Fairy Tale transformations

 

Mary Russell Mitford, talented writer and poet though she was, couldn’t have been more wrong about the fashion of fairytales, which are as popular today as they have ever been.

I foresee that the Andersen and Fairy Tale fashion will not last;
none of these things away from general nature do.
Mary Russell Mitford to Charles Boner, 18481

Since filmmaker and magician Georges Melies first began to explore the mutability of film and fairytale in the late nineteenth century, onscreen fairytales have been integral to the evolution of cinema and to a modern understanding of the fairytale genre. Considered by scholars as the founder and pioneer of the fairytale film, Melies brought to films his passion for illusion and transformation, born of his years as stage magician and the desire to play with viewers’ perceptions of reality.

Through the narrative of well-known tales, Melies was able to produce spectacular animated tableaux, alluding to the existing fairytale plot, while experimenting with technical effects. While only 30 or so of his 520 films could be classified as fairytales, the technical innovation and experimentation these engendered provided inspiration for other filmmakers to stretch the boundaries of the art form both in terms of narrative structures and the underpinning technology.

Production still from Bluebeard 1901 / Director: Georges Méliès / Image courtesy: British Film Institute

The word ‘fairytale’ is drawn from the French term conte de fées and is somewhat misleading: fairies are not often found in fairytales. It was an idiom devised in the seventeenth century by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Countess d’Aulnoy, to describe the inventive and risque magicaltales she told to entertain the intellectuals and aristocracy attending her salon in Paris. Formerly scorned as the vulgar province of peasants, these oral stories, derived from those told by nursemaids and servants, became highly popular in Parisian fashionable circles over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and found favour in salons as well as the Opéra féerie (operas and opera-ballets based on fairytales).

Both the countess and her compatriot, Charles Perrault, a leading figure in literary fairytales, published collections of these stories in 1697, at the peak of the genre’s popularity: Les Contes des fées and Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l’Oye (literally, ‘stories or tales of times past, with morals: Tales of Mother Goose’) respectively. While the literary fairytale’s popularity declined during the eighteenth century, the genre returned to prominence in the early nineteenth century through the work of sibling scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, better known as the Brothers Grimm.

Performances of fairytales had continued strongly until this time — the Opéra féerie was well attended until the early nineteenth century — and the culmination of performance and literary tales provided filmmakers later in the century with a unique opportunity: to use the audience’s familiarity with these tales to create films full of cinematic experimentation and excesses.

Production still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926 / Director: Lotte Reiniger / Image courtesy: British Film Institute, London

The literary fairytales are often referred to as ‘true’ or ‘original’ fairytales: however, this is not the case. While a record of the writer’s version of the tale was fixed, and often heavily modified in transcription to fulfil the moral and social obligations of the day, the oral traditions continued to change in response to the audience. Handed down through the generations, the fluidity and mutability inherent in storytelling allowed raconteurs to entertain while also resolving moral conflicts, addressing transgressive behaviours and reinforcing the social codes of the community. Set within the guise of a different time and place, with elements of wonder and the supernatural, these stories used archetypal characters — gallant princes, worthy princesses, wicked stepmothers and false heroes — to explore common anxieties surrounding the abuse of power, injustice and exploitation.

While modern readers could find the content of these early stories to be gruesome and crude (the incidence of violent revenge, cannibalism, paternal and fraternal cruelty and infanticide is marked), these stories offered the audience of the day a glimpse of hope through magical transformation, and favourable, if conditional, endings. While nearly every character in the earlier fairytales was capable of cruel behaviour, in the end, the most heroic triumphed and the evil force was destroyed.2

Production still from Beauty and the Beast 1946 / Director: Jean Cocteau / Image courtesy: British Film Institute

As Jack Zipes, author of The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, writes:

Fairytales map out possible ways to attain happiness, to expose and resolve moral conflicts that have deep roots in our species. The effectiveness of fairytales and other forms of fantastic literature depends on the innovative manner in which we make the information of the tales relevant for the listeners and receivers of the tales. As our environment changes and evolves, so we change the media or modes of the tales to enable us to adapt to new conditions and shape instincts that were not necessarily generated from the world that we have created out of nature.3

This need to adapt and evolve these archetypal characterisations and narratives for contemporary audiences is evidenced in the genre’s ongoing cinematic development and recent resurgence in mainstream North American television. While Walt Disney’s cavalcades of animated adaptations since the 1930s have dominated contemporary understandings of fairytales, many other filmmakers have also drawn on the motifs and tropes of the fairytale genre to explore these tales from their own perspective.

