![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
movie note - The Brothers Grimm
Sep. 13th, 2005 07:40 amI'm running late for work already, so this is just quick, but I've been meaning for weeks to post something about The Brothers Grimm, the new Terry Gilliam movie.
I have seen so many reviews that called it "disjointed" or said it wasn't thematically coherent or similar. I am utterly convinced that these people have missed the unifying point of this film: it's not really a movie about fairy tales per se. It's a movie about the actual sociological context of fairy tales at the time of the real brothers Grimm. The whole german-french military thing is not extraneous - it's an expression of how the tales were deliberately connected to raise German cultural pride, as an aspect of the then-nascent nationalist movement in Europe. Germany at the time was a very fragmented place, where individual cities/regions had more cultural awareness than the nation as a whole - one aspect of the fairy tale collection thing was to try to emphasize/help create a national, "German" identity - there were similar efforts in other countries at this time.
Also, theorists have looked at the way the interest in fairy tales, mythology, and "traditional" culture at this time was a reaction to the beginnings of the industrial age - the scenes in this movie that involve torture are not just strange side product images - the "torture" devices, if you examine them, are all instruments of what was then modern industrial tech - automated grape presses or some such in one scene, new kinds of wheels and pulleys being developed for factories in another, even a connection to older tech through use of the mill in the German town as a torture location - this externalizes the anxiety modern tech was introducing.
Similarly, references by the torturer to how he "knows this story because his nanny [note - NOT his mother] told it to him connect this set up to the known fact that many of the aristocratic french and german fairy tale tellers of the time were "formalizing" or prettying up folk stories that they heard from the care takers - this was a time of oral and low culture entering high culture, with the high culture repeaters getting the credit.
Of course the whole "historical" basis in the dead queen's story, and the just-barely-mentioned clash between christian and older religions that fuels the dead queen's power also tie into this narrative framework, a highly analytical one.
Just to say, if you approach this movie from the context of the sociology of fairy tales, rather than the tales themselves or their psychology, then the film becomes wond'rous coherent. In fact, damn near perfect I'd say.
Course, how many blockbuster movie watchers or raters have this background, I couldn't say. This one, anyway. I'll have to buy the movie, it was worth watching frame by frame.
I have seen so many reviews that called it "disjointed" or said it wasn't thematically coherent or similar. I am utterly convinced that these people have missed the unifying point of this film: it's not really a movie about fairy tales per se. It's a movie about the actual sociological context of fairy tales at the time of the real brothers Grimm. The whole german-french military thing is not extraneous - it's an expression of how the tales were deliberately connected to raise German cultural pride, as an aspect of the then-nascent nationalist movement in Europe. Germany at the time was a very fragmented place, where individual cities/regions had more cultural awareness than the nation as a whole - one aspect of the fairy tale collection thing was to try to emphasize/help create a national, "German" identity - there were similar efforts in other countries at this time.
Also, theorists have looked at the way the interest in fairy tales, mythology, and "traditional" culture at this time was a reaction to the beginnings of the industrial age - the scenes in this movie that involve torture are not just strange side product images - the "torture" devices, if you examine them, are all instruments of what was then modern industrial tech - automated grape presses or some such in one scene, new kinds of wheels and pulleys being developed for factories in another, even a connection to older tech through use of the mill in the German town as a torture location - this externalizes the anxiety modern tech was introducing.
Similarly, references by the torturer to how he "knows this story because his nanny [note - NOT his mother] told it to him connect this set up to the known fact that many of the aristocratic french and german fairy tale tellers of the time were "formalizing" or prettying up folk stories that they heard from the care takers - this was a time of oral and low culture entering high culture, with the high culture repeaters getting the credit.
Of course the whole "historical" basis in the dead queen's story, and the just-barely-mentioned clash between christian and older religions that fuels the dead queen's power also tie into this narrative framework, a highly analytical one.
Just to say, if you approach this movie from the context of the sociology of fairy tales, rather than the tales themselves or their psychology, then the film becomes wond'rous coherent. In fact, damn near perfect I'd say.
Course, how many blockbuster movie watchers or raters have this background, I couldn't say. This one, anyway. I'll have to buy the movie, it was worth watching frame by frame.
