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Kristian Moen is Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television at the University of Bristol. He has published and presented on topics including nineteenth-century visual culture, cinema and modernity, and the relationship between cinema and fantasy.
Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Copyright Ā© 2013 Kristian Moen
The right of Kristian Moen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Versions of some chapters were published previously. Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 originally appeared in a somewhat different form as āāNever Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoriaā: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860ā1889ā, Comparative Critical Studies 6, no. 3 (2009): 361ā72. Chapter 5 is a substantial revision of an article that was published as āāThe WellāOrganized Splendor of a Growing Cultureā: Sites of Fantasy and The Thief of Bagdadā, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 1 (2010): 63ā73.
International Library of the Moving Image: 8
ISBN: 978 1 78076 251 7
eISBN: 978 0 85773 319 1
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
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āAcknowledgements
This project has gone through many metamorphoses since the idea of fairy tales in film first began to fascinate me, and I would like to thank and acknowledge those who have helped and supported me as the book came into being. Thank you to those at the University of East Anglia who helped me so much during this bookās first incarnation as a PhD thesis: my astute supervisors, Justine Ashby and Yvonne Tasker, Peter KrƤmer whose intellectual generosity never failed to surprise me, and Jonathan Tooke, Charles Barr and Andrew Higson, who provided much valued encouragement. In countless discussions, Corin Depper always offered critical acuity and a delight in ideas for which I am deeply thankful. Staff at the Archives Municipales de Toulon, the BibliothĆØque nationale de France, the British Film Institute, and the Library of Congress were tremendously helpful, and I thank them. I also acknowledge the support of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their funding during my PhD study. At the University of Bristol, as the book took shape, Alex Clayton and Sarah Street were instrumental in helping me out and keeping me on track, and I thank them along with my colleagues Catherine Hindson, Simon Jones, Katja Krebs, Jacqueline Maingard, Richard Misek, Angela Piccini and Martin White. Thanks also go to Liza Thompson at I.B.Tauris for her patience and guidance. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Carole Zucker and Mario Falsetto for their inspirational teaching and generosity, Sherry Kelly for her perceptive insights, and my family and my wife Eventhia for their fantastic support.
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āIntroduction
While the spread of urban-industrial technology, the large-scale disembedding of social (and gender) relations, and the shift to mass consumption entailed processes of real destruction and loss, there also emerged new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception, a new relationship with āthingsā, different forms of mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity, temporality, and reflexivity, a changing fabric of everyday life, sociability, and leisure.
ā Miriam Hansen (2000)1
The cinema screen is the modern miracle placed within everyoneās means. This luminous picture window opened in the wall is the will-oā-the-wisp, the clearing in which fairies dance. It is the place of dreams in a prosaic existence; it is a refreshment of the eyes after the fatigue of withering labour.
ā Ćmile Vuillermoz (1919)2
In this book, I examine how cinema made fairy tales modern. I look at a range of fairy tales, but perhaps not in the ways we have grown accustomed to think of them. Rather than approaching fairy tales as āthe purest and simplest expression of...
