Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
M Arts and Culture: Comparative Cultural Analysis
2016
Thesis
History through a moral tale: Pan’s Labyrinth
The cultural memory of Spanish fascism depicted through a
disobedient fairytale
By Sarah Lafer
Supervisor: Dr. Boris Noordenbos
Acknowledgements:
I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who supported me during my MA programme in Comparative Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam. In particular, I want to thank my supervisor, Dr. Boris Noordenbos, for his
patience and guidance throughout the process of writing my thesis. Furthermore, I want to thank my boyfriend Hasan and my family for their love, support,
inspiration, and motivation to achieve my goals and follow my dreams. It was an incredible year full of challenges and exciting experiences that will stay with me for all my life.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Cultural Memory and Fascism 5
1.1 Historical Background 5
1.2 Cultural Memory 7
1.3 The single narrative of Fascism 10
1.4 Disobedience and choice 20
1.5 Transcultural memory and national/international references 26
Chapter 2: History and Fantasy 32
2.1 Fact versus Fiction 32
2.2 Visual characteristics of the film 36
2.3 Fairytales 40
2.4 A Haunted Nation 43
Conclusion 46
Introduction
History can be remembered in various ways. Textbooks, documentaries, or exhibitions are some of the means of conveying an image of the past, but it can also be remembered through emotions, moral values, stories, or even a fairytale. Interpreting history through a fairytale can seem contradictory, considering that fairytales come from human imagination and involve legendary creatures or magical places. However, depicting a historical period through fairytales’
qualities can provide a more complex approach of how it is remembered through culture and how it can become a part of a society’s identity. Deriving from this notion, this thesis intents to analyse how the cultural memory of the fascist period in Spain is delineated in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, by emphasising the importance of a disobedient and unrestricted fairytale to challenge the single narrative of Franco’s dictatorship as well as its legacy.
One of the main focuses of this study will be cultural memory, which refers to a group’s collective remembrance of the past. Cultural memory is a foundational factor in the formation of a society or nation’s identity, as it establishes a
collective feeling of belonging and connecting. This type of memory is influenced by the present and affects the future, which renders it crucial to be transmitted comprehensively from people to people, from one generation to the next. It is therefore important to enable cultural memory to evolve with a society and
prevent it from being restricted or manipulated. An example of repressed cultural memory can be found in recent Spanish history.
By encouraging to forget, the Spanish political sphere has attempted to influence the way of remembering the period of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the succeeding dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, which ended in 1975. The legacy of the opposition’s supporters, the Republicans or rebels, who had disappeared or died during the Civil War and the following decades, was excluded from public discourse and the general notion emerged to concentrate on the future by omitting the past. Only recently, the cultural taboo of remembering the victims from both sides of the conflict has eased and the memory has been dug up (Valverde, 79).
The film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, contributed to the disintegration of this taboo. It portrays a ten-year-old girl, Ofelia, facing actual and fantastical horrors in 1944 Francoist Spain. Together with her pregnant mother Carmen, she moves to the mill of Captain Vidal, a senior officer of the fascist regime and the father of Ofelia’s half-brother. After Ofelia’s father had died, Carmen married again, but Ofelia finds no connection to her stepfather or his ideology. Trying to escape him, she is drawn into a magical quest presented to her by a faun. He tells her that she is a lost princess, whose memories were erased after she had entered the human world, and in order to return to her kingdom she must prove her true self by fulfilling three tasks. These involve obtaining a key from a giant toad’s stomach and collecting a dagger from the cave of a monster, the Pale Man. Intrigued and excited, she believes the faun and wants to fulfil the tasks to return to her kingdom.
However, Carmen and Vidal disrupt her quest with the horrors of real life. Carmen becomes severely ill during the last stages of her pregnancy and
eventually dies giving birth to her son. Meanwhile, Vidal is actively fighting the republican rebels in the mountains surrounding the mill. The rebels’ resistance against the regime endures even after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, and both sides are waiting for an opportunity to attack the other. Ofelia’s only friend is the housekeeper Mercedes who is spying for her the rebels including her brother. When Vidal discovers that she, as well as his doctor, who secretly provided the rebels with medical care, betrayed him, he murders the doctor and attempts to do the same to Mercedes. She, however, manages to escape and shortly after, the rebels attack the mill during Ofelia’s final task, which involves taking her brother to the labyrinth. When the faun demands her to give him the baby, Ofelia refuses because she notices the dagger in his hand. The faun
becomes furious over her disobedience and leaves her to her fate. Seconds later, Vidal, who was following her, appears behind her and takes his son from her. Ofelia protests, but he shoots her and leaves her behind to die.
Outside the labyrinth, the rebels and Mercedes are waiting in front of the burning mill for Vidal to surrender. Knowing his fate, he gives the baby to Mercedes and is shot by her brother. Mercedes runs into the labyrinth and finds
Ofelia who is dying from her wound. In her imagination, however, Ofelia has fulfilled the last task by sacrificing herself rather than her innocent brother and returns to her kingdom. She is welcomed by her parents, the faun, and the entire kingdom, and she learns that her father did not forget her which allowed her soul to return and remember. It appears that this thought puts a smile on her face while she takes her last breath inside the labyrinth.
Pan’s Labyrinth does not attempt to be an authoritative historical source of
Francoist Spain, as it does not inform about documented characters or events. However, its aim is to expound a different facet of remembering history, one that does not involve textbooks, but fairytales. Thus, I will explore how fascism is remembered by analysing its depiction in Pan’s Labyrinth, and emphasise the importance of courageous disobedience, the ultimate virtue wrapped in a transcultural fairytale. I will support this argument through exploring the cultural memory of an authoritarian system’s totalising narrative by analysing who owns a memory and who decides what is allowed to be remembered and what not, and later interconnect my findings to the fairytale genre. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how the spiritual portrayal of refusing to forget is a metaphor for dealing with the memory of the events, crimes, and deaths of the Civil War and Franco Era in Spain.
In chapter one, I will begin my study by providing a historical background of the Spanish Civil War and the succeeding fascist period under Franco, as well as the legacy of these events. A brief history of memory studies will follow, which will lead to the concept of cultural memory, developed by Jan and Aleida
Assmann. Considering the fact that cultural memory is always influenced by the present, it is necessary to include the circumstances the film was created under, to understand it as a memory of this period. Next, the film’s depiction of the single narrative of fascism as well as how it is challenged will be analysed. I will therefore explore the disobedience within the film, represented by the
Republicans against the regime and by Ofelia against almost everyone, as well as the disobedience of the film itself. This involves the combination of the normally distinct genres of political drama and fantasy, as well as the dismissal of generic audience expectations. The last part of the first chapter will deal with national
and international references demonstrated in the film, as well as the transculturality of memories.
The second chapter will explore the boundaries and connections between history and fantasy. As a starting point, I will emphasise the importance that fiction can be a part of the cultural memory of a historical event. An evaluation of the cinematic attributes to deepen this argument will follow, before I will move on to the impact of a fairytale used as a genre. Lastly, I will refer back to the historical dealing with events, which characterise Spain as a haunted nation. By probing the spectral features of the film, I will propose that the film is in fact a spectral metaphor of historical events.
