communist folk‐tale films, produced regularly in the Grimm heartlands and nearby countries, normally inflected in a particular political direction. However, despite a common overarching ideology, there was great diversity in these films, both from one country to another, and from one decade to another.
In the late 1930s the successful release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs prompted Alexander Rou to make The Magic Fish (Po shchuhemu velenya, USSR, 1938), which initiated more than half a century of Soviet cinematic activity in this field. Based on an old Russian tale, it tells of Yemelya who one day catches a fish which pleads to be spared, saying that in exchange it will grant any wishes. Yemelya agrees. Nearby is a Tsar with a beautiful daughter, Nesmeyana, who is always bad‐tempered and rude, and never laughs. In desperation, the Tsar makes a public proclamation that he will give her hand in marriage to any man who can make her laugh. Many suitors arrive and try, but none succeeds till Yemelya uses one of his wishes. The Tsar goes back on his promise, but Nesmeyana likes Yemelya so much that she runs away with him. This story is punctuated by various magical transformations effected by the fish: winter turns into summer, a lake grows out of a puddle, houses evolve from nowhere.
So popular was The Magic Fish that Rou's follow‐up, Koniok gorbunok (The Little Humpback Horse, USSR, 1939), was made in colour. It features the same leading actors and tells a similar story: a peasant wins the heart of a princess. Ivan, a young shepherd, catches a little white pony, and in its mane he discovers the glowing feathers of the firebird which alone can lead to princess Silver Morning. After freeing the pony, Ivan finds a talking humpback horse waiting for him at home. He becomes a groom in the service of a decrepit Tsar and is sent on pain of death to find Silver Morning, whom the Tsar plans to marry. With the humpback horse, Ivan has many adventures on land, under the sea, and in the sky, before finding the princess and bringing her back. However, she refuses to marry the Tsar; instead she rescues Ivan from gaol.
Apart from their portrayal of Tsars as senile and treacherous, there is little explicitly political in these and other similar films of the period: they could be interpreted in the West as simply promoting secular humanist values. Consequently, during the war, at the height of the Western alliance with the USSR, they were brought into distribution in the UK and shown to children in some Saturday cinema clubs. However, the tenor of Russian fairy‐tale films soon began to change, and so did their reception in the West. Volshebnoye zerno (The Magic Seed, USSR, 1941) is about two peasant children, Andreika and Marika, who are presented by a legendary singing blacksmith with a magic seed, one of only two in the world. If planted in good soil, it will feed the world. The other is possessed by Karamur, a wicked ogre who keeps it locked up. Hearing about the children's seed, Karamur sends an army of Longnoses to destroy it, but the children go to another planet to consult a wise scientist. With his aid, plus that of a black slave and a flute, they overpower Karamur and set about spreading food and happiness to all humankind. Within the context of an exciting narrative the story presents, by implication, contemporary political ideas about oppression, liberation, the proletariat, progress through science, and the desirability of spreading happiness/communism to other countries. It was released in the UK over Christmas 1944, but was not shown in children's Saturday matinees.
The end of the war saw the emergence of Aleksandr Ptushko as one of the pre‐eminent Russian directors of folklore on screen, and an inspiration for film‐makers elsewhere. Based on a folk‐tale from the Ural Mountains, Ptushko's film Kamenni tsvetok (The Stone Flower, USSR, 1946), offers spectacle, adventure, suspense, and an analysis of the satisfactions of craftsmanship. It achieved fame and distribution in several countries, including the US and the UK.
During these immediate post‐war years DEFA, the state film company of the communist‐controlled sector of Germany, was making no fairy‐tale films at all, partly because directors and writers were uncertain how to interpret and apply to this genre the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism. However, within a year of the 1949 establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) as a separate state, director Paul Verhoeven had followed Ptushko's lead and made Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart, GDR, 1950). Steering clear of Grimm princesses, Verhoeven adapted a text by the 19th‐century German writer Wilhelm Hauff. The film uses an enchanted forest, scenes of banqueting, and a giant's gruesome repository of bartered, still‐beating hearts as a vivid background for the story of a young man who learns that riches are worthless without a social conscience. It was well received in both Germanies; and after an eight‐year delay reached selected Saturday matinees in the UK.
