someone is dispensed with in an incredible quick burst of violence. There is a similar scene at the beginning of Crimson Peak. They were horrified! People left the cinema! Del Toro’s subversive violence is quite important there is no irony to it. KM: Yeah, I remember that a lot of people in England brought their children to see Pan’s Labyrinth because they thought it was a fairy tale. Though the movie is seen through the eyes of a child, its use of violence is brutal and deeply disturbing. The tone of the film shifts violently, from fairy tale to gruesome horror. There is a scene in Pan’s Labyrinth where Ophelia’s stepfather, a captain in Franco’s army, captures a rebel fighter and repeatedly beats in his face. Installation photograph, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (August 1–November 27, 2016), including Professor Bruttenholm's box, 2003, from Hellboy Thomas Kuntz's Fakir, 2010 and Dan Baines's Crookes' Residual Ectometron-Dual Chamber Variant, 2012 I was fascinated by Pan’s Labyrinth, especially by the way del Toro transformed and used his source materials in ways that were highly original and quite extraordinary, with references to Arthur Rackham, Lewis Carroll, and a range of other Victorian and Edwardian writers. RC: I was a children’s literature specialist, with a major interest in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature. We thought that this was a good time in his career to take the temperature of where he is and where he is going. We noticed that, for a filmmaker who had been prolific over the last 10 years, there wasn’t a lot of material out there on del Toro. ![]() ![]() KM: We went down the rabbit hole, from which we haven’t really returned. We wrote a paper on that, which scratched the surface slightly on the complexity of the work. We looked at Pan’s Labyrinth as an example of a film that uses children’s literature as a jumping-off point for an experiment in adult fairytale. Keith McDonald: Roger and I used to work together at the English department in our university and we were teaching children’s literature. What initially drew you to del Toro’s work and inspired you to approach his films within a scholarly, critical framework? McDonald and Clark expand on this by pointing to his frequent blending of high and low art to conjure his unique films. Their book argues that Guillermo del Toro himself is an alchemist through his constant combining and reworking of normally fixed genres. They offer a close reading of the director’s films while tracing his artistic influences and highlighting major and minor themes within his work. Keith McDonald and Roger Clark investigate alchemy and other motifs throughout del Toro’s films in their book, Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). It symbolizes the human drive to change the ordinary into something fantastical.ĭr. In del Toro’s films, alchemy functions as a magical tool. In Crimson Peak (2015), Thomas Sharpe constructs an excavation machine to draw energy from the clay of the earth. In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Ophelia places a mandrake root in a bowl of milk to ease her stepmother’s illness. In Cronos (1997), 14th-century mystic Umberto Fulcanelli creates a device that offers eternal life-with slight vampiristic side effects. His films are filled with figures who strive to transform base materials into precious items, unearth ancient secrets, and challenge the fundamental laws of nature. ![]() Alchemists of all sorts populate the world of Guillermo del Toro. ![]()
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