Chapter 1: Cultural Memory and Fascism
1.1 Historical Background
To begin with, it is important to note that Pan’s Labyrinth cannot be interpreted with definitive explanations. Multi-sourced characters, an interconnection of narratives of conventionally distinct genres, and transcultural references distance the film from establishing firm boundaries between ultimate
explanations of what is real or imagined. To substantiate this argument, I will construe the film as a reaction to the political dealing with the national memory of the Spanish Civil War and the succeeding fascist period under Franco. Several historical events need to be expounded to view the film in a comprehensive
context.
In 1936, the conservative military, referred to as the Nationalists, led a coup d’état against the democratically elected left-wing socialist government, the Republicans. After three years of heavy fighting and many casualties on both sides, the Nationalists seized control of the country under Generalissimo Franco, who remained in political power until his death in 1975. After the shift of power, particularly in the 1940s, numerous Republicans kept resisting the new regime and the fighting continued in many parts of the country. Thousands of people, active fighters as well as civilians, disappeared during this time and never returned.
After Franco’s death, the monarchy, which had been abolished in 1931, became reinforced and in 1977, free elections were held. Politicians on both sides of the spectrum decided it was the wisest and most efficient decision for the country to focus on the future rather than on the past. Therefore, in the same year, the ‘Pact of Forgetting’ was introduced, which prevented a public dealing with the past. Just like the Franco regime, which commemorated only its own dead, “controlled how the past was historicized through the curtailment of dissonance and the destruction of records that jeopardized its own carefully constructed narrative” (Delgado, 181), the government which followed
maintained this narrative by hardly challenging it and scarcely addressing the past. The public monuments commemorating the dead on the nationalist side remained, while the ones on the republican side remained missing. The Pact of Forgetting “operated by sweeping the crimes of the Franco era under the carpet in order to consolidate democracy in Spain” (Delgado, 184).
Only in 2000, the non-governmental Association for the Recovery of
Historical Memory (ARMH) began to recover the past by digging up the bodies of hundreds of people from unmarked graves. Hence in 2007, under the government of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the ‘Law for Historical Memory’ was introduced, which recognised victims from the Civil War and its aftermaths on both sides and allowed compensation for descendents.
Keeping these historical facts in mind, Pan’s Labyrinth, which was released in 2006 but written and produced years earlier – del Toro had started to think about it in 1993 (Ebert) – can be considered as an appeal to people to remember the past. It implements this notion through the parable of the fairytale of the lost princess, whose memories were erased after she had left her kingdom. Unable to remember, she eventually died from the pain and sickness this amnesia caused her. Her soul, however, could not rest until she remembered her origins and returned to her kingdom.
Within the framework of the fairytale, Ofelia fully identifies with the princess and strives determinedly to remember her former life. Because she has been outside of her kingdom for so long, however, she cannot achieve this easily and is required to fulfil a quest to prove her true self. In the end she dies as Ofelia, but within the fairytale she succeeds. She is rewarded not only with her return but also with gaining back her memories. Furthermore, she is thanked by her people for not having submitted to fascism and for standing up for what she believed was right, even if it meant disobeying others. Her father played a significant role in this context because he refused to forget her. He was not
willing to let her slip into oblivion because she was not gone, just missing, and he did not satisfy without closure. His resistance to let her go allowed her soul to return because her memories lived on.
Ofelia returns to her kingdom and is greeted by her parents and the faun.
1.2 Cultural Memory
As already mentioned, cultural memory is one of the main theories this study focuses on. I will therefore briefly elucidate some essential terms in the field of memory studies to establish an understanding of the theory of cultural memory. Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist, coined the term ‘collective memory’ through which he explained that apart from everyone’s individual memory there is also the memory a society shares as a group. Memories need to be
communicated within a social framework, a collective, and only through this, people acquire a feeling of belonging together as a group; vice versa these groups then form memories (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 109).
Following this concept, art historian Aby Warburg formulated the term ‘social memory’ and emphasised the importance of cultural artefacts as the carrier of memories. He devoted his time to the study of the afterlife of classical antiquities in Western culture and disseminated the general approach to receive
history as a form of (cultural) memory (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 110). Warburgs discoveries are already relatively similar to the understanding of cultural memory, and as a response to both Warburg’s and Halbwachs’s findings, Aleida and Jan Assmann devised the theories of ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’.
Communicative memory consists of collective memories based on everyday communication. Through this communication, each person composes a memory, which is socially mediated and relates to a group (J. Assmann, “Collective Memory” 127). Such memories are usually obtained through oral transmission and therefore do not contain a cultural characteristic. Rather, they are passed on from people to people, from one generation to the next, and hence their temporal horizon cannot exceed more than eighty to one hundred years, or three to four generations. The communicative memory was introduced because all too often individual memories are not the same as objective collective memories and the transition from one to the other can be extensive. The communicative memory describes the difference between Halbwachs’s collective memory and J.
Assmann’s understanding of cultural memory (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 110).
In contrast to the communicative memory’s proximity to everyday life, cultural memory creates a distance from it and the individual memory itself. Based on fixed points from the past, cultural memory represents and preserves memories in cultural formation and institutional communication (J. Assmann, “Collective Memory” 129). Cultural memory evolves constantly with the changes of society, because it does not merely consist of knowledge of the past, as documented by historians or archaeologists, but it presents the past as it is remembered (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 113). Furthermore, cultural memory is always vicarious because, other than communicative memory, it does not involve first-hand experiences of an event. Rather, it mediates other people’s experiences through cultural artefacts and it is the product of these representations (Rigney, “Plenitude and Scarcity” 15). The external and objectified memory of the past is crucial for a formation of a group and a cultural identity, because through a
shared cultural memory, people are able to and share a feeling of belonging and connecting.
Aleida Assmann specifies the concept of cultural memory by establishing the relationship between remembering and forgetting (A. Assmann, 97). She states that in cultural memory, many details of an experience must be forgotten in order to create a memory consisting of information to face the present and future. While active forgetting, however, is closely intertwined with censorship and abuse of political power, passive forgetting is a loss or negligence of
information (A. Assmann, 98). There is furthermore an active and a passive form of remembering. The active form, also referred to as ‘working memory’, consists of the selected memories that make up the canon, which is the matrix of cultural memory that forms the feeling of unity and consequently identity. The passive form, also known as ‘reference memory’, is stored in what she calls the archive. It holds information that has not met the society’s current standards to become part of its identity, but that is nevertheless kept in a storage because it might become important at some stage in the future, when the society changes. “It preserves what has been forgotten” so that it can serve as a reference point when people are ready to accept it into the canon (A. Assmann, 106). Hence, it holds the
information that is not part of the common memory of an event, but that is substantial enough not to slip into oblivion.
