Content area
Full Text
Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix. Foreword by Jack Zipes. Logan; Utah State University Press, 2010. xiii + 263 pp.
Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix's Fairy Tale Films - praised by Jack Zipes in his foreword to the collection as being "path breaking" and as filling "a gap in both film studies and folklore" scholarship (ix) - presents a set of ten original essays that individually and collectively expand our understanding of the experiments in genre and intertextuality that have shaped fairy-tale films during the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. As Greenhill and Matrix explain, these films range "from fairy tale films proper - those that employ the structure of a recognized fairy tale - to cinematic folklore more generally - which draws upon folkloric motifs commonly found in traditional culture" (8). Stating, further, that "filmed fairy tales are as much the genuine article as their telling in a bed-time story or an anthology," the editors situate their and their contributors1 approach to fairytale film "not as a break with tradition but as a continuation of it" (3). Thus the central question posed by this collection of essays "is not how successfully a film translates the tale [or a traditional motif] into a new medium but, instead, what new and old meanings and uses the filmed version brings to audiences and sociocultural contexts" (3).
The first essay of the collection, Cristina Bacchilega and John Rieders "Mixing It Up: Generic Complexity and Gender Ideology in Early Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films," focuses on fairy-tale fragmentation, generic hybridity and gender ideology. Defining generic hybridity as the "incorporation and integration of fairy tale...