Wow! eBook
Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy
Author(s): Kristian Moen (Author)
- Publisher: I.B. Tauris
- Publication Date: 30 May 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 1780762518
- ISBN-13: 9781780762517
Book Description
Stars like Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark, who not only played fantasy roles but presented their off-screen personae in deliberately fantastic terms, and the transformative claims of modernity expressed through visions such as Orientalist fairylands are analysed to show the extent to which fairy tales were used to negotiate different experiences of modernity – the giddy adventures of social mobility, consumer culture and identity transformation, the threats and anxieties of cultural change, impermanence and mutability. Moen traces the evolution of the fairy tale in film to its self-aestheticising peak in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, alongside ironic allusions in films like Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, concluding with an examination of how fairy tale visions of fantastic transformation have seen a resurgence in contemporary cinema, from Tim Burton to Harry Potter. In the process, he shows how cinema made fairy tales modern – and fairy tales helped make cinema what it is today.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Peter Dahlen, Historical Journal of Film
‘Kristian Moen shows himself equally a master of close archival work and an d an adept and informed cultural historian able to bring his findings from the world of early cinema into the fantasy films of both the 1910s and the immediate modern era. His perceptive analyses are enlivened by the clarity of his writing. A wonderful and essential study for which we have ample reason to be grateful.’
‘With precision and breadth grounded in exacting research, Kristian Moen charts the ways in which fairy tales transformed, and were made modern by, the cinema. Beginning with the relation between the technical wonders of nineteenth-century fairy plays and early film, the book traces the history forward from the silent period to Walt Disney and provocatively beyond to our contemporary context in order to elaborate how cinematic fantasy has reflected and negotiated the marvels, dreams and crises of the modern world.’
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