Pan’s Labyrinth, a genre film, an auteur film, or art cinema?

December 11, 2007 in Article
Tags: art cinema, auteur film, cinema, del Toro, film, genre, genre film, movies, Pan's Labyrinth

Recently after viewing the film ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ i was wondering which catagory the film fit into, a genre film, an auteur film or art cinema? I got a bit carried away and i think this article shows it haha, enjoy

I will speak about the varying amount of relation the film has to the methodologies of the auteur theory, art cinema and genre studies, with a concise study of the films most obvious relation, art cinema. The choice of this film was simple, it is an absolute masterpiece and it has strong relations to all three methodologies, throughout the paper I will highlight the information each methodology brings into consideration while assessing what is discovered. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, originally named in Spanish, ‘El Laberinto del Fauno’; which literally translates to ‘The Labyrinth of the Faun’, is an Academy Award-winning Spanish-language fantasy film made in 2006, which is written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo Del Toro, of ‘Hellboy’ and ‘The Devils Backbone’ fame. Though the original title referred only to the mythological faun, the English title refers to the faun-like Greek god Pan. Del Toro has stated, however, that the faun featured in the film is not actually Pan. The film is set in post-Civil War Spain, and tells the allegorical story of a girl named Ofelia, played brilliantly by Ivana Baquero, who is given three tasks by a mysterious faun. Meanwhile, her stepfather, Captain Vidal, played by Sergi López, who is a fanatical Falangist, viciously hunts for rebels in the region, and her pregnant mother grows ill. Heavily influenced by fairy tales and considered a spiritual sequel to ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ , the film employed make-up, puppetry, and CGI effects to create its marvellously immersive fantasy world, which is truly stunning. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is the kind of great cinema that creeps up on you slowly. Although it was not engrossing immediately, the plot and characters began to make it clear that this film was Del Toro’s first masterpiece, and was even though it doesn’t blown you away from the opening shot. Del Toro was looking to make a film without compromising his vision and had decided to take his time getting things, like place and character, established. The result is spectacular. Everything: the story, the acting and the editing are seamless. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is a fully realized, adult fairy tale.

Throughout this paper the methodologies behind the Auteur Theory, Genre Studies and the role of Art Cinema will be mentioned often, these theories are very much separate but at the same time when it comes to the study of film, they work in correlation with each other. The 1950s-era Auteur theory is prominent in film criticism. It holds that a director’s films reflect that director’s personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary “auteur” (the French word for ‘author’). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar “auteur” role for films that they have produced. In law the auteur is the creator of a film as a work of art, and is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law the film director shall always be considered the author or one of the authors of a film. The Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. “Auteurism” is the method of analysing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director’s work that makes her or him an auteur. Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical ‘Cahiers du cinéma’. In film theory, genre usually refers to the primary method of film categorization but there are also many other methods of dividing films into groups besides genre, for example the auteur theory mentioned earlier which group films according to their directors. A “genre” generally refers to films that share similarities in the narrative elements from which they are constructed. Three main types are often used to categorize film genres; setting, mood, and format. The film’s location is defined as the setting. The emotional charge carried throughout the film is known as its mood. The film may also have been shot using particular equipment or is presented in a specific manner, or format.

Del Toro is slowly becoming more synonymous with the word Auteur, in a few films time he may be considered one, but at this point in time he is not. Although the films he has directed throughout his career have many aspects which can be considered similar, it can be argued the Del Toro has not become prolific enough yet to be considered an Auteur. If you were to put his films under the same umbrellas as the recent crop of fine Mexican directors, Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), you can almost say they as a group could be considered within the realms of the Auteur theory, as they are obviously benefiting from their rare friendship and system of critique and response to each others’ film projects. Needless to say these filmmakers are making some of the most interesting cinema today and their collaboration seems to serve as a method of refining and polishing their respective cinematic gems. Pan’s Labyrinth may be the best film the group has yet produced and most certainly deserves accolades for its style, substance and incredible poignancy. Unfortunately it is too early in Del Toro’s career to specify whether he can be considered an Auteur or not.

The Mexican filmmaker has pointed out the importance of genre in his filmography, from his feature directorial debut, Cronos (1992), a revision of the meaning of vampirism, to Pan’s Labyrinth, a hybrid from a generic point of view:

‘I’ve always preferred genres to be mixed. Like combining horror with an historical narrative, for example. For me, Pan’s Labyrinth is therefore a drama rooted in a context of war, with fairytale and mythological elements grafted on’.

In Pan’s Labyrinth, as in his previous films, Guillermo Del Toro pays an extraordinary amount of attention to the production design. The result is a film full of richness in its visual style. Guillermo Del Toro includes a wide range of sources of inspiration. The references in Pan’s Labyrinth come not only from films, but also from literature and painting. This film evokes Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, among other fairy tales. Del Toro and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who is also a frequent collaborator with director Robert Rodríguez, has captured the imagery of the best Victorian children’s book illustrations, with the creations of Arthur Rackham as a main model:

‘I tried to reconnect with the perversity and very sexual content of his work. In fairy tales, all stories are either about the return to the womb (heaven, home) or wandering out into the world and facing your own dragon. We are all children wandering through our own fable’.

Del Toro has pointed to the paintings of Goya, in particular the ‘black-paintings’, as a referent for the tone (‘grotesque’) and atmosphere (‘chiaroscuros’) of Pan’s Labyrinth; in particular the painting Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturno Devouring His Son) is quoted in the scene of The Pale Man eating the fairies, a metaphor for cannibalism and anguish. Finally, apart from the references to comics – Mike Mignola, for example – Del Toro has manifested his admiration for the symbolist painters, mainly Carlos Schwabe, but also Arnold Bocklin and Feliciens Rops.

