Pan's Labyrinth

BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance and, in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.palgrave.com/bfi.

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Editorial Advisory Board

Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, Edward Buscombe University of London William Germano, Cooper Union for Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick the Advancement of Science and Art Dana Polan, New York University Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Austin Santa Cruz Lee Grieveson, University College London Amy Villarejo, Cornell University Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned.1 (Arthur Machen)

Pan’s Labyrinth

Mar Diestro-Dópido

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the

BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

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Front cover design: Santiago Caruso Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), © Estudios Picasso/Tequila Gang/Esperanto Filmoj; The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973), Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas; Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1992), © Iguana Producciones; The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001), El Deseo/Tequila Gang/Sogepaq/Canal+ España; Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992), © Sogetel; ‘Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo’/‘The Shootings of May Third’ (Francisco Goya, 1808); La Caza (Carlos Saura, 1966), Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas; Ana y los lobos (Carlos Saura, 1972), Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas; Cría cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975), © Elías Querejeta; ‘Saturno devorando a un hijo’/‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ (Francisco Goya, 1819–23).

Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–1–84457–641–8

Contents

Acknowledgments 6

Introduction 7

1 The Horror(s) of War 25

2 Vidal and Amnesia 40

3 Ofelia and Memory 54

4 The End … 72

Coda: Phone Interview with Guillermo del Toro 79

Notes 87

Credits 92

Bibliography 101

6 B F I F I L M C L A S S I C S

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the following for all their invaluable help:

The BFI Publishing/Palgrave Macmillan team – the advisory panel and the readers, Rebecca Barden, Jenna Steventon and, in particular, Sophia Contento for her help with the images. Guillermo del Toro for making himself available, and for making a film that still moves me every single time I see it. My colleagues at Sight & Sound for their genuine engagement and support right from day one. A delayed gracias to LuisJa for all those shared teenage sessions listening to Radio 3’s horror classics. A huge thank you to Professor Maria Delgado, for her unremitting encouragement. And above all to Kieron Corless and the fluffy compañera, for always being there …

This book is dedicated to my parents and my sister Olga. My parents because they went through it all always looking forward; but also for turning a blind eye whenever my sister and I sneaked behind their armchairs to watch películas de miedo at night … And to the forthcoming Nerea, who was conceived at the book’s inception and who is due to make her appearance on its publication.

PA N ’ S L A B Y R I N T H 7

Introduction

The real and the imagined The opening sequence in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s universally acclaimed 2006 cult feature, El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth2 (henceforth referred to as GdT and Pan respectively), is a cunning foretaste of the commingling of real and fantasy worlds that will characterise the film. Accompanied by the tune of the lullaby that will haunt the film throughout, an intertitle tells us that the story is set in Spain in 1944, five years after the end of the Civil War, during the so-called Peace Years. A few Republican insurgents – known in Spain as the maquis – remain hidden in woods, still trying to fight back against the forcibly established fascist government. We see thirteen- year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) lying on the floor drawing her last breath, but both the sound and the blood streaming from her nose are going backwards, indicating that this tale will not follow the normal rules of time or reality. The camera then zooms into her eye, revealing what she will remember as her true identity and the world she truly belongs to; the Underworld Realm, a place, it transpires, she has constructed for herself. A male voiceover intones the fairytale staple ‘A long, long time ago’ and introduces Princess Moanna, who, lured by the upper world, escaped from the Underworld Realm and was blinded by the sunlight, causing her to forget who she really was. It is no coincidence that the fairytale is introduced verbally, whereas the actual historical setting is introduced via a text written on the screen. From the start, textual history is imprinted on the ancient oral tradition of folklore, myths and fairytales, presented in equal terms on the basis that, like two sides of the same coin, they constitute the two halves of one character’s psyche, in this case Ofelia’s. Yet oral tradition is superior to text in the permanence that it acquires through its flexibility and capacity to transform, a prerequisite for survival in Pan.

