FANTASY

The most obvious vehicle for the creation of fantasy in movies is, of course, animation but it was not always thus. Georges Méliès filmed Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 using a series of optical tricks to create his illusions.

Since then, filmmakers like Walt Disney, Fritz Lang and Stephen Spielberg have used their own special methods to create fantasy in film.

Fantasy as a vehicle has been much maligned as self-indulgent and infantilising. But many fantasy vehicles carry potent ideas. Too often we confuse fantasising with pleasure. Fantasy can reawaken a sense of wonder in the most jaded and cynical of us.

According to writer Dean R Koontz fantasy introduces us to emotions that we would rarely or never experience as we go about our everyday lives. Recently we have been exposed to what is commonly called ‘reality’ TV. However, much of this so-called reality is smoke and mirrors, and this ‘window on the world’ is actually a mirror in which we observe parodies of ourselves experiencing ‘everyday’ emotions, as eagerly as a dog observing its own tricks. Self-referential? Self-reverential?

Fantasy also helps us to explore the darker side of life. In 1926, Fritz Lang made Metropolis, a movie about a mythical city where a downtrodden class of people labour day and night to maintain an elite. Sound like some place you know?

Couched in these terms, Metropolis may not seem too far from reality but the fantastical elements are there. Freder, the son of the leader of the ruling class, is bored with his life of idle decadence and decides to explore the lower part of the city. He is astonished by what he sees: columns of men working seemingly obediently at the most monotonous of tasks and a giant machine that seems to control them all. Most of all he remembers a lovely young woman teaching a group of children and telling them to be good and obedient.

Freder returns home but becomes ill, having nightmares about his encounter with the ‘underworld’. Also he has fallen in love and is determined to seek out Maria. While he has been ill, however, a magician called Rotwang has built a machine replica of Maria to further control the workers and has imprisoned the real Maria. The workers meanwhile have decided to revolt against their ‘masters’.

In the style of a true hero Freder rescues Maria who, in turn, rescues the children and the machine replica malfunctions and runs amok. Peace and order are restored in the end but with a new ingredient; Freder gains the position of acting as ‘negotiator’ between workers and bosses not unlike any trade union official we recognize today. And, of course, he also wins Maria.

Ok, the story could have been told more ‘realistically’. Rotwang is an inventor, not a magician, and what’s this nonsense about machines controlling people? But how dry and dusty the tale would have been in comparison.

One vehicle that early film-makers used to convey fantasy was Technicolor. Consider the use of colour in The Wizard of Oz, (Victor Flemming, 1939). The bookends of this film, i.e., the sequences at the beginning and end of the story were filmed in black and white while the fantasy sequences of Dorothy in Oz were filmed in colour. The monochrome aids the suspension of our disbelief in the more ‘realistic’ parts of the story while the use of colour heightens the fantasy of our time in Oz.

For the next decade animated movies and musicals were made in colour while films with more realistic storylines were made in black and white. Now the black and white movies is a rare vehicle indeed. The only significant BW movie in recent times was Elephant Man and that was decades ago. Colour is used to convey realism in a way that monochrome cannot. However, colour can be reinvented as a fantasy medium.

In Edward Scissorhands Tim Burton recreates the familiar, drab suburb as a pastel coloured wonderland. The houses and cars appear to have been sprayed daily with colours more suited to an ice-cream parlour. In the meantime the inhabitants go about their staid occupations in garments that seem to have been inspired by a dress designer’s narcotic-induced fantasy. Burton obviously needed a foil for the muted tones of the gothic castle from whence the subject, Edward Scissorhands, (Johnny Depp) came.

Love or loathe fantasy, the success of Peter Jackson's trilogy, Lord of the Rings, confirms that the fantasy vehicle is with us yet.

Books to Read

Copyright © Artyfacts 2007