The Enchanted Screen by Zipes Jack;

Author:Zipes, Jack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

The initial and closing frames of the film are highly significant. At the beginning Jonas is pictured at the meager grave of his mother, alone and despondent. Right after this image, we see Katja and Margit walking through a stony field. They come across a stream in which they discover a dead young woman whose hands are tied behind her back. She, too, may have been declared a witch and murdered. Katja tells her younger sister that they can never return home and must seek a new home far away where nobody knows anything about their past. In the closing frame of the film, Margit is left alone, and in the distance Jonah disappears over a hill in pursuit of Katja.

The loneliness of Margit, who continually has visions of her lost mother throughout the film, is stark. In the course of the film she loses a half-brother, stepfather, and her sister. Keene questions whether we can ever find home and humane attachment. The communication between all the members of the patched-up family is sparse, and their beliefs are a mixture of Christian religion and pagan superstition. Their common goal or raison d’être appears to be survival. Yet, we are compelled to ask what the meaning of life is if its telos is basically survival. Keene’s adaptation of “The Juniper Tree” may leave us with a greater understanding of why women are driven to commit certain atrocities that involve infanticide, but it also leaves us without much hope.

Fortunately, not all the fairy-tale films that engage in a discourse about child abuse and abandonment are as pessimistic as Keene’s The Juniper Tree, but the better films do seek to touch a sensitive chord in audiences that raises questions about adult responsibility for creating unfavorable conditions for the development of children. The numerous filmic versions of “Hansel and Gretel,” “Tom Thumb,” “The Pied Piper,” and “Donkey-Skin” deal primarily with impoverished children or young persecuted women who are exploited and victimized. For the most part, they are films of hope projecting possibilities for alternative ways of living, but it is often a hope that serves to rationalize the incapacity of modern societies to cope with the inequalities that make life merely a matter of survival for the majority of people. Sometimes, films with no hope are more honest and hopeful than those with rosy endings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.