Back in the USSR, Ptushko was developing further his expertise in bringing myth to the screen. Sadko (USSR, 1952) was based on medieval Russian legends which Rimsky‐Korsakov had used in the 1890s as the basis for an opera of the same name. Ptushko retained snatches of the music, but reshaped the narrative significantly to suit his medium and ideology. In the film Sadko is a wandering minstrel who, when he arrives at the port of Novgorod, is so appalled by the disparity between the poverty‐stricken conditions of the working people and the well‐being of the prosperous merchants that he vows to take a selected company on a voyage round the world in search of the legendary bird of happiness. Needing ships and money to make this happen, he receives unexpected help from an underwater princess, whose father is the powerful Tsar of the Ocean. In India he thinks he has found the bird of happiness, but it turns out to be a phoenix, which lulls people into forgetting their problems, rather than overcoming them. Returning home empty‐handed, they encounter a great storm; Sadko is able to save his comrades only by giving up his life to the Tsar of the Ocean. However, the Ocean Princess sets him free. Back on Russian soil, Sadko realizes that his journey was misconceived: happiness is in one's native country and has to be worked for, not found. In addition to this moral, the film stresses collectivism rather than individuality and points to the iniquities of capitalism, while at the same time getting full entertainment value from its energetic dances, its phoenix, and its underwater action. The film won a prize at the Venice Film Festival and achieved distribution in the UK, the USA (where it was retitled The Magic Voyage of Sindbad) and other Western countries; but it was the last Russian film of this genre to do so.
In the same year, Czechoslovakia launched several decades of cinematic production of this type with its first film made especially for children. Derived from national legends collected in the 19th century by the Czech novelist Bozena Nemcova, Pysna princezna (The Proud Princess) shows how good King Miroslav humbles the overbearing pride of Princess Krasomila. Under his guidance, and with the help of a singing flower, she learns to respect the work of the common people, recognizing it as the source of all prosperity.
Still in 1952, the GDR Communist Party held a conference which resulted in a decree that socialist realism included a requirement to show optimism in facing the future. Little more than a year later, at Christmas 1953, DEFA unveiled Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (Little Mook), which was to revitalize DEFA by becoming the most successful film it ever produced. Mindful of the popularity of The Cold Heart, the director Wolfgang Staudte stuck with Hauff and adapted a story of an unwanted, orphan hunchback boy in the Orient who hears about the legendary Merchant who Sells Happiness, and runs away to the desert to find him. This film adds a new ingredient to standard themes by putting a frame round the comedy of Mook's magic shoes: at the beginning, middle, and end of the film are scenes showing Mook as an old man relating his story to a group of young children. By the time he finishes they are roused to declare that they will look after him and will henceforth speak out loud and clear against injustice and prejudice. Mook eventually reached selected Saturday morning screens in the UK, but only as a boy having fun: the sequences showing him as a wise old man were cut out.
All three countries were now committed to the idea that tales, legends, and myths could provide the basis of films that were edifying as well as entertaining—and not only for children—but they developed such projects in their own ways, in the light of their own national culture and the prevailing interpretation of socialist realism. A comparison of three films made near the end of the 1950s, one from each country, will illustrate the range of possibilities which they perceived as being open to them. In the USSR Ptushko saw out the decade as co‐director of an elemental epic; in the GDR the spirit of Bertolt Brecht encouraged audiences to keep their distance; and in Czechoslovakia a beautiful princess became mousy.