These types of archives, which store information that is not required at the current time, are called historical archives. However, A. Assmann elucidates that there are also political archives held by institutions of power, which control what kind of information gets accepted into the canon and which is stored away safely from any criticism against them. When operated by authoritarian regimes, organisations, or people, active forgetting and remembering can become precarious because then the present and the future can be channelled and controlled arbitrarily. Even further, A. Assmann continues that in totalitarian regimes, there is not even a storing of memory because there is only a single official version of the past. “This paranoid effort is deemed necessary for the protection of the state because an independent reference to the past can trigger a counter-history that challenges the totalitarian version of the past and
After having explained the definitions of these terms, they will now help with the analysis of Pan’s Labyrinth. The period under Franco is undeniably part of
Spain’s cultural memory, but because it became a taboo to talk about it, it adopted a mystical character without clear memories. The political discourse moved from a single totalitarian narrative of the dictatorship to a dismissal of all narratives of the past. Pan’s Labyrinth demonstrates this conflicted relationship with the past expressively by taking familiar genres and then breaking the familiarity and identification by interweaving them without following common norms to demonstrate the importance to allow memories to be created. Apart from supporting this argument, the study will also analyse the importance of disobedience in political regimes as well as the importance of disobeying generic expectations of the audience. By always sticking to a restricted set of possibilities within a genre or a story, people limit themselves in realising important
connections that require thinking outside the framework. Only by understanding these connections, something can be learnt from the past and cultural memory can not only serve as a bond between groups but also as a foundation of what has worked in the past and what has not and needs to be avoided in the future.
1.3 The single narrative of Fascism
After having established the definition of these terms as well as my intentions, I will now use this socio-constructive approach to analyse the representation of fascism in Pan’s Labyrinth. Much has been written about the film, and I will attempt to contribute to the dialogue by proffering a new approach. While
Francisco J. Sanchez argues in his analysis of the film that, “Vidal’s psychological perspective overcomes the representation of Fascism” (Sanchez, 138), other
scholars, such as Paul Julian Smith, highlight all the reasons of why Vidal embodies Fascism. He lists that Vidal’s “pure male affiliation”, his “fetishistic attention to uniform”, and his “amorous investment in the tools of torture” are all fundamental aspects to Fascism (Smith, 7). Sanchez, however, argues that the film is about a father-quest; both for Ofelia and for Vidal. Both of their missions
are to honour their dead fathers and this alone is Vidal’s agenda. His drive is therefore not politically but psychologically motivated, and this makes him more sadistic than an ordinary officer might be (Sanchez, 138). Sanchez’ argument, however, does not offer solid ground. Vidal repeatedly expresses his desire for a clean Spain without any resistance and if that requires fighting and killing for it, that is what he will do. Besides this, one of the rebels also says that if they kill Vidal, the regime would simply send someone else like him.
For this reason, I will comply my position with the scholars who regard Vidal as an embodiment of fascism. With fascism, I refer to Roger Griffin’s
definition of the term: “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin, 118). This dense definition means that firstly, generic fascism is an ideology, which prevents it from having an objective definition and allows only a characterisation of common features of fascist regimes. Secondly, Griffin states that fascism cannot be defined by the ideas a fascist regime produces but only by the core myth which underlies these ideas, serving as a matrix determining which type of thoughts are accepted into the national culture. The fascist myth provides a strong image of what the society could achieve and corroborates extremely effective to mobilise people to strive for such an image, for a rebirth of the nation from its present decadence (Griffin, 117). This explains the word palingenetic in his definition, which means rebirth, and it also elucidates the part involving nationalism, by stating that the nation as a whole (in theory, in praxis all those not opposing the ideology) should be elevated to a new level to be saved from degeneration. His definition involves the idea that the nation is an entity that can decay but which can also be reborn, and fascism is the ideology for this process (Griffin, 118). Vidal patently desires a newborn and clean Spain for his son to be born in, which itself is a metaphor of Griffin’s definition of fascism.
Before using this explanation to analyse the film in more detail, I will briefly remain with the concepts of myth and nationalism because it will give a more meaningful context to my argument. In his assessment of the film, Kam Hei Tsuei warns of the recurrence of fascism portrayed through Vidal. According to him, a big part of the struggle against fascism happens on the level of myth and “the constant production of counter-myths is necessary” in order to prevent
fascism from returning to power (Tsuei, 244). This means that counter-myths against the fascist narrative must constantly be produced to challenge the fascist myth. Moreover, by placing this analysis in the memory field, it is essential to understand that various memories of the fascist myth also need to be created in order to challenge a single authoritative memory. Pan’s Labyrinth addresses both issues directly: Ofelia creates a counter-myth to Vidal’s ideology, and the film itself presents a counter-myth to the official dealing of the Franco memory in Spain at that time.
To delineate this in more detail, the study refers to Duncan S. A. Bell’s explanations of the social-agency approach to nationalism, which is an essential element to fascism as well as to the controlling of memory. Bell clarifies that memory can often be manipulated because it is the socially framed property of individuals, for memory “articulates a more conceptually refined account of memory and its relation to identity and history” (Bell, 72). He highlights that even though memories are individual properties, no one remembers perfectly accurately. Additionally, people are influenced by the social discourse, which shapes their memories accordingly (Bell, 72). Memories rely on these socially framed conditions, and especially in a strongly nationalist environment there are clear definitions of the self and the other, the inside and the outside; there are hardly any grey-zones. The memories are therefore channelled into a single right way to remember.
Halbwachs has already stated that individuals use social frameworks when they remember and that the reconstruction of a memory is always re-enacted from and informed by the present (Colmeiro, 21). For this reason, Bell urges that it is essential to challenge the national memory and the “totalizing mnemonic that forms the basis of the nationalist narrative: the alleged unified, coherent memory shared amongst all of the people concerning their national past” (Bell, 74). A way of challenging these notions is through producing what Tsuei calls counter-myths: stories against the official national narrative.
Pan’s Labyrinth is such a counter-myth. Set against the Pact of Forgetting,
the film portrays a girl who was not on the side of the regime, and it tells her story and death in detail. But more significantly than the making of the film are
the characters within the story that attempt to impose a single narrative of memories and those who disobey this notion.
Vidal is portrayed from a low angle to emphasise his authority.
As embodiment of fascism, Vidal encourages active forgetting of information in order to control the memory of the past. This is demonstrated clearly in the scene of the dinner party at the mill, with officers, the doctor, and people from the Catholic Church, “Franco’s quiet partner” (Valverde, 80). When an officer tells Vidal that he knew his father in Morocco, he also mentions that the men in his battalion said that he smashed his watch on a rock when he died in the
battlefield, so that his son would know the exact time of his death. Vidal dismisses this as nonsense because his father did not own a watch. This,
however, it the real nonsense: as shown several times throughout the film, Vidal carries the broken watch with him all the time. But despite this, he refuses to give anyone else the authority of telling the story of his father. Solely by being the only source of this information, Vidal can remain in control of how the story is conveyed. This is an authority he will not compromise on, even if it requires lying to prevent anyone else from obtaining the source, which would enable the telling of it in a different way. Video-essayist Evan Pushak, who calls himself Nerdwriter1 on YouTube, remarks that Vidal’s purpose reflects the intention of
all authoritarian regimes, which is “to limit the number and kinds of stories that can be told from a set of facts or events, indeed limit it to one story”
(Nerdwriter1).
