ASSIGNMENT: Two Writing Prompts for the final paper, choose one. Please provide a Works Cited page.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth;
Prompt #1:
Whose freedom, identity, and individuality has disappeared, disconcertedly mutated, or been threatened in Pan’s Labyrinth? In Cocteau’s Orpheus? In
After Lorca? What freedoms have been lost? What innocence, illusion, and purity are put at risk? Which characters in the two films are in denial
and/or imprisoned, by what force? In Spicer’s After Lorca, what sacrifices have been made? What about the reader/viewer? Did you feel freed or
imprisoned watching Del Toro’s film? Does Ofelia or Mercedes succeed in protecting her own or anyone else’s identity? If one considers the Captain
as a latter day Inquisitor, what faith is it that he believes he’s serving? And, what does he believe threatens that “faith”? How do you interpret the end
of the movie?
Prompt #2:
Rather than set borders and limits, Del Toro’s film, Cocteau’s film, and Spicer’s translations of Lorca reframe and remap. All three works are
concerned with tracing the boundaries between an imagined world and a harsh reality, guiding the camera inside a girl’s imagination, inviting the
viewer to step through mirrors, encouraging the reader to allow the dead, Garcia Lorca, a return to life, if only temporarily, through the work of
translation. (Del Toro’s, Cocteau’s, and Spicer’s tracing of boundaries is analogous to Ofelia’s tracing with chalk on walls an outline of a door or portal
that allows her to move between worlds – similar to the mirror as passageway between life and death in Cocteau’s film Orpheus). Who or what in
these 3 works has ultimate authority? Destiny? The unknown, or unknowable? Something else?
Further notes to stir your thinking: Del Toro’s un-fairy tale ending problematizes any clear-cut way to read the film. Ofelia dies, and while the narration
suggests she returns to her homeland (and her royal family) after proving herself worthy, the image of Mercedes as she looks on Ofelia’s dead body
and how she reacts to El Capitan’s pleas for his baby boy still linger.
Is Del Toro’s film an allegory where imagination triumphs over fascism, or a fairy tale that cannot escape the fascist reign of violence that envelops it?
Is Cocteau’s film an allegory where the poet’s imagination triumphs over the humdrum of daily life, bringing new forms and energy into the world, or a
dark fairy tale about domesticity, marriage, and the boundaries of love and death?
Is it possible, as Spicer argues in one of his letters to Garcia Lorca, that poetry is something unexplained—like a place in a map that says that after
this is desert. A shorthand to admit the unknown? That allows the poet to bring objects across language(s) and time?
FYI: The name Ofelia, is probably derived from Ancient Greek ὠφέλεια (ōphéleia, “help”)