Pan’s Labyrinth has relations to all three methodologies as an auteur study, art cinema study or a genre study, but I feel the most obvious is art cinema, as the film has gained its critical acclaim as an art house fairytale. Art films are aimed at small niche market audiences, which mean they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, and huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely-released mainstream blockbuster films. Art film directors make up for these constraints by creating a different type of film, which typically uses lesser-known film actors (or even amateur actors) and modest sets to make films which focus on reflective dialogue sequences. For promotion, art films rely on the publicity generated from film critics’ reviews, discussion of their film by arts columnists, commentators, bloggers, and “word-of-mouth” promotion by audience members. Since art films have small initial investment costs, they only need to appeal to a small portion of the mainstream viewing audiences to become financially viable . Del Toro has done an extraordinary job of turning a small art-house script into an absolute masterpiece with a small budget and yet not once sacrificing his vision to give in to the pressures of popular cinema.

I feel that the most impressive aspect of Pan’s Labyrinth was the lack of clichéd revelatory CGI (Computer Generated Image) moments. Most epic films of late have featured some kind of wide shot, for example Spiderman swinging through the buildings of New York while fighting the terrible Sandman in ‘Spider-Man 3′ all the while a remastered version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 boom’s in the background. Pan’s Labyrinth, although regularly employing interesting digital effects, does not attempt to send us to Narnia or Skull Island, and the closest thing to a superhero is a little girl who wants to save her mom and unborn baby brother. This use of effects as support for, rather than the focus of, the story make this world seem very real and intense and, as in the scene with a creature called “The Pale Man,” very frightening.

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is the epitome of the art-house film, while not being cliché it manages to approach a fantasy and horror theme with a totally different perspective, turning this film into the ultimate fairy tale for adults. Grappling with both the necessity and absurdity of narrative, Guillermo Del Toro’s film lures you in with its fantasy underpinnings, setting up a contrast with the war-time reality of the other characters in the film. Del Toro carefully constructs each frame of this film with care, marrying sound and image together to form a beautiful world of magical realism. His images allow the spectator fully into the childlike perspective of Ofelia, positioning you to hope that each imaginative adventure serves as a sufficient escape from the brutality of her step father, the captain, who constructs his own reality based on his fascist ideology. Del Toro commands the narrative with the stylistic devices he employs to execute it, which is necessary given the film’s focus on the function of narrative in the interpretation of our perceptions of the world. Imagination is absurd in many ways, but it is wholly essential to grappling with the experience. A stunning sequence near the beginning involving Ofelia talking to her unborn brother in her mother’s womb incorporates images so sublime in such a free-flowing yet succinct manner. The images coupled with Javier Navarrete’s ethereal, lullabye-esque music represent one of the film’s key scenes.

Allegorical parallels abound, but the film is restrained in its presentation of details, capturing both magic and horror in equal amounts while balancing the narrative between a character based war drama and a fairy tale. Where most stories would take this setting at face value, Del Toro makes it a more prominent element of the story than the imaginative world into which Ofelia flees. He is very sparing in how he incorporates the fantastical aspects, and he is also much darker with them than your typical Alice in Wonderland story. The fantasy world in this film is not happy-go-lucky by any stretch; it is a strong reflection of how Ofelia views and participates in the reality of her own life. As the narrative progresses and we become more exposed to the brutal reality of violence and fascism and losing faith in Ofelia’s world, which allows the viewer to understand her imaginative impulses as more of an inconsequential distraction from the goings on of the war plot. But Del Toro knows full well what he’s doing and allows the proceedings to culminate in a climax so poignantly hopeful and bittersweet. It isn’t until the film is over that you can really put together the pieces of what Del Toro is after in this film, and the meanings are open to interpretation.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a moving and spectacular achievement by one of the finest directors working today. Pan’s Labyrinth is simply not for kids. This is a movie very much designed for adults. The only common ground between Pan’s Labyrinth and, say, The Chronicles of Narnia are a pair of goat hooves and some cute little pixies. However, in Pan’s Labyrinth you watch in horror, as the pixies become the bloody lunch of some demonic monstrosity. The similarities and contrasts between the two worlds serve as an inquiry into not just national and personal ideology, but the reality of experience. Our experience with the world outside is ultimately nothing more than perception and interpretation according to individual and social experience. Del Toro achieves this by building a brilliant narrative within these two worlds, never quite allowing the spectator to entirely be inside one without the other. That simple contrast reveals itself to be much more complex than we might initially anticipate, and Del Toro’s understanding of this is so essential to the film’s themes. No amount of praising metaphors or adjectives can contain just how beautifully simple yet dizzyingly complex Pan’s Labyrinth is. It is a masterpiece. Throughout the film the methodologies of an Auteur, a Genre Study and Art Cinema can be found, but the use of the word Auteur to describe this budding director is premature, he is very much an amazing talent and it can be argued that ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is the successor to ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ but it is just too early to be able to categorise his films. In contrast it is extremely apparent that Del Toro can be considered one of the heavyweights of new age art-house cinema, his films, and especially ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ ooze’s realism and authorial expressivity. His films deviate from the mainstream, “classical” norms of filmmaking in that they typically deal with more episodic narrative structures with a loosening of the chain of cause and effect.