Pan's Labyrinth

• Pan's Labyrinth


  Film directed by Mexican Director Guillermo Del Toro
• Pan's Labyrinth released


  2006
• Pan's Labyrinth


  • Total Budget of $19 million
  • Box Office total of $83.3 million
• Produced by


  Tequila Gang
• Meaning and Response
• Fascism


  A political ideology characterised by a single party system, led by a dictator that promotes aggressive nationalism and forcefully suppressed oppositions
• Spectatorship


  • Active - Passive Spectators - Interpreting a film is a dynamic process between the film and the audience as the crew behind a film use film form and narratives to create a story which often includes meanings and messages they want to share with the audience. The audience plays a part in this as they bring their own beliefs and ideologies to the film which allows their own perspective of the film to be changed due to different demographic factors
  • Viewing Context - How your viewer changes depending on what you use to watch a film such as watching in the cinema, on your computer or on your phone. Depending on the environment you watch a film in, your experience and opinion on the film could change as you may be distracted by a range of external factors
• Demographic


  • Gender
  • Age
  • Ethnicity
  • Social-economic background
  • Sexuality
• Stuart Hall: Preferred, Negotiated and Oppositional Readings


  • Dominant Reading - When spectators take away the intended meaning from the film and accept what they have been shown passively
  • Negotiated Reading - When viewers accept parts of the intended meaning but reject other parts
  • Oppositional Reading - When the reader understands the film's messages but rejects them
• Representation


  • Gender
  • Ethnicity
  • Age
• Ofelia and the Toad

  1. Why did she kill the toad?

  2. What is it doing to the tree?

  3. Fantasy to the real world - Wipe transition behind a tree to move to reality

  4. Vidal finds a vial of medicine under a recently extinguished fire and later links it to Dr Ferreiro

  5. Rebels dressed in earthy colours to blend in with the surroundings

  6. Warm colours used in fantasy worlds, Cool colours used in reality

  7. The frog killing the tree represents how society grows weaker as the dictators become stronger

  8. "Aren't you ashamed living down here, eating all these bugs and growing fat whilst this tree dies?" is a direct link to the Vidals banquet scene as they are feasting like kings while the rest of society survive on rations

  9. The toad and the Pale man are physical manifestations of fascism

  10. The tree could be representative of a mother's womb and the toad represents her unborn brother who is causing fatal problems for Carmen
• Pan's Labyrinth


  2006 film directed by Guillermo del Toro, set in Spain
• Pan's Labyrinth is critically lauded with 3 Academy Award wins in 2007 for Best Makeup, Art Direction and Cinematography. Widely regarded as Del Toro's definitive film.
• Starting Points - The Beginning and the End


  • 01:09 - Camera pans into close-up of young girl Ofelia who is dying
  • 01:47:23 - Final shot shows a flower blooming and a fairy looking on, with subtitles saying Ofelia's alter-ego Princess Moanna left traces on earth
• Cinematography


  • 01:23 - Camera zooms into Ofelia's eye, transporting to magical fairy kingdom
  • 02:25 - Stark contrast to previous ethereal blue shots, showing ruins of church in sun-baked landscape
  • 05:21 - First shot of Captain Vidal preceded by his watch, symbolising his precision and macho need to ape his father
  • 02:41 - First two shot of Ofelia and her sickly, pregnant mother
• Mise-en-Scène


  • 21:11 - Close-up of the Fawn, Ofelia's guide who tells her she is Princess Moanna
  • 57:31 - Sequence with the monstrous Pale Man, a truly terrifying creation
  • 04:45 - Gothic production design with ceremonial standing stone
  • 18:37 - Locust transforms into friendly fairy, suggesting magical realism
  • 34:49 - Realistic and visceral model of the giant toad Ofelia has to deal with
• Editing


  • Conventional style with diegetic wipes and cross-dissolves linking real and fantasy worlds
• Sound


  • 16:13 - Gruesome murder of farmers by Captain Vidal, with sound design adding to the horror
• The broken face of the protagonist's watch is suggestive of his own broken identity - an immaculate and precise mechanism but flawed
• Mercedes will later slit the protagonist's mouth open, and he will be shot just below his right eye, mirroring scenes reflecting the precise deconstruction of the watch face and his own
• The main women in the film, Ofelia, Carmen and Mercedes all suffer at the hands of patriarchy
• When Mercedes is caught by Vidal, Vidal laughs at the suggestion that he should not be left alone with her - 'She is just a Woman!'
• Mercedes replies that she was able to support the rebels precisely because she was 'invisible' to Vidal
• Ofelia is killed by her step-father for stealing his son and defying him, and Carmen dies in child birth unmourned by her new husband
• Only Mercedes triumphs in the end through her ingenuity and bravery and through her love for her brother
• Mercedes' final scene is one of profound grief as she holds the dying Ofelia in her arms and weeps for the loss of childish innocence at the hands of a brutalising patriarchy
• In the Pale Man's lair, the chilling shallow focus close-up of all the shoes of the Pale Man's victims evokes comparisons with scenes from the Nazi death camps
• The representation of the Pale Man devouring babies and the sumptuous banquet that cannot be touched can be read as a critique of a ruling elite (perhaps the Church) which systematically and brutally crushes innocence and life
• Youth is clearly at odds with the adult world in this film - fantasy is perhaps the only escape
• There are no multi-ethnic representations in the film which is excusable given its setting in Northern Spain in 1944
• The Falangist's (supporters of the dictator, Franco) are aligned to corrupt officialdom, a morally bankrupt church and a sadistic and brutal military
• Vidal alone executes his step-daughter, a doctor, two farmers and an injured rebel as well as torturing and taunting a captured rebel with a stutter
• The Spanish rebels are depicted as a significantly more humanised, freedom loving and empathetic group of democrats
• The film is a magical realist text - combining beautifully constructed but very dark fantasy sequences, some verging on horror, with a graphically violent rendering of factional fighting in Northern Spain in the early years of Franco's dictatorship
• Del Toro has referred to this film as a very loose sequel to an earlier feature horror, The Devil's Backbone - itself set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War
• Franco's army unit is represented as a brutalising force of occupation and its commanding officer, Captain Vidal, as a sadistic epitome of evil
• The ruling elite who attend a banquet given by Vidal are equally venal and corrupt and Del Toro clearly has little empathy for the priest and the organised Catholicism he represents
• The narrative triumph of liberalism over fascism is literal as the movie ends with the Captain's execution by the victorious rebels and Ofelia's imaginative or real resurrection in the Underworld
• The moss-covered ruins of the Labyrinth and associated standing stones, and the tree beneath which Ofelia finds the toad and from which blooms her own resurrection all suggest a sophisticated and elemental pagan past now acting as rare portals to the fairy kingdom
• The representation of women reflects the social problems they faced in this patriarchal and macho era