Vidal controls the conversation at the dinner table.
Toro allows Vidal to remain in control in this scene, but at the end of the film, just before he is killed, things take a different course. When Vidal exits the labyrinth and realises that the mill has been taken over by the rebels, who are awaiting him with Mercedes, he hands his son to her and asks her to tell him the time of his death one day. While still speaking, Mercedes interrupts him, looks him straight in the eye and says firmly, “No. He won’t even know your name.” Her brother Pedro then shoots Vidal and his fascist ideology is terminated once and for all. Mercedes interrupts Vidal not only by expressing his ideals, but also by passing on his parental story to his son who will be raised by the Republicans.
This scene resists the Spanish memory twice. Firstly, it refuses to remember Vidal and through this reverses the refusal to remember the
Republicans who died during this period. In that moment, Vidal’s story dies with him. Secondly, during the Civil War and in the Franco Era which followed, thousands of babies were taken from Republican mothers and given up for
adoption to Nationalist families in order to eradicate the Marxist gene from their parents: “a scandal that continued well into the democratic era, with 30,000 infants thought to have been trafficked over a fifty-year period” (Delgado, 181). In the film, however, a Nationalist baby will be raised by Republicans and it will not grow up on the fascist side. Mercedes demonstrates this reversed position determinedly.
Jennifer Orme highlights that this is the second time Mercedes interrupts Vidal: the first time she does so when he prepares to torture her (Orme, 230). She interrupts him not only directly in his verbal preparation of telling her what is going to happen to her, but also in his male dominated narrative of the fascist regime in which women are worthless, helpless, and invisible. After all, fascists celebrated the only and ultimate role of women to bear a new generation to strengthen the nation (Eatwell, 481). This narrow-minded judgement enabled Mercedes to plot against him in his own house in the first place. She was
invisible to him and succeeded in spying for the rebels for a long time. Even when Vidal discovers her actions, he still underestimates her. This renders Mercedes to win her conflict with Vidal and furthermore, she deforms him. “Rather than killing him, she slices a deep gash from the corner of his mouth all the way up his cheekbone, symbolically turning him into the deformed monster he has in reality always been” (Tsuei, 239). This mark will stay on him until his death, even if he wins the battle against the Republicans.
Ofelia also takes advantage of Vidal’s judgemental conclusion and manages to delude him. Without him noticing, she enters his room, hides, and drugs his drink with sleeping medication, before taking her brother and running to the labyrinth. She, however, does not escape him as easily as Mercedes did: Vidal finds her, takes the baby, and shoots her. Feminine emancipation, as some scholars like Tsuei argue, is not a guarantee to defeat fascism. Even though it helped defeating Vidal, Ofelia pays this sacrifice with her life.
Mercedes deforms Vidal’s face.
Vidal’s indifference towards women is another way in which the film reflects his fascist mindset, which regards them merely as child bearers. The film takes this idea even further and highlights his resentment towards women, rather than indifference, demonstrated through his attitude towards his unborn baby. Without having any evidence, he is convinced that Carmen will give birth to a boy who will bear his name. When the doctor asks him how he can be so sure of this, Vidal looks at him in disdain and merely ends the conversation by saying, “Don’t fuck with me.”
Not every woman in the film stands up against Vidal’s authority, though. Carmen allows him to silence her and to stop her believing in anything other than what he permits, demonstrating the statement A.O. Scott pointed out in
The New York Times: “Fascism begins at home” (Scott). At the already mentioned
dinner party, Carmen tells the story of how she and Vidal met with sparkling eyes. With a patronising tone, Vidal ends the conversation by excusing himself for his wife. “She thinks these silly stories are interesting to others”, he says.
Again, he silences any other stories than his own and this in itself is another strong connection to the fairytales, which he assesses as a threat to his own narrative, as later demonstrated when he discovers Ofelia with the
mandrake root under Carmen’s bed. Ofelia had placed the plant there and fed it with milk and blood everyday, in order to cure her mother’s illness. But this belief does not perform well next to Vidal’s narrow mindset. It interrupts what he knows and is used to, and therefore he wants to eliminate it. Ofelia tries to resist, but Carmen intervenes by taking Vidal’s side. Just like she allowed him to
dismiss her at the dinner party, she also does not allow Ofelia to behave
differently than what she is expected to. She throws the mandrake root into the fire and it shrieks painfully as it burns in the flames. As an immediate reaction, Carmen’s contradictions begin and she dies while giving birth to her son.
Ofelia puts the mandrake root into a bowl of milk and puts it under Carmen’s bed.
To undermine Vidal’s authority, the camera points at him from a very low angle several times throughout the film. Moreover, on the graphical level of the film, there is hardly any difference in the way del Toro depicts fascist men next to fantastical monsters. “Visually, there is no great distinction between the countryside, gore-soaked and seething with secrets as it is, and the Gothic
netherworld presided over by a ‘faun’ – a smooth-talking, goat-headed man-thing who seems scarcely more trustworthy than the men in uniform” (Atkinson, 52).
This absence of clear differentiations allows Ofelia to form her own judgement of the characters surrounding her. For example, she is not scared of the faun and builds a much stronger relationship to him than she ever does to her stepfather. She does not realise that the faun is neither good nor bad, but that he does not have an agenda. He does not care about whether Ofelia lives or dies, as long as she fulfils her quest. The only reason he helps her mother with the mandrake root, for example, is because he knows that Ofelia will not
continue fulfilling her tasks otherwise. She trusts him, but in the end he puts her in a situation where she has to disobey even him in order to stay true to her beliefs. Her final disobedience results in her sacrificing her own life in order to save her brother’s. This can be read either as her last test, which she passes, because it results in her return to her kingdom, or it can be considered as the price she pays for blindly trusting the faun and letting him go that far.
In the final task, the faun performs an interesting role because he is the sole owner of a memory Ofelia does not possess (anymore). He told her before that soon they would be strolling through the gardens of her kingdom together, as soon as she fulfils her quest. Throughout the film, he has seduced Ofelia by making her believe him so that she would continue to fulfil her quest, but as he is the only source or authority of this memory, he holds full control of what
information Ofelia gets to learn. Those who interpret the story in this way, can see him as creating false promises and misleading Ofelia. Other than Vidal’s, the faun’s intentions are not questioned by Ofelia, which appears to dismiss her otherwise defiant character. But in the end, she is tested and realises that she cannot rely on him either and must decide between life and death. Del Toro blurs the lines again and the faun becomes a character who can be interpreted as good or bad; he can be made responsible for her death, or her rebirth.
