Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (with Deborah Shaw)

Episode 53 journeys into the irregular and twisting world of Spanish fantasy cinema, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) by Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth, and a specialist in Latin American cinema whose publications include The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (Manchester University Press, 2013), as well as the edited collections The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics (I. B. Tauris, 2017). Topics up for examination this episode include the potency and power of the film’s national-historical setting, and its knotted relationship with the perennial allegory of Fascism; the narrative role of magic and belief within the construction of villainy and antagonism; the ‘monstrosity’ of Guillermo del Toro’s VFX and the formal style of its monstrous aesthetics; the rhythmical dimension of how del Toro treats time, chronology and history; and the global circulation of Pan’s Labyrinth that is enabled by its palatable mainstream vocabulary of CGI and populist effects imagery.