Fairy Tales: Unmissable films in December

Production still from La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (detail) 1946 / 35mm, black and white, mono, 96 minutes, France, French (English subtitles) / Director/script: Jean Cocteau, France 1889–1963; Cinematographer: Henri Alekan; Editor: Claude Iberia / Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day / Image courtesy: Société nouvelle de distribution (SND), Paris / © Société nouvelle de distribution (SND) / 1996–98 AccuSoft Inc. All Rights Reserved

Production still from La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (detail) 1946 / 35mm, black and white, mono, 96 minutes, France, French (English subtitles) / Director/script: Jean Cocteau, France 1889–1963; Cinematographer: Henri Alekan; Editor: Claude Iberia / Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day / Image courtesy: Société nouvelle de distribution (SND), Paris / © Société nouvelle de distribution (SND) / 1996–98 AccuSoft Inc. All Rights Reserved / View full image

Fairy tales have always been a means of speaking truth to power; challenging injustice and providing hope. The ‘Fairy Tales Cinema: Truth, Power and Enchantment’ free film program presents beloved classics alongside contemporary retellings and highlights how filmmakers have innovated on older stories to resonate in different times and contexts.

Screening this week and upcoming

‘Fairy Tales Cinema’ is presented in conjunction with Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) blockbuster summer exhibition ‘Fairy Tales’. Curator Sophie Hopmeier picks five of her unmissable films each month during the program.

RELATED: Journey through the ‘Fairy Tales’ exhibition with our weekly series

#1
The Night of the Hunter (1955) M

A crazed and deadly preacher (Robert Mitchum) chases two children across a Gothic southern landscape in a story saturated in fairy-tale themes of lost children and a shimmering, poetic atmosphere. Lillian Gish stands as the children’s protector, fighting off one kind of old-time religion with another. A box office failure on its release, Laughton’s film is now widely considered his masterwork.

1.00pm, Saturday 9 December 2023
The Night of the Hunter will screen from a rare, imported 35mm print

Production still from The Night of the Hunter 1955 / Director: Charles Laughton / Image courtesy: Park Circus

Production still from The Night of the Hunter 1955 / Director: Charles Laughton / Image courtesy: Park Circus / View full image

#2
Kummatty (1979) All Ages

This poetic, ethereal film by Govindan Aravindan is steeped in the folklore and landscape of Kerala, India. Pied Piper-like trickster Kummatty (played by famed musician and dancer Rammuni) visits a village every year, where he entertains children with music and magic tricks, before transforming them into animals. One boy misses the breaking of the magic spell and must live in the form of a dog, awaiting Kummatty’s return.

6.00pm, Wednesday 6 December 2023
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project The Film Heritage Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, in association with General Pictures and the family of Govindan Aravindan. Funding provided by the Material World Foundation.

Production still from Kummatty 1979 / Director: Govindan Aravindan / Image courtesy: Cineteca di Bologna

Production still from Kummatty 1979 / Director: Govindan Aravindan / Image courtesy: Cineteca di Bologna / View full image

#3
Blancanieves (2012) M

This exquisite silent Spanish film transposes the Brothers Grimm’s story of Snow White to 1920s Andalucia. Carmen (Macarena García) lives an unhappy life with her invalid father and abusive stepmother (Maribel Verdú). Suffering from amnesia, she joins a travelling band of six bullfighters with dwarfism and discovers her innate talent as a matador. Pablo Berger’s adaption of this classic fairy tale is at once romantic and melancholy.

1.00pm, Saturday 2 December 2023

Production still from Blancanieves 2012 / Director: Pablo Berger / Image courtesy: Rialto Distribution

Production still from Blancanieves 2012 / Director: Pablo Berger / Image courtesy: Rialto Distribution / View full image

#4
La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1946) PG

Drawing on both the nineteenth-century picture book illustrations of Gustave Doré, and Surrealist cinema, Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête has defined the public imagination of the 1757 story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont for generations. When Belle (Josette Day) protects her father by agreeing to live with the monstrous Beast (Jean Marais), she gradually develops feelings for him. The extraordinary cinematography and effects of this sumptuous film heighten the striking subtext – that one can love an other not in spite of, but because of their difference.