Despite that, what matters is not whether the faun misleads Ofelia or not, but that she has forgotten her origins and tries everything in her power to gain her memories back and return to her kingdom. She suffers because she does not hold a feeling of belonging to this world, especially after her mother died and even more so after Mercedes escaped and joined the rebels. She reflects someone who has forgotten about their past and origins, but also someone who is haunted by
this and will only find closure or liberation through remembering. She represents the younger generation of Spanish people whose parents or grandparents were involved in the Civil War or the Franco Era, but who never talked about what happened to them and who did not pass on their communicative memory to their descendants.
However, at some point people started to ask questions and began to literally dig up the past, just like Ofelia, and the truth eventually emerged into people’s memory. In Ofelia’s case, this process required her death, but in the end she still smiles because for her it is a rebirth and a new start. For this reason, I do not agree with the assessment of the film by Robert J. Miles who voices that the film does not succeed in conveying the message of the importance of
remembering in order to learn from it in the future, and that it will be easily forgotten (Miles, 197). His judgement contradicts the entire achievement of the film, which has the intention to analyse the memory of the past on an emotional level in order to provide a new facet of remembering, to add a perspective.
Furthermore, the aim is to help people remember it accurately, which del Toro complicates through the fairytale. This should enable people to learn from what happened in the past to prevent them from repeating either fascism or the authoritarian approach to remembering or suppressing the memory of the victims of fascism.
1.4 Disobedience and Choice
As already touched upon, the film is to a great extent about disobedience and choice. Due to the multiple sources the film references to convey its story, it
distances itself from any clear definitions or totalising explanations. It is thus the audience’s choice to interpret the story in their own way. Sometimes, making this choice involves disobeying generic expectations. Del Toro made this decision by taking two normally distinct genres – political drama and fantasy – and
combining them. However, he did not only interweave them, but he also stayed true to both genres and did not use any simple excuses in order to satisfy
expectations. Until the end, he fully committed to both worlds he created, and for this reason the two genres convincing that both storylines can be interpreted as true (true in the sense of being a fairytale, not in a historical sense).
For example, the opening of the film shows a black screen with white text explaining the historical context it is set in. It is Spain in 1944, the Civil War is over, but active rebels are still resisting and hiding in the mountains to fight the regime. Such an opening creates a distance to the audience by explaining events most people are too young to have been a part of or to remember properly or at all. The opening is just like opening a textbook about the history of Spain. The first image, however, which immediately follows, presents Ofelia dying. This image appeals to people’s emotional side and creates commiseration.
Furthermore, there is confusion because the blood is not coming out of Ofelia’s nose but rather going in, suggesting that the story runs backwards. Imminently, the first spoken words are heard – “A long time ago” – and the fairytale begins. The camera dives into Ofelia’s eye and the fairytale is being told. This could be an indication that the fairytale only takes place in her head, but there is no definite evidence for this.
What is coherent, nevertheless, is that through the familiar words of “A long time ago”, which are in the same category as “Once upon a time”, the distance of the sober, fact-based, historical text shown in black-and-white, is broken. For the general viewers, the film attempts to create associations to their childhood, which animates them to remember. Therefore, the film becomes more
relatable than a dry, fact-based representation and a stronger connection can be built. Del Toro creates this stimulation on different levels by using “effortless parallel montage to interweave narrative threads” (Smith, 8). Through this, the opening of the film actively employs the narrative of a historical or political drama as well as of a fairytale and it engages the audience in both worlds at the same time (Orme, 226).
Already in the first few minutes of the film, two forms of disobedience are introduced: the rebels’ disobedience to submit to the regime, in the form of their resistance; and the lost princess’s disobedience, led by her curiosity, to stay within the realms of her kingdom. The rebels will go on disobeying the regime, demonstrated through Mercedes and the doctor who actively disobey Vidal; and the lost princess will keep on disobeying too, but now by refusing to forget her kingdom in order to return, in the form of Ofelia who disobeys her mother and Vidal as well as the faun to prove worthy by standing up for what she believes in.
Staying with the rebels’ resistance, I will analyse one scene that powerfully demonstrates their disobedience. After Vidal’s men had captured one of the republican fighters from the mountains and tortured him, he calls the doctor to cure him enough to continue the torment. The rebel, who is acquainted with the doctor, tells him that he wants to die because he already mentioned something to Vidal he did not intent to, caused by the torture. Afraid of revealing even more to Vidal, he begs for his euthanasia. The doctor commiserates with him and gives him a lethal injection, disobeying Vidal’s orders. When Vidal discovers this, he asks him why he did not obey him. The doctor answers that it was the only thing he could have done. “To obey just-like-that for the sake of obeying, without
questioning… That’s something only people like you can do, Captain.” For this response, Vidal shoots him dead.
A captured rebel begs the doctor for his euthanasia.
This scene ties onto the already mentioned dinner party scene. Before Carmen tells the story of how they met, one of the guests says that they will help Vidal however they can because they know he is not there by choice. Vidal stops eating for a dramatic pause and then gives a short speech: “You’re wrong about that. I choose to be here because I want my son to be born in a new, clean Spain.
Because these people hold the mistaken belief that we’re all equal. But there’s a big difference: The war is over and we won. And if we need to kill every one of these vermin to settle it, then we’ll kill them all and that’s that. We’re all here by choice.” They toast with “By choice!” and Mercedes, not being able to bear these people, leaves to give the rebels a sign. The rebels’ choice is to disobey the regime and keep on resisting, and Vidal’s choice is to eradicate every single one of the rebels. His speech demonstrates his totalitarian mindset patently and that he will not stop until he has achieved his goal of establishing a clean Spain. That is why he killed the doctor once he had discovered his disloyalty. Orme regards this idea as, “the film’s social critique of the systematic violence employed by
unambiguous world by destroying all that is disobedient – all that does not fit into the master narrative of totalitarianism” (Orme, 227). She makes this point by highlighting the ambiguous interruptions of the single authoritarian narrative embodied by Vidal.
Indeed, the characters of the rebels, the doctor, and Mercedes disrupt or interrupt Vidal’s narrative; but the ambiguity of the fairytale does so too. Not only does Vidal make it clear that he does not accept either Carmen or Ofelia being influenced by stories or tales that do not fit into his canon, he also becomes visibly irritated by disruptions, especially when he cannot make sense of them. This explains his fury when he finds Ofelia and the mandrake root under
Carmen’s bed. He cannot connect it to anything he has knowledge of and wants it to be gone in order to avoid interruption of his worldview. Later on, this attitude is projected onto Ofelia. He cannot make sense of why she believes in her stories and refuses to let them go, so he decides that it is easiest for him to make her disappear.