8 B F I F I L M C L A S S I C S

For this is as much Princess Moanna’s story as it is Ofelia’s. A pan of some ruins ensues, and we are told that, although the princess died in the upper world after suffering from ‘cold, sickness and pain’, her spirit lived on; for that reason, her father, the king (Federico Luppi), opened portals around the world to enable her to find her way back and recover her immortality. It is at this point that the princess and Ofelia are fused visually; when the narrator tells us that the spirit of Princess Moanna lives on, the camera cuts to the inside of the car in which Ofelia is travelling with her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to the military outpost of Carmen’s new husband, the vicious Captain Vidal (Sergi López), a mill from where he and his men are hunting the remaining maquis. At the end of the film, the fairytale triumphs, as ultimately Princess Moanna prevails in both worlds. Even though she recovers her memory and is able to get back to the Underworld Realm, her presence in the mortal world has left a series of signs, which are only visible ‘to those who know where to look’. For everything in Pan depends on the principle that seeing is believing – or, in GdT’s words, ‘the eyes are the beginning of it all’3 – his most recent production company, established in 2011, is called Mirada, which GdT translates on its website as ‘a point of view, a possibility to look into things differently’.4 It is this kind of mirada,

Carmen and Ofelia in the car

PA N ’ S L A B Y R I N T H 9

a kaleidoscopic way of looking at GdT’s Pan, that this book is also attempting. Just as there are two realities present in Pan, there are two sides to GdT’s film-making. On the one hand there is Hollywood studio fare such as Mimic (1997), a traumatic experience with Miramax; Blade II (2002), a Grand Guignol sequel which turned out to be more popular than the original; and Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II (2008), both heralded as arguably the best comic-book adaptations ever.5 These films alternate with what GdT refers to as his ‘personal’ projects: Cronos (1993), and the first two instalments of what should ultimately be a trilogy on the Civil War: El espinazo del diablo/ The Devil’s Backbone (2001), the film GdT considers his most autobiographical, and which established him as an international auteur; and Pan, which GdT describes as a sister film, a companion piece to Devil. The third instalment’s provisional title is 3993. In many ways Pan is a culmination, corralling all of GdT’s thematic preoccupations: family, children, horror, violence, the solitary hero/heroine and, above all, ‘the permeability of the membrane between reality and fantasy’.6 The latter trait, together with the melodrama and violence, GdT regards as the most Mexican element not only in Pan but also throughout his oeuvre. Written,

Car arriving at the mill

1 0 B F I F I L M C L A S S I C S

directed and produced by GdT, Pan’s inception came about in 2003 when the director annotated some ideas and drawings, in a by-now famous leatherbound notebook that he has been religiously carrying around since 1982. Yet the original synopsis for the film differed greatly from the version we now know. Set during the Spanish Civil War, initially the plot focused on the fascist captain and his pregnant wife, who, dissatisfied in her marriage, fell in love with the world opened up to her by a Faun she met at a nearby labyrinth. When she gave birth the Faun told her that, in order to enter his world, she had to kill the baby, which she duly did. But it transpires she was betrayed by both worlds and, instead of passing through to the Faun’s universe, she remained locked in the centre of the labyrinth.7 However, once GdT started writing the story, he soon realised it would be more interesting to see this world through the eyes of a pre-pubescent girl instead. He explains,

I always start with a long period of research – fiction, non-fiction, travelling, etc., so I started making notes on fairytales, and when I went back and read books on myth, fairytale lore and analysis, it seemed much more interesting to base the story on a girl who’s about to become a woman – a staple in fairytales. Everybody around her is telling her how she should behave. Her mother is saying, ‘You have to leave all that behind, the world is a horrible, disappointing place, you have to believe me and you have to obey your father.’ And I thought, this is the last moment when, as a kid, your spirit is still free, and if you give up that freedom then you become just another boring adult. And even more so when your father is a fascist. Because for a fascist, a central virtue is obedience, and I thought the young girl would be a more interesting figure of disobedience than the adult – she has even fewer social tools and so is able to resist from a genuine spiritual place.8

As such, Ofelia will confront her stepfather’s cruelty, and that of the times, through her imagination and the fairytales she loves – a world as real to her as the iron grip of Franco’s fascist Spain is to everyone