From fairytale procedural crime dramas to the appearance of well-known characters in modern-day America — as seen in television series Grimm and Once Upon a Time, respectively (both 2011) — to the experimental films of Jarome Jires (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders 1969), Jan Švankmajer (Alice 1988, Little Otik 2001) and Stephen and Timothy Quay (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes 2005), these retellings move beyond the classic cinematic renditions and interpretations, integrating elements of the fairytale with those of parody, experimental film and horror.

Production still from The Pied Piper 1972 / Director: Jacques Demy / Image courtesy: Cine-tamaris
Production still from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders 1969 / Director: Jarome Jires / Image courtesy: Ateliery Bonton Zlin a.s.
Production still from (Alice 1988 / Director: Jan Švankmajer / Image courtesy: Athanor s.r.o.
Production still from Little Otik 2001 / Director: Jan Švankmajer / Image courtesy: Athanor s.r.o

Critical responses to fairy-tale films [are] shaped by presuppositions about the nature and function of the fairy tale. Film is a relatively new medium for the fairy tale, and to a great extent might be considered a different genre in its own right, with its own conventions and its own principles, although it may employ many narrative codes specific to the literary fairy-tale schemata . . . A criterion often adduced in discussing film adaptations is fidelity to the source, but unlike film adaptations of literary classics, for example, fairy-tale films cannot always be referred back to a particular source but many derive from a myriad of indeterminate intervening retellings.4

Production still from Pan’s Labyrinth 2006 / Director: Guillermo del Toro / Image courtesy: Hopscotch Films

Subsequently, the cinematic fairytale draws on the structural elements of both the literary and oral fairytale traditions. While each film becomes a fixed insight into the world of the storyteller and their audience — a snapshot of social and cultural mores of the place and time of its creation — filmmakers are also engaging with the fluidity of the oral tale, with each filmic retelling built on the foundations of previous cinematic iterations and wide array of influence in popular culture such as theatrical and dance performances, opera, music, poems, books and illustrations. While told in modern times and through different formats, the function of the fairytale in society remains unchanged from its earlier roots: these contemporised stories still serve as a platform from which to express social concerns and anxieties. They help us to articulate the way we might see and challenge such issues and, through transformation, be it radical, magical or personal, triumph in the end.

Amanda Slack-Smith, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA

Endnotes
1 Cited in MA Conny Eisfeld, A Literary and Multi-Medial Analysis of Selected Fairy Tales and Adaptations, Universität Flensburg, Germany, 2012, p.4.
2 Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1989, p.5.
3 Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, Routledge, New York, 2011, p.1.
4 Jack Zipes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Oxford University Press Inc, New York, 2000, p. 160–61.

TheFairy Talesexhibition is at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Australia from 2 December 2023 until 28 April 2024.

Fairy Tales Cinema: Truth, Power and Enchantment‘ presented in conjunction with GOMA’s blockbuster summer exhibition screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA from 2 December 2023 until 28 April 2024.

The major publicationFairy Tales in Art and Film’ available at the QAGOMA Store and online explores how fairy tales have held our fascination for centuries through art and culture.

From gift ideas, treats just for you or the exhibition publication, visit the ‘Fairy Tales’ exhibition shop at GOMA or online.

The Australian Cinémathèque
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) is the only Australian art gallery with purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. The Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA provides an ongoing program of film and video that you’re unlikely to see elsewhere, offering a rich and diverse experience of the moving image, showcasing the work of influential filmmakers and international cinema, rare 35mm prints, recent restorations and silent films with live musical accompaniment by local musicians or on the Gallery’s Wurlitzer organ originally installed in Brisbane’s Regent Theatre in November 1929.

