Abstract
Adaptations of fairy tales were particularly popular in the years of early cinema. In the period preceding the year 1903 films consisted of a series of animated tableaux since filmmakers had difficulties in telling a coherent story. Allusions to a well‐known tale could then function as a guide for the spectator. At the same time, filmmakers were fond of experimenting with cinematic tricks, such as stop‐motion techniques and superimpositions. The fairy tale offers a legitimate backdrop for these tricks and these film adaptations even display an excess of the marvelous at the cost of the actual story itself.
Highlights
The film historian André Gaudreault disagrees with the common wisdom – or Wikipedia-wisdom, if you like – that cinema was born on that famous evening in December 1895 when the brothers Lumière projected several shorts on a screen
Biograph had copyrighted the film according to the regular custom of one single still photograph, that at this stage was taken as the copyrighting of one shot
In the early years of cinema, film fairy tales had a transitional function in helping film shed its dependency on theater in favor of an affiliation with narrative literature
Summary
Adaptations of fairy tales were popular in the years of early cinema. Fairy tales have been a source of inspiration for a large variety of types of film. This article delves into the background of this relative popularity in the beginning of the twentieth century In this period, the quite new medium of cinema was still in search of adestination,’ and, as I will claim, the format of fairy tales turned out to be helpful in trying out a narrative road
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