Dialogic Cinephilia: Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

Monday, September 11, 2023

Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

An Academy Award–winning dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth encapsulates the rich visual style and genre-defying craft of Guillermo del Toro. Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, in a mature and tender performance) comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather (Sergi López), a sadistic captain in General Francisco Franco’s army, hunts down Republican guerrillas refusing to give up the fight. The violent reality in which Ofelia lives merges seamlessly with her fantastical interior world when she meets a faun in a decaying labyrinth and is set on a strange, mythic journey that is at once terrifying and beautiful. In his revisiting of this bloody period in Spanish history, del Toro creates a vivid depiction of the monstrosities of war infiltrating a child’s imagination and threatening the innocence of youth. - Criterion page for the DVD release

Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006: 119 mins)

"Adventures in Moviegoing with Guillermo del Toro." The Current (May 25, 2017)

Ahuja, Akshay. "Pan's Labyrinth." The Occasional Review (January 24, 2007)

Atkinson, Michael. "Pan's Labyrinth: The Heart of the Maze." The Current (October 18, 2016)

Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]

Blitch, Savannah. "Between Earth and Sky: Transcendence, Reality, and the Fairy Tale in Pan’s Labyrinth." Humanities 5.2 (2016): 1-7.

Cattaneo, Ann, et al. "Transformations: How Fairy Tales Cast Their Spell." Philoctetes (November 30, 2007)

del Toro, Guillermo and Cornelia Funke. "Guillermo del Toro's Influences." The Current (October 19, 2016)

Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century. McFarland, 2009. [Chapter 11 is on Guillermo del Toro and Pan's Labyrinth. I have a copy of the book if you want a photocopy.]

Ebert, Roger. "Pan's Labyrinth." Chicago Sun-Times (August 25, 2007)

Greenhill, Pauline and Sydney Eve Matrix. Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Utah State University Press, 2010.

Herrero, Carmen. "Pan's Labyrinth/El Laberinto Del Fauno (2006): A Study Guide." Cornerhouse (No Date)

Kermode, Mark. "'Pain should not be sought - but it should never be avoided'." The Observer (November 4, 2006)

Kotecki, Kristine. "Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating the Metafictional: Textual and Sociopolitical Authority in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth." Marvels & Tales 24.2 (october 2010): 235-255.

Lightcap, Torey. "Pan's Labyrinth." Explore Faith (2007)

Lindsay, Richard. "Menstruation as Heroine’s Journey in Pan’s Labyrinth." Journal of Religion and Film 16.1 (2012)

López, Issa. "Pan's Labyrinth." Switchblade Sisters #4 (November 30, 2017) ["This week is a fantastical episode of Switchblade Sisters where April sits down with director Issa Lopez to discuss the influential Guillermo Del Toro film, Pan's Labyrinth. Issa opens up about her lonesome adolescence, the death of her mother, and how these events influenced her work. She tells April about the emotional process of working with children on her most recent film, the fantasy-horror Tigers Are Not Afraid. And she also discusses the culture of witchcraft and magic in Mexico and how that pervades many Mexican artist's work."]

Mann, Michael. "Interview with Guillermo Del Toro." What's Up Mann (December 2006)

Markham, John. "Guillermo del Toro and the representation of the Spanish Civil War in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘The Devil’s Backbone.'" (Personal Website: January 6, 2015)

Maurer Queipo, Isabel. Directory of World Cinema: Latin America. Intellect, 2013

McSweeney, Terence and Amresh Sinha. Millennial Cinema Memory in Global Film. Columbia University Press, 2012.

Nelson, Victoria. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Harvard University Press, 2012. [pgs 219-239 are on Guillermo del Toro and Pan's Labyrinth. BCTC's library has a print copy. "The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration. Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like."]