#QAGOMA

New Media, Light and Movement

 
Robin Fox, Australia b. 1973 / CRT: homage to Léon Theremin (detail) 2012 / Interactive installation, cathode ray tube televisions, multi–channel sound, motion tracking system / Photograph: QAGOMA / © Courtesy: The artist

A significant element in the creation of new media art is the artist’s exploration into the unique possibilities that are still presented in working with every day and obsolete media. Both Robin Fox and Ross Manning, two artists in the Gallery’s 2012 National New Media Art Award exhibition, have a particular interest in established technology.

CRT: homage to Léon Theremin, by Robin Fox, is a highly responsive interactive audio-visual installation which recalls both the magical physicality inherent in playing a Theremin musical instrument coupled with the lurid colour fields of old CRT televisions.

Both elements can be traced to Russian physicist Léon Theremin, a flamboyant inventor who devised both the Theremin musical instrument and contributed to the earliest research which led to the development of the cathode ray tube television — specifically the interlacing vision to achieve a higher image resolution.

For Robin Fox the aesthetic potential of CRT television monitors has resulted in a playful celebration of old and new technology’s — in addition to the CRT television sets the work also incorporates a custom-designed motion tracking system — and an experience which teases out the connective elements between performer, space and technology.

Robin Fox, Australia b. 1973 / CRT: homage to Léon Theremin 2012 / Interactive installation, cathode ray tube televisions, multi–channel sound, motion tracking system / Photograph: QAGOMA / © Courtesy: The artist

In his work Spectra lll, Ross Manning combines off-the-shelf appliances such as coloured fluorescent lamps and motorised fans, to explore the aesthetic potential of the RGB additive colour model, the basis of screen based technology today. Manning’s elegant and mediative kinetic sculpture weaves a circular pattern at the point of balance between the twisted cables and oscillating fan heads, placed in the centre of a purposed built architectural space. The result is a conceptually rich investigation of video projection deconstructed to its basic components — light, aperture and screen. The sculpture recalls television resolution scan lines that have jumped off a screen and are twirling in space, overlapping different coloured wavelengths of light, or spectra, to produce new colours or, if by chance the lights meet and mix in equal measure, white light.

You can view the award exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 4 November 2012 which is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication.

Ross Manning, Australia b. 1978 | Spectra III (detail) 2012 | Installation, coloured fluorescent lamp, motorised fan, power board, extension cable, wood, rope | Photograph: QAGOMA | © Courtesy: The artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

New Media and therapeutic design

 
George Poonkhin Khut, Australia b. 1969 | Distillery: Waveforming 2012 | Screen capture of heart rate controlled iPad app | Signal analysis software: Angelo Fraietta (Smart Controller) and Tuan M Vu; iOS visual effects software: Jason McDermott (ARUP Informatics), adapted from original code by Greg Turner | Image: Courtesy the artist | © The artist

A prominent feature of the upcoming National New Media Art Award 2012 is the number of artists working with technologies that have been developed for therapeutic applications. Artists George Poonkhin Khut, Karen Casey, and Leah Heiss reflect this trend, often working in collaboration with medical research teams and industrial engineers. Through their art practices, these artists have found unique and exciting new ways to think about, and experience, the body.

In Distillery: Waveforming 2012 George Poonkhin Khut has been exploring the possibilities for an experimental relaxation system, delivered through an iPad ‘app’ prototype. This application was first developed to assist in the management of pain and anxiety experienced by children undergoing clinical procedures and has been trialed at the Kids’ Rehab Unit within the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney. Enabling the ‘sitter’ to interact with a live, abstract visualisation of the rhythm of their own heartbeat, creating pronounced wave-like changes in heart rate and breathing, Khut’s work encourages us to be aware of the world that exists uniquely within each of us.

George Poonkhin Khut, Australia b. 1969 | Distillery: Waveforming (Portrait of Rob) 2012 | Still from video portraits of sitters interacting with heart rate controlled composition software for iPad | Photograph: Julia Pendrill Charles | Stylist: Troy Brennan | Image: Courtesy the artist | © The artist

Karen Casey’s Dream zone 2012 provides another take on contemplative states. Drawn from her work with the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Casey has recorded her EEG brainwaves and utilised them to create a three screen meditative environment. Through the custom program VisEEG, developed by software engineer Harry Sokol, Casey’s neural data is rendered into a unique audio-visual installation in real time. Drawing on the artist’s own theta brainwaves. Often associated with states of dreaming and inspiration, Dream zone literally creates from the stuff of resting thoughts and creativity.