Ptushko's epic was Sampo (USSR/Finland, 1959), which drew on Kalevala, the Finnish version of a Nordic myth about the origins of the world. Against a backdrop of Finnish locations, and the colour and special effects which create a flying cloak, a woman walking on waves, and a fire‐breathing snake‐trampling iron horse, Sampo validates labour—logging, hunting, blacksmithing—and puts a higher value on the community and its culture than on any one individual. No character or relationship is depicted in any detail, or given any idiosyncrasy. When a young man is drowned, it is his mother, not his betrothed, who pleads with the sea to give him up, and with nature to give him breath again. The film ends not with the wedding, but with the wider picture—the community rejoicing that their dream of a better life may be about to come true.
By contrast the GDR film from the same period, Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan (The Story of Poor Hassan, 1958) has a restricted cast and no exterior locations. Made in response to the GDR's second film conference, which had criticized the neo‐realist quasi‐documentary style of some recent productions, Hassan adapts Brechtian distancing techniques, developed for the stage, to the screen. Their purpose is to undermine any illusion of reality that may develop in an audience's mind. The film starts with the actors introducing themselves direct to camera and talking about the characters they are going to play. The Hassan actor leafs through a book to emphasize that what the audience will see is a constructed tale. When the story is acted out, no exterior locations are used; every scene takes place in a stylized studio set with minimal decor. Till just before the end the characters are one‐dimensional—Hassan, naïve; the merchant, brutal; the judge, corrupt; the slave Fatima, helpless. The director's intention, through this style of telling, was to stimulate in the viewer a gradual sharpening of awareness of the painful contradictions (workers oppressed and poor, bosses idle and wealthy) in the characters' social relations. Not all GDR critics were entirely happy with this film, but for some the obvious seriousness of its intentions made it vastly preferable not only to neo‐realism but also to what they saw as the bourgeois flimflam of The Singing Ringing Tree, made in the same country the year before.
Such critics would not have much liked a Czech film produced a year later. Princezna se zlatou hvezdou (The Princess with the Golden Star, 1959) was again from a story by Bozena Nemcova, who had herself derived it from the Brothers Grimm. It is similar in some ways to Jim Henson's Sapsorrow, but in this version the threat of incest is omitted, leaving it as a fairly traditional type of story about a princess who escapes from a wedding to a king she detests by dressing in a mouse‐skin coat and passing as a scullery‐maid. The result is a film which shows little political awareness. The princess's father, Hostivit, is lightly mocked for his senile stubbornness; and Kazisvet, the hated suitor, is scorned for his arrogance and aggressiveness. There are romantic songs, performed by the popular singer who plays the prince; and there is ballet, for which several opportunities are created. The only real moral that the film illustrates is the universal lesson that people should be judged for what they are, not for how they look; and the only ideological reference is to an uprising which asserts the liberal democratic notion that ultimate political power lies with the people, not with any individual.
In the following three decades, culminating in the collapse of communist systems all over Europe, the three countries carried on making folklore films as a significant part of their overall programme, with each of them staying, to some extent, within the pattern established in the 1950s. In the USSR, Ptushko directed more national epics, such as Russlan and Ludmilla (1973), based on a long narrative poem by the venerated writer Alexander Pushkin. In the GDR, where films operated within a narrower definition of what was politically acceptable, one film‐maker adapted a book derived from fantasy characters invented by Karl Marx as a way of introducing his own children to the basics of dialectical materialism—Hans Rockle und der Teufel (Hans Rockle and the Devil, 1974). And in Czechoslovakia several more Bozena Nemcova stories about princes and princesses were brought to the screen.
But there were plenty of variations from this pattern as well. Directors in the USSR sometimes went outside their own national literatures, and made, for example, a version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (shot in Tashkent, not Moscow, 1980) and several films based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen, including Rousalochka (The Little Mermaid). In the GDR, the tales of the Brothers Grimm gradually became politically acceptable, especially those stories which do not feature royalty, such as Sechse kommen durch die Welt (How Six Made their Way in the World, 1972), Gevatter Tod (Godfather Death, 1980), and Jorinde und Joringel (1986). Meanwhile Czechoslovakian film‐makers went outside the communist bloc not only for stories, such as Andersen's Galose stastia (The Lucky Boots, 1986), but also for stars, such as the Austrian Maria Schell, who played the Queen Mother in Kral Drozdia brada (King Thrushbeard's Bride, 1984).