3.00pm, Sunday 17 December 2023

Production still from La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) 1946 / 35mm, black and white, mono, 96 minutes, France, French (English subtitles) / Director/script: Jean Cocteau, France 1889–1963; Cinematographer: Henri Alekan; Editor: Claude Iberia / Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day / Image courtesy: Société nouvelle de distribution (SND), Paris / © Société nouvelle de distribution (SND) / 1996–98 AccuSoft Inc. All Rights Reserved

Production still from La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) 1946 / 35mm, black and white, mono, 96 minutes, France, French (English subtitles) / Director/script: Jean Cocteau, France 1889–1963; Cinematographer: Henri Alekan; Editor: Claude Iberia / Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day / Image courtesy: Société nouvelle de distribution (SND), Paris / © Société nouvelle de distribution (SND) / 1996–98 AccuSoft Inc. All Rights Reserved / View full image

#5
Labyrinth (1986) PG

The evolution of fairy tales on screen from the 1970s onwards was influenced by master craftsman, puppeteer and filmmaker Jim Henson. Labyrinth is a fairy tale from the viewpoint of Sarah, a sulky teenager who envisions herself as a put-upon princess while babysitting her infant stepbrother. Sarah (Jennifer Connolly) wishes to be free of the crying child, and the wretched obligation to her (not so wicked) stepmother. Her wish is granted by the Goblin King (David Bowie), who takes the baby, thrusting Sarah into an adventure in a parallel world – filled with an ever-changing labyrinth, talking creatures, a peach of forgetting, and an otherworldly ballroom sequence – to retrieve him. The dreamlike logic of the film shifts between states of childhood and adulthood as Sarah realises she is not as ready as she thought to be grown up.

3.00pm, Sunday 3 December 2023

Production still from Labyrinth 1986 / Director: Jim Henson / Image courtesy: Park Circus

Production still from Labyrinth 1986 / Director: Jim Henson / Image courtesy: Park Circus / View full image

#6 (Our wild card)
Live Music & Film | Ticketed
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

Join us for an enchanted journey through the tales of the Arabian nights in The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926. Painstakingly made over three years, Lotte Reiniger’s intricately hand-cut silhouette animation is the earliest surviving animated feature film and remains one of the most magical fairy-tale films of all time.

Dva (Linsey Pollak and Tunji Beier) will perform a newly composed live accompaniment on experimental wind instruments and percussion. Sophie Hopmeier spoke with percussionist Tunji Beier about the Live Music & Film event for The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

Get tickets Live Music & Film
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA
11.00am, Sunday 3 December 2023
Production still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926 / Director: Lotte Reiniger / Image courtesy: British Film Institute, London

Production still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926 / Director: Lotte Reiniger / Image courtesy: British Film Institute, London / View full image

View the full program (2 Dec 2023 – 28 Apr 2024)

Alice 1988
Alice in Wonderland 2010
Barbe bleue 2009
Beauty and the Beast 2017
Blancanieves 2012
Blaze 2022
Border 2018
Careful 1992
Cinderella 2015
Cinderella Moon 2010
Claire 2001 Live Music & Film / 11.00am, Sunday 3 March 2024 | Tickets on sale now
Crumbs 2015
Donkey Skin 1970
Dreams 1990
Häxan 1922 Live Music & Film / 6.30pm, Friday 5 April 2024 | Tickets on sale now
Kummatty 1979
La Belle et la Bête 1946
Labyrinth 1986
Mirror Mirror 2012
Night of the Kings 2020
Pan’s Labyrinth 2006
Petite Maman 2021
Picnic at Hanging Rock 1975
The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha 1969
The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926 Live Music & Film / 11.00am, Sunday 3 December 2023
The Company of Wolves 1984
The Fall 2006
The Juniper Tree 1990
The Lure 2015
The Match Factory Girl 1990
The Night of the Hunter 1955
The Princess Bride 1987
The Tale of Princess Kaguya 2013
The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga 2014
The White Reindeer 1952
The Wizard of Oz 1939
Three Thousand Years of Longing 2022
Thrilling Bloody Sword 1981
Walkabout 1971
Wanderers of the Desert 1984
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? 2021
Where the Wild Things Are 2009
Wild at Heart 1990

The ‘Fairy Tales’ exhibition is at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Australia from 2 December 2023 until 28 April 2024.

