Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” (Plato)

“I’ve seen people being shot; I’ve had guns put to my head, I’ve seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated . . . because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility,” (Guillermo Del Toro, in Tsuei, 2007, p. 227).

Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth reclaims the fairytale form set during the tumult of the 1940s Spanish Civil war and Franco’s regime. The film is a testament to the power of human imagination, exploring its fantastical ability to both confront and escape the trauma of war, hatred and corrupted power. We peer through the central protagonist, Ofelia’s eyes into a magical underworld kingdom. She confirms her royal link to this world through three tests of fate which are given to her by Pan, the underworld’s messenger and guardian of the portals between worlds. Similar to the nature Goddess Persephone she is given a double-vision of reality (that of death (the underworld) and life (human existence)). Her world is engendered by a merging of the threatening reality of Franco’s Regime as represented by the psychopathic Capitain Vidal, the efforts of its leftist resistance, her mother, Carmen’s birth-complication, and the imaginative reality of her subconscious; the Kingdom under the ground. It is her task as protagonist to be tested in this reality, to see beyond the blinding light of the sun; the horror of the real by overcoming her own human foibles with her imagination.

Del Toro’s cinematic expertise is horror, and in Pan’s Labyrinth, he inverts horror to represent real life, and inextricably links it to its usual repository, the fantastic realm of the imagination. Through animatronics, special effects and filmic breaks in verisimilitude Del Toro takes us into the metaphysical and oneiric space of Ofelia’s experiences in another world. Early in the film, the camera works in deep focus, and extended shots to highlight the gap between Captain Vidal’s stronghold where Ofelia sleeps and the verdant forest where Pan’s Labyrinth lies. However, this gap soon dissipates in the film as the setting is structured by the narrative thrust of Ofelia’s imagination, and the battle scenes between Vidal and the resistance are depicted in the forest. She is given the ability to make passage ways with a magical piece of chalk given to her by Pan advising her to “make her own way.” Using the interiority of camera angles, masked cuts, a contrast of blue and red-yellow filter lighting del Toro coalesces the two realities, and the extrication between Ofelia’s imagination and reality is broken. He creates an enchanting neo-gothic aesthetic. These give the narrative a highly portentous symbolism, casting a platonic shadow across the audience. Del Toro merges two worlds in one diegesis, emphasising and celebrating the importance of the imagination in our materialist realities, and highlighting his prominence and ingenuity as a filmmaker.

An increase in the use of animatronics and special effects to depict the various mythical creatures in the film such as the stick-insect-come-fairy, Pan, the pale-man monster, the Mandrake that safe-guards her mother and the toad under the tree constantly subverts the naturalism of the film fusing the imagination and the horror of the real. It also increases the vividness of the “child-witness/protagonist point of view” (Smith, 2007, p.6) juxtaposing it against the horror of war allowing the audience to historically re-remember the socio-political situation but also access the vivid symbolism and harrowing innocence of Ofelia and her experiences. The continuity of narrative between these worlds is evidence of del Toro’s expert plot-setting and the mastery of his story-telling technique. Del Toro portrays the way in which the power of the imagination can reorder and confront the horror of the real just as film can re-represent the real, and remember the historical: “Fantasy is made proportionate or compensatory to the real,” (Smith, 2007, p.8). Evidently, the success of Pan’s Labyrinth lies in del Toro’s ability to cinematically capture the human capability to dream beyond and in confrontation of the horror of the real.

Del Toro mixes mythological allusions and intertextual references to other films such as Snow White, the Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland to reinvent the Hollywood Disney spectacle exporting us away from the conventions of the clichéd fairy-tale. His film takes a leaf out of Guy Debord’s philosophies, whereby the contrast of the horror of the real and the imagination align with the assertion that the fairy tale should not simply provide a spectacle; “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images… the self-portrait of power in the age of totalitarian rule over conditions of existence,” (Debord, in Zipes, 2008, p.240). Del Toro is purporting that fairy tales should challenge the spectacle’s structure and pierce its escapist and societially-esconced nature. In this way, the very politics of his cinematography critique the socio-political nature of mainstream filmic fairytales.

Del Toro does not shy away from showing children the realities of the world they must confront and the hope that all humanity possesses – “I know for a fact that imagination and hope have kept me alive through the roughest times in my life,” (del Toro in Zipes, 2008, p.239). His film does not simply follow the suit of the escapist forms of spectacle that support a certain ideology or utopian ideal. In this way, Pan’s Labyrinth is a film that transcends the conventions of mainstream cinema, and provides an audience of all ages with a stimulating and deeply moving fairytale; a testament to hope and the power of the human imagination and the salvation of sacrificial love.

References

Zipes, J. 2008, ‘Video Review – Pan’s Labyrinth’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 121, no. 408, pp. 236-240.

Smith, J. P. 2007, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), Film Quarterly, Vol.60, No.4. pp. 4-9.

Tsuei, H. K. 2007, The Antifascist Aesthetics of Pan’s Labyrinth, Socialism and Democracy, Vol.22, No. 2, pp.225 -244.