Karen Casey, Australia b. 1956 | Dream zone 2012 | Technical collaborator & software interface designer: Harry Sokol | 3 channel projection exhibited from computer, audio-visual data rendered in real-time (production still, detail) | Image: Courtesy the artist | © The artist

For Leah Heiss, the connection between technology and creativity has led to an interdisciplinary practice concerned with the humanisation of technology. As Heiss has stated:

‘Artists tend to think beyond technology to consider whole-of-life human experience — the users, situations, environments etc. — in which the technology will be used . . . Artists ask ‘human’ questions that allow technologies to become more sensitive to users’ needs’.

In Heiss’s work Polarity 2012, the artist has repurposed a nanotech material that is usually applied in electronic devices and advanced medical technologies, and transformed it into unexpectedly vulnerable organic forms. Captured in constellation of tiny glass vessels, the high-tech liquid lies inert until activated into an array of pulsing spikes through the activation of a concealed magnetic field.

Our next National New Media Art Award post will focus on light and movement and the works of Robin Fox and Ross Manning.

Leah Heiss, Australia b. 1973 | Polarity (detail) 2012 | Installation, magnetic liquid, propylene glycol, ethanol, glass vessels, motors, rare earth magnets, table | Image: Courtesy the artist | © The artist

New Media, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

 
Ian Haig, Australia b. 1964 | Some Thing 2011 | Concept, development, direction and original model: Ian Haig; Production and fabrication: Fiona Edwards; Robotics and electronics: Martin James; Sound: PH2 (Philip Brophy and Philip Samartzis) | Robotics, electronics, latex | Funded with the assistance of the Australia Council, Inter-Arts Office, 2011 | © Courtesy: The artist

Opening 3 August, the ‘National New Media Art Award 2012’ is an exciting overview of Australian artists working at the intersection of art and technology.

Selected from across Australia, the exhibition profiles innovation made possible through the use of advanced medical apparatus, motion-tracking sensors, increasingly sophisticated custom programming and even nano-technologies.

An interesting trend to emerge from the Gallery’s research this year is the many different ways in which robotics and Artificial Intelligence have been incorporated into the field of art, and the range of social and cultural perspectives highlighted therein.

Kirsty Boyle, Australia b. 1975 | Tree ceremony 2010 | Robotics, micro controlled, infrared sensors, custom software, wood, textiles, straw, bonsai | Commissioned by the Tinguely Museum and the Kunsthaus Graz 2010 | © Courtesy: The artist

Kirsty Boyle’s Tree ceremony 2010 approaches the integration of robotics from a Japanese perspective, a country which holds a holds a widespread fascination and affection for technology. Boyle’s kimono clad robot Suki executes a peaceful and rhythmic performance honouring the living bonsai tree beside her. The work draws on the artist’s comprehensive knowledge of advanced Artificial Intelligence and traditional Japanese mechanical doll making known as karakuri ningyo. This gentle approach to robotics also reflects the karakuri ningyo association with Shintoism, the indigenous religion of Japan.

Petra Gemeinboeck, Austria b. 1971 | Rob Saunders, United Kingdom b. 1971 | Zwischenräume (detail) 2010–12 | Robotics: electronics, custom artificial intelligence software, aluminium, steel, wood, plasterboard | © Courtesy: The artists

Zwischenräume 2010-12 by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders is similarly a work for contemplation, but is more restless and questioning. Hear that knocking on the wall?  The artists have implanted advanced robots, with the capacity to study and respond to their environment, behind the plasterboard and they are breaking through to watch you.

As the robots possess the capacity for creative learning: not only does the audience interact with, and contemplate the work, it also interacts and considers the audience. Friend or foe? It is hard to tell — but they point to a very different future on the horizon in which we share our space, both physical and cultural, with cognizant creations of our own design.

