Team Snow Queen: feminist cinematic ‘misinterpretations’ of a fairy tale

Abstract

Four women directors’ live-action films available in English – Päivi Hartzell’s feature Lumikuningatar (The Snow Queen, 1986), Danishka Esterhazy’s short The Snow Queen (2005), Tamar van den Dop’s feature Blind (2007), and Catherine Breillat’s feature La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty, 2010) – use Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Snow Queen’ as hypotext. Explorations of gendered positions in culture and in film, directly linked to a readily identifiable fairy tale, these works offer a compelling example of how geographically and temporally dispersed adaptations can share perspectives beyond their common source material, ones which I argue can be directly linked to what one director felicitously called a (feminist) ‘misinterpretation’ of the original. First, their Snow Queens are lookers in two senses: having a beautiful physical appearance, and actually looking and seeing within the films’ diegeses. Second, they show the Snow Queen’s physical movements and gestures as stylised or unusual. Third, they conflate the characters of Gerda and Kai and/or problematise their gender, making it ambiguous, doubling it, or rendering it in composite. Fourth, unlike Andersen’s story, these films’ climactic scenes focus on interactions/relations between Kai/Gerda and the Snow Queen.