‘Fairy Tales Cinema: Truth, Power and Enchantment‘ presented in conjunction with GOMA’s blockbuster summer exhibition screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA from 2 December 2023 until 28 April 2024.

The major publication ‘Fairy Tales in Art and Film’ available at the QAGOMA Store and online explores how fairy tales have held our fascination for centuries through art and culture.

‘Fairy Tales’ merchandise available at the GOMA exhibition shop or online.

‘Fairy Tales’ merchandise available at the GOMA exhibition shop or online. / View full image

The Australian Cinémathèque
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) is the only Australian art gallery with purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. The Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA provides an ongoing program of film and video that you’re unlikely to see elsewhere, offering a rich and diverse experience of the moving image, showcasing the work of influential filmmakers and international cinema, rare 35mm prints, recent restorations and silent films with live musical accompaniment by local musicians or on the Gallery’s Wurlitzer organ originally installed in Brisbane’s Regent Theatre in November 1929.

Dr Sophie Hopmeier is ‘Fairy Tales’ Assistant Curator and Assistant Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA

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    Fairy Tales: Unmissable films & live music in March

    In March we venture into the surreal outer reaches of fairy tale cinema. The enchantment of fairy tales lies in their fantastical elements, which conjure uncanny images like pumpkin carriages, magic carpets, or houses made of gingerbread. Fairy tales significantly influenced the development of Surrealism, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) acknowledged as a forerunner to the twentieth century art movement. Cinema presents rich ground for the weird and wonderful forms of fairy tales to take shape in all their glory, presenting visions which are beyond reality, and drawing together the familiar and the strange in compelling ways. Jean Cocteau ‘La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)’ 1946 ‘Adélaïde’ costume | ‘La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)’ 1946 While films like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête 1946 (illustrated) is a paragon of surrealist fairy tale cinema, the strange and magical reimagination of older stories has continued and flourished, with fairy tale forms appearing in a vast array of filmmaking traditions. Screening this week & upcoming ‘Fairy Tales Cinema: Truth, Power and Enchantment’ is presented in conjunction with Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) blockbuster summer exhibition ‘Fairy Tales’. ‘Fairy Tales’ unfolds across three themed chapters. ‘Into the Woods’ which explores the conventions and characters of traditional fairy tales alongside their contemporary retellings. ‘Through the Looking Glass’ presents newer tales of parallel worlds that are filled with unexpected ideas and paths. ‘Ever After’ brings together classic and current tales to celebrate aspirations, challenge convention and forge new directions. Travel with us in our weekly series through each room and theme of the ‘Fairy Tales’ exhibition as we introduce you to some of the works while curator Sophie Hopmeier picks her unmissable films each month during the program. #1 The Lure (2015) Ages 18+ This visceral and glittering interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ transposes the beloved tale to gritty 1980s Poland. When two carnivorous mermaid sisters come ashore, their tantalising siren songs and otherworldly aura make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers. A savage coming-of-age fairy tale with a catchy new-wave soundtrack, lavishly grimy sets, and outrageous musical numbers, The Lure explores its themes of sexuality, exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with energy and originality. 