Ian Haig | Some Thing (detail) 2011

This more western, potentially darker, take on the future of robotics, as is often seen in Hollywood blockbusters, can also be seen in Ian Haig’s ambiguous visceral form Some Thing 2011. Inspired by the prosthetic designs found in the B-grade ‘body horror’ films of the 1970s and 1980s, this twitching, jerking and pulsating robotic sculpture, confronts our fundamental fears surrounding the vulnerability of our fleshy vessels and the effects of aging, sickness and mutation. It makes visible our unconscious horror that, within our form, we carry the biological seeds of our own destruction.

Our next National New Media Art Award post will focus on New Media and therapeutic design, the works of Karen Casey, George Poonkhin Khut and Leah Heiss. What are you thoughts on art and technology?

Manga Boy meets Anime Girl

 

Welcome, sit back and enjoy 30 minutes of pure escapism! Relive the video highlights from our recent Cosplay competition.

Presented in conjunction with the Gallery’s ‘Drawn to Screen: Graphic Novels, Comics and Serials‘ film program, Cosplay celebrates the art of ‘costume play’ and those dedicated practitioners who work tirelessly to transform themselves into their favourite characters from page and screen.

GOMA’s Cosplay draws in the crowds

 

We celebrate our first-ever Cosplay event showcasing the costuming talents of our local Cosplay community. Congratulations to all those who rocked the day!

Presented in conjunction with the Gallery’s ‘Drawn to Screen: Graphic Novels, Comics and Serials‘ film program, GOMA celebrated the art of ‘costume play’ with an eruption of colourful costumes, gravity defying wigs, props and excited cosplayers of all ages.

Our contestants sashayed across the stage — stopping frequently to pose for a delighted audience — before sharing the secrets of their fantastic character recreations with host John Robertson. With an audience overflowing from inside the cinema into the Gallery foyer — GOMA celebrated Australia Day 2012 in pure Cosplay style.

With the help of Judges Jeremy Sue, Sabina Myers and Zimiel (Shona Gray) GOMA would like to congratulate the winners from the following categories.

Best Overall and Best Role-Playing/Performance (Solo) | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Best Overall and Best Role-Playing/Performance (Solo) | Frances as Alexiel from the graphic novel Angel Sanctuary.

‘Alexiel is one of the key characters in the graphic novel Angel Sanctuary. An Organic Angel, Alexiel is sickened by the growing corruption of Heaven, she starts a rebellion and in doing so her soul is cursed to suffer tragic lifetimes as a human.’ (Frances)

Best Role-Playing/Performance (Group) | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Best Role-Playing/Performance (Group) | Andrew and Erin as Kamina and Yoko from anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

‘Kamina is the enigmatic leader of Dai Gurren in the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. His sheer tenacity to fight, survive and be manly has earned him the title of manliest man in all of mandom. Yoko is the girl in the picture. She supports Kamina in his shenanigans.’ (Andrew and Erin)

Best Costume (Technical Design – Solo) | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Best Costume (Technical Design – Solo) | Michael as Ezio Auditore Da Firenze from the video game Assassins Creed 2.

‘Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, an Italian assassin from the early Renaissance, and main character of the video game Assassins Creed 2, He’s a flamboyant but incredibly talented assassin who devoted his life to the war against the Templars.’ (Michael)

Best Costume (Technical Design – Group) | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Best Costume (Technical Design – Group) | Matthew and Jessica as Atlas and P-body from the video game Portal 2.

‘Atlas and P-body are testing robots from the video game Portal 2, our cosplay is based on a humanoid version of the robots.’ (Matthew and Jessica)

Best first time Cosplayer | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Best first time Cosplayer | The Pyro from the video game Team Fortress 2.

‘A mumbling, suited psychopath of indeterminate origin, the Pyro has a burning fondness for fire and all things fire-related in the video game Team Fortress 2. (Joel)

Honourable Mention | Portrait photography by Adam Sebastian West www.adamsebastianwest.com

Honourable Mention | Raniera as Commander Shepard from the video game Mass Effect Series.

‘Commander Shepard is the main character in the video game Mass Effect series. I am presenting myself in the default battle armour of Mass Effect 2 with a matching modified Nerf handgun.’ (Raniera)

So, who would your Cosplay character be?