Ofelia challenges Vidal’s desire to control the discourse by having a strong imagination and firm principles that she stands up for, even if it requires rebelling against what is expected of her. She does not care about materialistic things such as the dress and shoes her mother gives to her, but rather about stories and the adventures presented by the faun’s quest. However, she does not fully submit to the faun and disobeys him several times, even though he is
someone she appears to trust. In the Pale Man’s cave, for example, she chooses a different keyhole than the fairies show her because she senses it is the right one and revealing the dagger behind the lock rewards her choice. But only minutes later, she is seduced by the palatable feast, neglects the faun’s warning of not consuming anything, and starts eating grapes with relish. This time, her disobedience is punished and the Pale Man awakes, chasing after her with the intention to kill her. Only narrowly she manages to escape.
For this action, she gets punished twice: the second time by the faun who refuses to help her afterwards and tells her that she has wasted her chance to return to her kingdom. Ofelia deeply regrets her unruliness and learns that when she makes a mistake it has severe consequences. Of this realisation, the faun
changes his mind and gives her one more chance, under the condition that she will not disobey him again. Ofelia agrees, but soon afterwards she dismisses this agreement. In the labyrinth, the faun asks her to give him her baby brother, but Ofelia spots the dagger in his hand and does not obey. Now the faun reminds of Vidal in the earlier scene with the doctor, getting angry because someone does not obey him. But just like the doctor, Ofelia challenges his authority and decides to take things into her own hands rather than leaving them in someone else’s. The faun shouts and asks her if she would give up her rights and her throne for someone she barely knows and who has caused her so much despair. Ofelia insists that she will not hand over her brother and the faun leaves her to her fate. Vidal then appears behind her and takes the boy from her. She protests, but he points his pistol at her and fires the deadly shot. This renders Ofelia to
sacrifice herself for an innocent. She dies in the real world, but she is reborn in her dreams in her kingdom where her disobedience is rewarded by her father and the people of her kingdom.
The Pale Man awakes as soon as Ofelia has eaten a grape.
While the topics of disobedience and choice have great impact on the film’s plot, they also influenced the making of it to a great extent. That starts as early as
when del Toro refused to produce his film as a Hollywood production, despite of producers offering him double the budget if he would make the film in English (“Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)”). Del Toro, however, did not want to compromise on the storyline according to the “market needs”. Hence, he made the film with the relatively small budget of €13,5 million, which forced him to spend a lot of his own money on it as well as to be dependent on financial support from his director friend Alfonso Cuarón (Mohr).
As already established above, del Toro refuses to create firm boundaries between the real world and the fairytale, which provides the audience with a choice of which story to believe in. But it also prevents the audience from only believing one of the stories by making both narratives dependent on one another. “Neither narrative becomes reducible to the other” (Nerdwriter1). Some things happen in the real world that would not be possible without the magical story, such as when Ofelia draws a door to enter Vidal’s room where her brother is. Del Toro does not explain to the audience how this is possible, and by not satisfying with definitive explanations, he allows them to think about it and try to break the boundaries of their imagination. The film’s purpose, after all, is not to tell a story but to break dogmas and the limitations they bring with them. However, del Toro is not consistent in the use of magic. Things that happen in the real world are mostly reflected in fantasy, but sometimes, fantasy precedes reality, such as when Carmen almost has a miscarriage and Ofelia gets warned from her magical book. Sometimes, fantasy runs parallel to reality, such as when the mandrake root restores Carmen to health, and when it dies Carmen dies as well. And sometimes, fantasy succeeds reality, as shown with the Pale Man’s feast, which is a reflection of Vidal’s dinner party from the day before. One could argue that these seemingly endless possibilities of fantasy weaken the storyline, but del Toro manages to create a strong connection to the real world so that they do not disappoint in the story but only in expectations. Thus he disobeys in generic expectations once more.
As mentioned above, Vidal regards women as his property and does not ascribe them any rights; their sole purpose is to produce heirs. However, he does not perceive them as his sexual property and even though the anticipation of sexual
violence is built up several times throughout the film, the “representation of sex or even eroticism is notably absent in Pan’s Labyrinth” (Orme, 228). For example, when Vidal prepares to torture Mercedes he unbuttons his shirt and a terrifying expectation of sexual violence is raised. This recalls the anticipation from an earlier scene: When Vidal tells Mercedes that the coffee was not drinkable, he puts his hand on her shoulder and lets it slide down her arm slowly, creating an expectation of a warning of physically abusing her. The same notion is created when the faun strokes through Ofelia’s hair or lets his fingers glide around her chin. No such intentions might be there, but the general audience is so used to anticipating sexual violence in a film in which women are suppressed by
authoritarian men, that the absence of the implementation of such a violence is more surprising than it would be the other way around.
The film’s ending does not deliver results to generic expectations either. For Ofelia’s fairytale, there is a happy ending because she manages to return to her kingdom and will rule for many centuries to come. For her real life character, however, the ending is tragic because she dies. At the same time, the rebels succeed in taking over the mill and eradicating the evil, Vidal. But in reality, Franco’s regime dominated Spain and suppressed any opposition for another 31 years, so that ending is also not happy. Del Toro thereby protests against definite endings of fairytales and shows that real life does not end in an explicitly good or bad way. This moral is applicable not only to Spain and by exceeding territorial or national boundaries the film becomes meaningful for a much broader
audience.
1.5 Transcultural memory and national/international references
Pan’s Labyrinth certainly has great influence from Spanish culture. It is set in a
distinctive time and place, in the Spain of 1944, and the story is dependent on the conditions of Spain during that time. Furthermore, the film revokes a number of traditionally Spanish images, such as the story of Don Quixote (Smith, 5). Like Ofelia, Don Quixote lived in a mill and fought the monsters of his fantasy,
film The Spirit of the Beehive, which also takes place in the 1940s in Spain. It features the story of a little girl who believes in spirits and disobeys her father, similar to Ofelia (Miles, 196). Del Toro’s earlier film about the Spanish Civil War,
The Devil’s Backbone (2001), also evokes some patterns of the plot, which are
re-used in Pan’s Labyrinth. It features a little boy living in an orphanage, being haunted by the ghost of another little boy who had been killed there and who can only get closure when the truth of his death is revealed.
But the success of Pan’s Labyrinth lies in the fact that it does not only reference national images, but also those that exceed Spain’s borders. The faun, for
example, comes from ancient mythology. The original title of the film, El
laberinto del fauno, means the labyrinth of the faun and does not include the
name Pan, which is never mentioned in the film. Only in the English, German, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Croatian translations the title became Pan’s
Labyrinth. This is due to the very dark and sexual association of the Roman god
Pan, which Del Toro did not want to place opposite a young girl. In the film, the creature is a faun but nevertheless, he features some essential characteristics of the god Pan.
The shepherd-god Pan, according to the Homeric Hymn 19 to Pan, has goat’s feet, two horns and enjoys the company of nymphs. He is also associated with music and often portrayed playing soft notes on his pipes of reed (Evelyn-White). But this is only one version of Pan. Edwin Brown, for example, suggests that Pan was often referred to as a young wolf. Wolf, in the definition of slang, means “a man forward, direct, and zealous in amatory attentions to women but also disposed towards those of his own sex” (Brown, 69). Applying this to Pan, one could make an association with a character who tries to seduce everyone he encounters. But in most stories, as well as in the Collins English Dictionary, Pan is referred to as “the god of fields, woods, shepherds, and flocks, represented as a man with a goat’s legs, horns, and ears”. He is strongly associated with nature, the season of spring, and fertility. His goat-like stature, however, also associates him with Satan, and he is often depicted with a phallus, due to his sexual and seductive nature.