6.00pm, Friday 1 March 2024 #2 Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981) Ages 18+ A Taiwanese fantasy action remake of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, Thrilling Bloody Sword is a mind-boggling adventure. Set in a strange land, the daughter born of a queen and a comet is abandoned and taken in by a kindly group of outcasts. When she falls in love with a prince, their happily ever after is thwarted by a pair of wizards who control a bevy of bizarre creatures including an enormous set of teeth. This imaginative and unforgettable fairy tale reinterpretation is a delightful psychotronic romp. 6.00pm, Friday 8 March 2024 & 8.30pm, Friday 12 April 2024 #3 Crumbs (2015) Ages 15+ In post-apocalyptic Ethiopia, where the vestiges of twentieth-century pop culture — from Michael Jordan to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — are worshipped as holy relics, a dormant UFO mothership hovering in the sky reawakens. Candy (Daniel Tadesse), a scavenger, embarks on a journey in search of Santa Claus through a surreal wonderland of characters including witches and Nazi knights. In this dream-like film, Candy’s and our own ideas about what constitutes a happy ending are called into question. 8.00pm, Friday 8 March 2024 & 3.00pm, Sunday 21 April 2024 #4 Dreams (1990) PG Dreams is a series of eight, loosely related magical stories, based on Akira Kurasawa’s own dreams. In each vignette a Kurosawa surrogate played by various actors passively engages with surreal and archetypal situations including a fox’s wedding, an enchanted peach tree orchard, a weeping demon and a village forgotten by time. Shot with Kurosawa’s signature dynamic composition, this trancelike film highlights the close relationship between Japanese folklore, fairy tales and our unconscious fears and desires. 12.45pm, Sunday 17 March 2024 This screening will be introduced by Dr Lucy Fraser, University of Queensland #5 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) PG On Valentine’s Day in 1900, a party of schoolgirls go on a picnic at the base of Hanging Rock in Victoria’s rugged Mount Macedon area. During the course of the afternoon three girls and their headmistress mysteriously go missing while exploring the rock. Seduced by the mysteries of the landscape, the ethereal young women vanish without a trace. Drawing on the fairy tale theme of lost children, Picnic and Hanging Rock’s uncanny reading of the Australian landscape has left an indelible mark on the national psyche. 3.15pm, Sunday 17 March 2024 Our wild cards Live Music & Film | Ticketed Claire (2001) Ages 15+ Loosely based on a 10th century Japanese story, Claire follows an elderly male couple on a farm in the 1920s American South who find a little girl from the moon inside an ear of corn and raise her as their own. This dreamlike black and white silent film was shot on an antique hand-crank 35mm (Mitchell Standard) camera. Organist David Bailey will provide newly composed live accompaniment to the film on the Gallery’s 1929 Wurlitzer organ. 11.00am, Sunday 3 March 2024 Buy Tickets Claire will screen from an imported 35mm print. Upcoming in April Live Music & Film | Ticketed Häxan (1922) Ages 15+ Benjamin Christensen’s wickedly humorous 1922 docufiction tracing the history of witches from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century is a tour de force of the weird, chilling, and supernatural. Blending an episodic account of the occult with lurid hallucinatory horror, Häxan holds a well-deserved place as one of the preeminent works of silent cinema. Post classical composer Madeleine Cocolas will provide newly composed live accompaniment to the film. 6.30pm, Friday 5 April 2024 Buy Tickets ...
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    Fairy Tales: Cinematic enchantments

