Ann Davies (SML)
Location: Research Beehive, 2.20
Time/Date: 3rd December 2009, 16:00 - 17:00
This paper considers the use of landscape, space and place in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006) and The Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo, 2001) that uses as a that use as a timeframe the later months of the Spanish Civil War and the attempts at resistance after Franco’s victory. The isolated countryside of the earlier film and the enchanted woodland of the later serves to position the recuperation of the memory of the defeated left in Spain as itself an isolated realm in which history itself can be rewritten as fantasy. Del Toro’s films, through use of landscape, space and place as well as genre, offer up memory as a form of wishful thinking that nonetheless offers pleasure in the fulfilment of desire of how things ought to have been rather than how they actually were. Del Toro’s own status as a Mexican director who carries out most of his work abroad (USA as well as Spain) serves further to problematise the question of nation, memory and landscape. In an era where world cinema can increasingly be confused with the globalisation of (American) cinema, specific times and places can become detached from meaning so that memory is hollowed out to conform with contemporary modes of filmmaking; del Toro’s films nonetheless simultaneously suggest the possibility of places of counter-memory wherein resistance to the wrongs of history can be enacted.
Published: 7th September 2009