A faun, faunus or phaunos, is a “rustic god of the forests” who is often identified with Pan. He, too, is half-human half-goat and a representation of nature and animals. Representing nature, the faun is neither good nor bad, but he is seen as a companion of travellers who guides their journey. Moreover, the faun is categorised as a legendary creature, which often appears in fables as a nature spirit (“FAUNUS”).
The faun introduces himself to Ofelia.
The faun in Pan’s Labyrinth is a faun as a creature but with the main features of Pan, except his sexual and satanic side. When Ofelia meets him for the first time, he is old and rustic. His body looks like roots of trees, his legs are in the shape of those of a goat, his hair is long, his eyes cloudy, and he has goat horns. He looks frightening and moves in a mechanic way, but he shows respect towards Ofelia by addressing her with the formal pronoun “vos”, and tells her not to be afraid of him. When he introduces himself, he says, “I am the mountain, the forest and the earth. I am a faun”. There is no real sexual reference, but he is teasing her and stroking her face in arguably an erotic way. Other than Pan in mythology, the faun in the film does not seduce his encounter sexually, but he does seduce Ofelia
to believe in what he says and to obey him in the process of getting to her
kingdom. Even though Ofelia is sceptical towards him, she does not question him directly and allows him to lure her deeper into the quest. Upon the final task, however, Ofelia disobeys him and he reveals his true nature, which is that he does not have an agenda. He wishes to return to the kingdom, but he does not care about the sacrifices that have to be made in order to get there. This side of him challenges her to question the authority of others and encourages her to form judgements for herself, rather than merely carrying out orders.
Another ancient reference comes from the mandrake root, or Atropa mandragora, which has a shape resembling the body of a human with two legs, arms, or even an entire body. According to superstitious stories, it was dangerous and screamed horribly when it was pulled out of the ground. This scream could result in the death of the person who pulled it. But the juice of its fruit supposedly also had healing powers and was used for magical healing rituals for centuries in the Middle Ages (“Herball, Generall Historie”).
When the faun gives the mandrake root to Ofelia, he says, “This is a
mandrake. A plant that dreamt of being human”. He then commands her to put it under her mother’s bed in a bowl of fresh milk and to feed it with two drops of blood every morning. Ofelia does as instructed and her mother becomes better immediately. This magic works until Vidal and Carmen find and burn it.
The Pale Man is inspired by Cronus, which is indicated by the mural paintings in his cave. In Greek mythology, Cronus was the father of Hades, Poseidon, and several other children, who he swallowed right after they were born because a prophecy said he would be overthrown by his own child, which he later was by fulfilled by Zeus (“Cronus”). Therefore, he is referred to as a child-eating monster, just like the Pale Man. Cronus is also a reference to another film by del Toro,
Cronos (1993). Apart form that, the Pale Man is a double of Vidal, who will go on
killing a child, just like Cronus did (Nerdwriter1).
Furthermore, several fairytales or other children’s stories influenced the plot, such as Snow White –Ofelia’s appearance with dark hair, white skin and red lips;
Alice in Wonderland – when Alice falls into the hole she meets magical creatures,
just like when Ofelia walks down the hole in the labyrinth; The Chronicles of
Narnia – when Lucy first learns about the world of Narnia no one believes her,
just like no one believes Ofelia when she tells about her encounters with the fairies and the faun; The Raven – Ofelia eats from the Pale Man’s feast just like the man in the story eats from the old woman even though the enchanted
princess tells him explicitly not to; and The Wizard of Oz – Ofelia wears red shoes in the end just like Dorothy, and she also shares her desire to break out of her surroundings.
I could continue naming sources del Toro wraps into his story, but my point becomes clear with the already given examples. Del Toro does not only include numerous sources into his narrative, for which I stated the importance earlier, but he does so by taking them from all over the world, letting the film break out of national boundaries. This way it recalls the Spanish cultural
memory, but at the same time it is also accessible for people who are not familiar with this specific period of history.
Earlier, I disagreed with Sanchez because he does not regard Vidal as a representation of fascism. However, he makes a significant point about the conveyance of the national history of this period in Spain, which allows it to attract an audience outside of Spain. He says, “Pan’s Labyrinth re-articulates the national issue of the memory of the Spanish civil war in an emotional and
psychological dimension that actually disconnects the film from a memory anchored in a historically-determined political question: that is, the role of violence in the formation of the Spanish Fascist State and the destruction of the Spanish Republic” (Sanchez, 143). The film blurs the political connection because there is an absence of a national identity, which enables people from the outside to identify with it. It is therefore a cultural and not a territorial framework.
While the main purpose for cultural memory is to establish a group and with it a feeling of belonging together, del Toro takes this very distinct memory, which is part of a national Spanish identity, and makes this memory trans-cultural. Tsuei adds to this that del Toro constructed “a transcendent fascist-monster archetype which can exist outside of Spain. All capitalists are behind fascism” and continues that “fascism is entirely human, made by particular
human beings for specific political ends” (Tsuei, 231-232). There is, therefore, an absence of national identity.
Perhaps this approach comes from the fact that del Toro is not Spanish himself, which I, however, regard as an advantage rather than not, because it gives him the essential distance to thematise this dubious topic. Astrid Erll argues that the memory within the framework of the nation-state, a concept of the 19th and 20th century, is now outdated due to globalisation and that the nation “appears less and less as the key arbiter of cultural memory” (Erll, 8). Memories nowadays are rarely territorial, socially, or temporally restricted and trans-cultural memory studies should therefore challenge the notion of “single memory cultures” (Erll, 8). This approach reaches across and beyond cultures and challenges the first concept of social framed-ness of memory, established by Halbwachs. Erll proves this by explaining that transculturality is part of everyone’s individual every day experience (Erll, 10).
The problem is, however, how to transmit individual transculturality into cultural memory, which is collective. Erll answers this through Warburg’s
explanation on the travel of memory and sees transculturality, “as the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders” (Erll, 11). It is her understanding of the “travelling memory”, which comes from “travelling cultures” and means the influences of different cultures into another one.
Pan’s Labyrinth is an example of such travelling cultures. With the fairytale
elements, the story has influences from Germany, through the Brothers Grimm’s fairytales; England, through Alice in Wonderland; Hollywood, through Dorothy’s red shoes; ancient Greek and Roman mythology, through Cronus or the faun; and medieval medicine, through the mandrake root; just to name a few.
The film demonstrates that other culture’s sources are also part of the Spanish cultural memory, but it does not attempt to take it as theirs. Rather, the film found a way of wrapping many stories from other cultures into one piece, which has become part of the Spanish cultural memory but is not restricted to it.
