Fantasy Film Berg Film Genres Series
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Fantasy Film Berg Film Genres series Edited by Mark Jancovich and Charles Acland ISSN: 1757-6431 The Film Genres series presents accessible books on popular genres for students, scholars and fans alike. Each volume addresses key films, movements and periods by synthesizing existing literature and proposing new assessments. Forthcoming: Teen Film: A Critical Introduction Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction Historical Film: A Critical Introduction Anime: A Critical Introduction Documentary Film: A Critical Introduction Fantasy Film A Critical Introduction James Walters Oxford • New York For my parents. English edition First published in 2011 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © James Walters 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walters, James (James R.). Fantasy film : a critical introduction / JamesWalters. — English ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84788-308-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-84788-309-4 (cloth) 1. Fantasy films—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.F36W35 2011 791.43'615—dc22 2011003156 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84788 309 4 (Cloth) 978 1 84788 308 7 (Paper) e-ISBN 978 1 84788 843 3 (Institutional) 978 1 84788 842 6 (Individual) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan. Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group www.bergpublishers.com Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Approaching Fantasy Film 9 2 Fantasy, History and Cinema 31 3 Fantasy, Authorship and Genre 47 4 Fantasy, Childhood and Entertainment 73 5 Fantasy, Imagination and Interiority 95 6 Fantasy, Style and Coherence 113 Conclusion 131 Annotated Guide to Further Reading 133 Notes 137 Bibliography 147 Index 151 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my series editors, Charles Acland and Mark Jancovich, for their dedication in seeing this book through to completion. I am especially grateful to Mark, whose generosity, support and enthusiasm continues to be a revelation to me; I hope I have repaid at least some of his faith. Tristan Palmer at Berg has handled the publication process with care and commitment, and I thank him sincerely for his efforts. At an early stage, the University of Birmingham granted me a period of leave to work on the book, for which I am very grateful. More than that, however, Birmingham provides a rich culture of research and critical inquiry that has spurred me on to develop the ideas contained within these pages. My colleagues have supported the direction of this research in a variety of ways, and I am particularly thankful to Dick Ellis and Helen Laville. I have also benefited profoundly from discussions held with students in my film classes at Birmingham. The range of ideas and critical opinions offered in seminars and tutorials has inspired me in ways I cannot begin to articulate. I am very lucky to spend my time with such a high calibre of student, willing to learn and willing to teach me. I watched any number of fantasy films with my brother, Jonathan, during our childhood and his keen knowledge of cinema continues to be an inspiration to me. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Amy, and our sons, Isaac, Ruben and Fergus for being such wonderful distractions during the writing of this book. I hope I kept my absences from their lives to a minimum. James Walters vi Introduction What is fantasy film? The search for any kind of definitive answer can often seem only to present more questions. Indeed, the very term ‘fantasy’ can become troublesome in discussions of cinema – something that Deborah Thomas usefully addresses when laying out the parameters for her study of the romantic, melodramatic and comedic in American film. Thomas explains that: I have argued against using fantasy as part of an alternative schema, both because, in my opinion, the term can be applied to all mainstream American films, and because, in other people’s use of it to designate films about the supernatural, it seems to me to be narrowly generic, rather than an example of the broad – but not all-inclusive – sort of category across genres which I’m after.1 Leaving aside the particular concerns that Thomas’ book will go on to raise and explore, it is clear in her account that definitions of fantasy face a dual dilemma of, on the one hand, being so broad as to include any fiction film that we can conceive of and, on the other, of becoming so narrow that they exclude a host of works that might legitimately belong to such a category. Avoiding fantasy as a definitive term is one strategy for coping with this problem but another approach might be to address directly fantasy’s intrinsic tendency to avoid absolute classification – its propensity for crossing the boundaries of genre to surface in works of horror, science fiction, comedy, melodrama, animation and so on. Fantasy is a fragile, ephemeral and volatile element in cinema, prone to emerge in unexpected places as well as shaping itself into the dominant facet of certain fictional worlds. We are left with the choice of whether to suspend such issues by doing away with the term ‘fantasy’ entirely, or embrace these characteristics in our critical accounts. Although we might justifiably be tempted to say that any fictional film can be read as fantasy, it also seems to be the case that we intrinsically recognize certain works, or even certain moments, as fantasy. More specifically, we recognize that a conscious effort is being made to depart from the confines of ordinary, everyday existence: from the natural to the supernatural, as it were. We feel we are experiencing fantasy as it unfolds. As I watch fiction films, I am aware of being presented with a set of circumstances that could occur within my reality but am equally assured that characters and locations existing in the film could never be found there. When faced with fantasy in films, however, I am conscious of being shown a series of events that, according to the rules of reasonable logic, could never occur within my 1 2 • Fantasy Film reality. Fiction and fantasy are thus made distinct. The potential risk involved in making these kinds of distinctions is that we might then use such criteria to suggest that fantasy applies to a particular type of film, so narrowing our understanding of fantasy and casting aside its essential breadth and diversity. Contrary to this position, my contention in the following pages is that fantasy is just as likely to emerge in a crime thriller about an escaped convict as it is in a story about a mythical kingdom in which the destinies of all creatures are decided by the fate of a magical ring. Discussion of fantasy in terms of genre is made difficult precisely because, despite our recognition of fantasy at work in certain films, it has the innate capacity to seep into different styles, tones and even genres of film making. But that difficulty is perhaps only made acute when we insist on the absolute rigidity of generic classification. That strategy might involve drawing up a set of rules that determine whether a film can be called ‘fantasy’ or not, and each potential case could be measured against this set of disciplinary guidelines. Under that system, works falling outside of such criteria could also be discounted with relative ease. Perhaps that kind of concrete discrimination is what the study of fantasy requires, but we could equally maintain that one of the key excitements of fantasy is precisely its ability to emerge in strange and unexpected places, at times making the familiar unfamiliar, enticing through that strangeness. Furthermore, we may resist the straightforward suggestion that placing a film in one genre necessarily excludes it from any other genre of cinema. (This is a thought that we will return to in later chapters.) Historically, definitions of genre frequently shift and realign across periods, a fact emphasized by Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich in an edited collection centred upon that very theme.2 They explain that: Generic terms are often imposed retrospectively onto books, films and other cultural forms that predate the invention of these terms. At one level, this might seem a fairly innocent activity, but it can do violence to our sense of history. It can, for example, abstract texts from the contexts within which they were originally understood and impose alternative understandings upon them, or it can simply emphasize some details and ignore others.3 If we are to conduct any historical analysis of genres, therefore, we must remain acutely aware of the fact that such borders and boundaries are not fixed and that terminology can retrospectively be placed upon certain works of art in order to group them. Across a range of approaches, however, the issues that Geraghty and Jancovich raise should alert us to the mutability and instability of generic terms, at least making us wary of defining genres in ways that are rigid, discrete or absolute. Following their reasoning, such an enterprise could only leave arguments open to contradiction and legitimate challenge. An uncompromising approach is therefore made precarious. On this theme of genre distinction, Brian Attebery in fact finds the notion of ‘fuzzy sets’ useful in Introduction • 3 considering the shifting definitions of fantasy. Taking his lead from the work of Lakoff and Johnson on metonymy and metaphor,4 he explains that: Genres may be approached as ‘fuzzy sets,’ meaning that they are defined not by boundaries but by a center.