Nor were such productions isolated from the major philosophical currents that influenced the rest of Europe in these decades. Ideas about female emancipation, for example, are evident in various films. A Bozena Nemcova variation on the Cinderella story—Tri orisky pro Popelku (Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella)—was turned in 1974 into a film which presents the heroine as positive and self‐confident, rather than resigned and submissive (as she had been in an earlier East German version based on the Grimms' tale). And a decade later two other 19th‐century women writers, Gisela and Bettina von Arnim, provided the source material for Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns (Gritta of Rat Castle, GDR, 1985). This centres on Gritta, a 13‐year‐old countess, whose eccentric father is so obsessed with inventing machines that he lets the family castle fall into ruin. It is, therefore, up to Gritta and her rat friends to defeat the schemes of her new stepmother, who with the help of an evil abbess plans to defraud girls of their inheritances by getting them locked up. Gritta is shown as being rebellious and independent‐minded, just as happy to consort with Peter the gooseboy as with Prince Bonus. The contemporary tone of these attitudes is reinforced by the dialogue, which is peppered with 1980s German slang.
One of the catalysts of such new orientations was television, the influence of which spread outwards. In the 1970s and 1980s some German and Czech fairy‐tale films were made directly for the home screen, rather than for the cinema, a change which had several effects. It allowed some films to be shorter, around an hour rather than the 90 minutes which cinema expects. Its fitness for close‐ups of facial expressions and for voice‐overs encouraged directors to explore characters' interior psychological dimensions. Its preference for realism led to films being shot on location in the countryside as far as possible, rather than in studios. And sharing the screen with news and current affairs programmes sharpened film‐makers' desire to find and point up contemporary relevance in the tales they were telling.
When communist government in these countries ended at the close of the 1980s, state subsidy of film production ended too. In the 1990s, fairy‐tale films are still made, but on an opportunistic rather than a systematic basis. A co‐production deal between Russian and Chinese film companies resulted in Magic Portrait (1997), which begins, in traditional fashion, with a hard‐working young Russian peasant called Ivan who, in return for kindness to a fairy, is given a picture of a beautiful girl. Stepping down from the painting, she says she is only a soul without a body. The difference from any previous Russian film is that she is Chinese. On a quest to bring her body and soul together, Ivan travels to China and there confronts many dangers. Another painting plays a significant role in the Czech The Magic of a Beautiful Girl (1995), which introduces new elements into fairyland and dispenses with magic completely. Made for television, it features a prince so in love with the portrait of an unknown woman (who turns out to be his late mother) that he will marry no one else, thereby showing an obstinacy which enrages his power‐hungry young stepmother so much that she persuades the prince's best friend to murder him by using sexual wiles. Climactically, the prince marries a young woman who looks like the portrait; and the stepmother commits suicide.
In Germany DEFA still exists but is now a commercial company, facing west as well as east. Five years after the Berlin Wall came down it produced a kind of valediction in which a famous detective, called upon to solve the mystery of the missing last pages in fairy‐tale books, discovers that they have been torn out by the Black Wizard, who is intent on changing the way the stories end. This post‐modern, self‐reflexive, east‐meets‐west way of saying goodbye to Grimmland was called Sherlock Holmes und die sieben Zwerge (Sherlock Holmes and the Seven Dwarfs (Germany 1994)).
Bibliography
- Berger, Eberhard, and Giera, Joachim (eds.), 77 Märchenfilme (1990).
- Koenig, Ingelore, et al., Zwischen Marx und Muck: DEFA‐Filme für Kinder (1996).
— Terry Staples
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