Chapter 2: History and Fantasy
2.1 Fact versus Fiction
Another key feature of the film is the correlation between fantasy and history; fact and fiction. To attain an understanding of how both concepts operate side by side to contribute to cultural memory, I will firstly refer to what Ann Rigney has described as the ‘original plenitude and subsequent loss model’ (Rigney,
“Plenitude” 12). This model expounds that when an experience occurs, a complete memory of it, in all its plenitude, is formed, incorporating everything exactly as it happened. The intention is to keep the memory alive and the model works best when most details of the experience are preserved for as long as possible. Practically, however, some parts of memories constantly get lost when they are transmitted from people to people, hence the name original plenitude and subsequent loss model. Rigney explains that, “Memory is conceptualized on the one hand in terms of an original ‘storehouse’ and, on the other hand, as
something that is always imperfect and diminishing, a matter of chronic
frustration because always falling short of total recall” (Rigney, “Plenitude” 12). The model is based on Foucault’s scarcity principle, which suggests that in the process of producing meaning through culture, not everything that might be expressed, can be expressed. There needs to be a selection, representation, and interpretation. Furthermore, this implicates that what gets actually expressed does not have absolute value; rather it obtains value relative to its usefulness in the present (Rigney, “Plenitude” 16). For this reason, there is a constant selection of what parts to remember about things from the past, in order to make the memory meaningful in the present.
A connection to A. Assmann’s terms becomes visible: there is a constant selection within the archive of what is transferred into the canon, which then becomes the collective, cultural memory. Cultural memory needs to be
conceptualised as an agenda or project, rather than something that is always fully achieved in practice; it is the result of an ongoing cultural process (Rigney,
“Plenitude” 25). Rigney concludes that, “Once cultural memory is seen as
something dynamic, as a result of recursive acts of remembrance, rather than as something like an unchanging and pre-given inheritance, then the way is open to thinking about what could be called ‘memory transfer’” (Rigney, “Plenitude” 25).
Keeping this notion in mind, it becomes clear that not only the formation of cultural memory is important, but also the way it is transferred. Cultural memory is always vicarious, an external experience by a collective group, hence the challenge is to attain a way to mediate the memory to new generations; to make them care about something they did not experience themselves but nevertheless convince them to include these memories to their identity. A wide range of memories of an experience can provide a possible solution to this
challenge. This range does not only include what is referred to as “history proper” – documented works by professional historians – but it also includes other
representations of memory, located in the category of imagination rather than history, which need to be accepted into the canon (Rigney, “Portable Monuments” 364). That is because a society’s dealing with the past can no longer be
definitively divided into one or the other. As Rigney affirms, “fictionality and poeticity are an integral and not merely ‘inauthentic’ feature of cultural memory” (Rigney, “Portable Monuments” 361). If a comprehensive relationship between fiction and history can be established, a more diverse and relatable memory can be created. In order to do so, the limits of both categories need to be reconsidered.
Pan’s Labyrinth arguably stimulates this reconsideration. It does not attempt to
present historical facts about fascist Spain or stories of characters who evidently lived. However, it is set in a solidly documented time and place, and by
incorporating a fairytale into these circumstances, the boundaries between the real and the imagined are challenged. By conveying emotional values and morals, a facet of history that is often disregarded, rather than facts, it conjures up the horrors of fascism through fantasy.
Moreover, the representation and mediation of fictitious elements are just as important as the transmission of pure facts, if it is the aim of cultural memory to be meaningful in the present and future. After all, “it is important to recognize
that certain things are remembered not because they are actually true of the past (which may or may not be the case), but because they are somehow meaningful in the present” (Rigney, “Portable Monuments” 381). By placing fantastical
fairytales next to fact-based history and interweaving both narratives, the transmission possibly becomes smoother for next generations because a familiar emotional dimension is added to the distance of sober historical facts.
Only if a transmission succeeds, cultural memory can be meaningful. As J. Assmann explains, cultural memory is based on fixed points in the past, but the past is not preserved as such (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 113).
Rather it is recorded in symbols and it constantly illuminates a changing present. He elucidates that the distinction between what is real and what might not be, vanishes because not the knowledge of the past is important to be preserved, but the memory; that is the past as it is remembered (J. Assmann, “Communicative Memory” 113).
In Pan’s Labyrinth, as it was established above, fantasy mostly works reflective to reality and can precede, mirror, or follow it. Smith criticises that there are holes in the plot because some things occur in Ofelia’s fantasy even though she does not experience them in reality, such as the mystery of how she draws doors with a piece of chalk (Smith, 8). Rather than regarding these aspects as gaping holes though, they can also be considered as being intentionally not explained. The film’s intention is to stimulate people to question definite and ultimate perceptions of one world or the other; not because sometimes, magical things happen in reality, but rather because sometimes, reality is too restricted for people to understand it and connect the dots.
Only once in the film do the real and the fantastical meet in front of another person than Ofelia. Towards the end, when Ofelia runs into the labyrinth and refuses to hand over her brother to the faun, Vidal follows her and observes her speaking to no one. This is a crucial scene because for many people in the
audience it is the proof that Ofelia was only imagining the faun. However, the film complicates this explanation: Right before Vidal runs after Ofelia, she drugged him with heavy sleeping medication. While taking too much of the
serum typically evokes hallucination, this position is reversed which renders Vidal to see nothing, even though the faun might be there. This idea allows the viewer to choose whether to believe Ofelia or Vidal, and even though the viewer is clearly encouraged to identify with Ofelia and perceive Vidal as the evil
character, many people might still choose his perspective of rationality to reason that the fairytale only happens in Ofelia’s head. Through this, the film breaks the viewer’s identification with Ofelia and creates one with Vidal; a character not encouraged to identify with throughout the rest of the film.
What becomes clear in this scene is the switching of the characters’ focalisation. To replace the limiting concept of traditional perspective, the term and idea of focalisation was coined by Gérard Genette. It “may be defined as a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld” (Niederhoff). This means that when an event is focalised through a specific character, only what the character experiences becomes visible. To branch his further, Mieke Bal elaborated by explaining that focalisation “is the relation between the subject and object of perception” (Bal, 49). In the case of
Pan’s Labyrinth, whenever Ofelia experiences something magical, the experience
is focalised through her. The audience only perceives what she does, which makes her the subject and the faun, the toad, or the Pale Man the object of perception. In the mentioned scene, however, her focalisation switches to Vidal’s. Suddenly, the scene is focalised through him and Ofelia becomes the object of perception. For the first time, the viewer’s identification with Ofelia is broken because the things she does not perceive herself become visible to the audience. Switching between these two viewpoints allows the viewer to establish a notion of a relative objectivity within a subjectified focalisation.
This aspect of the film links expressively to the cultural memory it attempts to convey. In this scene, Pan’s Labyrinth visualises two individual perceptions and portrays them next to each other to demonstrate that cultural memory is not an individual’s experience of an event but the product of a collective and more objectified perception.
