Filming fairies: popular film, audience response and meaning in contemporary fairy lore

Within the context of film, the image of the fairy invariably carries some aspect of meaning articulated in these quasi-philosophical discussions about the nature of fairy belief. In this sense, modern film audiences view fairy belief from the same perspective as Aubrey and Campbell. Modern responses via the visualisation of supernatural beings such as fairies in film are a re-enchantment of the world and a revival of a spiritual alternative, but it is worth stating that responses to these films differ in some ways from the lifestyle choices associated with Wicca, paganism and Goth culture. Film audiences are focused and articulate, but playful. They deplore coyness and sentimentality in the storyline and film technique, and, typically, comments stress the meaningfulness of these films for the viewer on a personal level.

Fairies on Film

One obvious characteristic of the cinematic treatment of fairies is that it dramatises static images of Victorian art. That the connection between art and action is symbiotic is illustrated by the history of Shakespeare's fairy play, Midsummer Night's Dream, as a subject for theatrical and film productions as well as painting. The play has provided an important focal point for visual realisations of fairies since the nineteenth century (Halio 2003, 11-31). It was one of the most popular subjects for a style of fantasy art that is now described as fairy painting, although this was not a term used at the time such paintings were first exhibited (Wood 2001, 8-17 and 62-69) The vogue for this kind of fantasy art coincided with the revival of interest in Shakespeare as a dramatist in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and both responded to and influenced theatrical productions of the play. From the 1830s onwards, painting, ballet and theatrical spectacle made images of fairies even more accessible (Bown 2001, 70). J. R. Planche and the dancer Madame Vestris revived Midsummer Night's Dream in London in 1840 with the emphasis on the supernatural spectacle (Bown 2001, 73-4). Theatre in effect made the fairies live, and this process was extended by the advent of film, where the fairies were alive--not just for the duration of a performance, but for the life of the film itself. The director Max Reinhardt had already staged Midsummer Night's Dream several times before he, and William Dierterle, had the opportunity to produce Hollywood's spectacular, black-and-white, 1935 film version. The film used dancers and child actors for the throng of fairyland. The costumes were sparkling diaphanous drapery rather than the long tutus of romantic ballet. This gave them more than a passing resemblance to some of the realisations of Shakespeare's plays in early-nineteenth-century paintings such as Francis Danby's Scene from a Midsummer Night's Dream (1832), while some of the grotesque male figures recalled the art of Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald. In the film, trick photography, well planned and used sparingly, created the impression of flight, the sudden appearance and disappearance of fairy characters and the contrasting size between fairies and humans that are evoked in the text of the play. As well as dramatising images of fairies already familiar in art, fairy cinema can subvert these images as well. The filmed version of Peter Hall's 1960s stage production of Midsummer Night's Dream, with mini-skirts and psychedelic colours, contrasts dramatically with the 1930s Hollywood spectacular. The white-on-white sets and costumes of Hall's influential 1971 stage production, which created an impression of an other world that was more sinister than any traditional fairy land, present an even greater contrast. The contrast may not be a deliberate and conscious subversion of the earlier film, although film and literary critics have contrasted them in this way (Mullin 1975, 529-34; Halio 2003, 85-105).