    The free film program — ‘Fairy Tales Cinema: Truth, Power and Enchantment’ — accompanying the ticketed ‘Fairy Tales‘ exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 28 April 2024 examines how cinema shapes our understanding of fairy tales, and how their structure in turn changes how cinema tells stories. Curator Sophie Hopmeier picks five unmissable films each month during the program. The program examines five thematic strands: how fairy tales are used to interrogate societal expectations about age and gender, in which women progress through the stages of ‘maiden’, ‘mother’ and ‘crone’; what makes a ‘happy ending’, and how our desires are shaped by societal and economic circumstances; how landscapes have been framed, constructed and edited to express the porous line between being lost and finding oneself; how archetypal tropes of transformation in fairy tales are used by filmmakers to connect with questions of identity; and how film, as a relatively new narrative medium, has engaged with older oral and literary forms of storytelling, making the wondrous and impossible visible. RELATED: Journey through the Fairy Tales exhibition with our weekly series ‘The Wizard of Oz‘ screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA In the 1890s, when German producer and director Oskar Messter first used the nascent technology of the cinematograph to record performances of ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and George Méliès’s experimentation with film brought enchantment to life on screen, the fairy tale found a new mass medium through which to proliferate.Today, a century and a quarter later, The International Fairy-Tale Filmography lists almost 5000 titles.Some films, such as Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)1946 or Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz1939, have become touchstones for the global imagination of older stories and literary texts. Many others, including those presented in QAGOMA’s Australian Cinémathèque for ‘Fairy Tales’, extend beyond the familiar literary canon to explore how fairy tales help make sense of the world in different sociopolitical contexts. There is a tension between the schematic quality of fairy tales, which are constantly being retold in new ways, and the unchangeable concrete detail of filmic images, which threatens to fix how we imagine stories in perpetuity.However, it is in the expanded field of fairy tale films, and how cinema fractures, recontextualises or blends these stories with other traditions, that the power and mutability of fairy tale images, and the possibilities they offer cinema to challenge social norms, becomes clear. ‘Mirror Mirror‘ 2012 screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA ‘Rabbit suit’ costume from ‘Mirror Mirror’ 2012 on display at GOMA The continuation and reinvention of fairy tales as a living form relies on the imagination of both the teller and the receiver. The ‘folk’ tradition of oral storytelling is ‘of the people’, dependent on the individuals who repeat stories over time and across space. Unlike more elaborate, rigid and detailed forms of storytelling, such as legend or religious lore, the fairy tale form is sparse and fluid. Characters are defined simply, in terms of their social roles (woodcutter or stepmother) or appearance (giant, crone, or Little Red Riding Hood). These elemental tropes leave room for the audience to project their own reality or fantasy into the story. Every telling or hearing relies on us to extrapolate outwards, building complete and unique worlds from the breadcrumbs provided by the fairy tale. As such, every iteration of the story will be different. ‘Alice‘ screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA Whereas oral traditions persist through varied repetition, cinema replicates the stories it tells the same way, wherever it is viewed. Like print before it, cinema’s power as an egalitarian mass media lies in its mechanical, and now digital, reproducibility.People around the world, and from different socioeconomic backgrounds, can share an identical experience of an image reproduced in a book or film, which is neither singular nor ‘unique’, but which connects individuals to communal narratives. Unlike oral and even literary fairy tales, stories told on screen render every image in dizzying detail.This, too, presents a shift in the way we engage with stories. We are provided with a full banquet of descriptive information, rather than only a breadcrumb, becoming consumers of an existing mise‑en-scène, instead of active creators. The dominance of the Euro-American film industry and its global distribution systems simultaneously creates identification with a community of other viewers (present or imagined), while ensuring that most of the fairy tales told on screen are drawn from a hegemonic set of popular Western stories.For the fairy tale film, this is not only a challenge, but also a source of power. ‘Pans Labyrinth‘ screens at the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA While cinematic reproduction and distribution threatens to stifle something of the living nature of the fairy tale, it also galvanises an increasingly shared set of fairy tale references and images, which filmmakers can mobilise to subvert the status quo. The iconic quality of fairy tales, coupled with our hardwired pleasure in making connections between crisp but shallow tropes, mean that filmmakers only need to provide us with the most cursory of fragments — woods, mirrors, apples, a rise from rags to riches, jealous stepmothers — to evoke an expectation of well-trodden narratives. Many films in the exhibition’s screening program do not simply enact older tales, but rather harness our associations with them, and capacity to extrapolate the whole from the part, in order to challenge our expectations, speak truth to power or point towards possible futures. Dr Sophie Hopmeier is ‘Fairy Tales’ Assistant Curator and Assistant Curator, Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA This edited extract from ‘Fairy-Tale Films: From Breadcrumb to Banquet, and Back Again’ was originally published in Fairy Tales in Art and Film, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2023 Fairy Tales: The exhibition The ‘Fairy Tales’ exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 28 April 2024 explores our fascination with this much-loved genre through a multifaceted telling of these tales in...