Snow White: Myth! Legend! Sacred Feminine!

sus

sus

Moderator
Mistress of Eternal Sleep!
A kingdom fallen into dormancy!
Eve takes the apple!

Narcissus revisited!
Zero-sum mentalities!
The seven servants!

This is Mvuent's thread. I am just making it for him. But if he doesn't take it over I will have to start posting. And none of us want that. Mvuent, rescue the thread!

Mvuent the Magnificent!
Mvuent the Magistral!
Mvuent the Monarchical!
Mvuent the Muciferous!

Here is Mvuent's initial review, to remind him:
a weird palimpsest of a movie. over an hour of cute, trivial yet perfectly executed fluff bookended by ~10 minutes (maybe fewer) of unsettling poetic storytelling.
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
I had the weirdest, most vivid dreams after watching "fantasia", don't recall what they were since it was years ago but they were definitely related, or at least inspired by watching it. even bought it on VHS at the time!
 
version

version

Well-known member
I like the whole thing but the Night On Bald Mountain sequence really leapt out at me as a kid.

That Broadway by Light thing I posted in the short films thread is like some combination of that and the night scenes from Taxi Driver, raucous carnival of lights followed by the dawn where everything goes back to normal.

 
sus

sus

Moderator
version said:
I like the whole thing but the Night On Bald Mountain sequence really leapt out at me as a kid.
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I watched the 1940 version for the first time last night, I thought "Night on Bald Mountain" followed by the "Aave Maria" was transcendentally beautiful. I'd just finished reading Lord of the Rings, right before I watched, and it very much had that elves-for-the-Gray-Havens feeling. Something dies and something is born and the world renews itself. Night falls and day rises, and the haunting spirits are banished with the dawn.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I think Fantasia does a good job illustrating what we've talked about before, re: how mood/vibe can be quasi-representational. Where the minimum viable structure of narrative is something like "mood progression"—the development of feeling and outlook over time.

The outlook/feeling implies a subjectivity navigating the world.

And the dynamic changes in that subjectivity's outlook & fortunes are represented by the development of mood. Now things are going poorly, now they're going well, here's the climax, here's the peaceful denouement.

This is an explicit concept in Romantic classical composition, I think—see Berlioz & his Symphonie fantastique—but it pops up other places—rock opera, for one—and it's not too distant from how we've talked about ambient. (Although ambient often prefers to represent a room, rather than a subjectivity passing through a labyrinth of rooms.)
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I also loved the creation myth logic of the film's opening half: first the conductor-god assembles his players and directs ("writes") time. First we get darkness, then light, then gas and rock and elemental things; then topography and sky, clouds and heavens; the clouds part, the sun radiates to the land below, and in the center of it all, the sun-god conductor, as volcanoes erupt and magma flows, and cell mitosis begins in their warm bath.

Sunlight is just energy, it's the only original source of energy, and all our food is merely sunlight stored (by plant and animal cells). So sun cults are a very natural thing, the most natural thing: they're a worship of the animating force itself, of "spirit," of elan vital.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Early in July 1916, (that is at the start of the battle of the Somme) the infantrymen are led to “death’s sure meeting place, the goal of their marching”, “a meeting place has been found”. That place is Mametz Wood where most of the soldiers are wounded or killed: John Ball is hit in the leg, Dai Great-Coat is blown to bits, Mr. Jenkins is shot in the head, and the whole place is strewn with dead bodies. It is a corporate slaughter, Mametz Wood becomes a sacred wood dedicated to the Queen of the Woods, to whom the men are sacrificed.
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Snow White is (sort of) Queen of the Woods

Now it is essential that the sacrifice be accepted by the god or goddess. Here, this acceptance is made clear by the handing out of boughs and flowers to the dead. The Queeen of the Woods walks about the battlefield and gratifies each dead soldier with berries, sweet-briar, myrtle or daisies. These gifts are like palms given to martyrs in the Christian tradition. The “doing” of this liturgy is now complete.
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seven dwarfs for seven planets



a pitch against Disney unionising?

 
sus

sus

Moderator
Now it is essential that the sacrifice be accepted by the god or goddess. Here, this acceptance is made clear by the handing out of boughs and flowers to the dead. The Queeen of the Woods walks about the battlefield and gratifies each dead soldier with berries, sweet-briar, myrtle or daisies. These gifts are like palms given to martyrs in the Christian tradition. The “doing” of this liturgy is now complete.
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Yes, part of the film is she gives the dwarves a little kiss right? It's been decades since I watched the film—this is @mvuent's thread, after all—but this is a regular trope, some loser guy sacrifices everything and gets a little kiss on the forehead from the beautiful goddess and it's all worth it now, we can feel like he got something out of it too
 
sus

sus

Moderator
7 is all over right? After 2 and 3 it's maybe the main holy number/symbol, right? I know very very little about numerology, just reporting out my personal encounters. 7 is all over Tolkien, I know that much.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Alfred Gell talked about the enchantment of technology/technology of enchantment in relation to objects

if you think of animation’s developing quality, when its zenith has been pushed further and further, this era’s animation (with all the period‘s political flaws) is part of so many childhood experiences it seems impossible to escape - as a conditioning filter for initial generational viewers even more so - and isn’t the light touch of later films

Snow White is asexual, the dwarves offer no fertility rite (bit of a giveaway unless dwarf gangbangs are your go to fix) but they’re noble in their flaws. The threat is infertile and feminine - Snow White as asexual fertility, Andraste for valium addicts

www.goodreads.com

The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Grave…
www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
WashYourHands said:
There are consistent comparisons in the classical world and beyond. It’s the rite to vision that gets lost or reinterpreted through the ChristIan lenses as possession. Gender roles are consistent

Veleda in her open but sequestered tower, the Pythia, priestesses of Sena (Scilly isles), Sein island off Brittany and the women of the Namnetes, Fedelm of the spiralling pupils giving Queen Medb her infamous “crimson-red from blood they are; I behold them bathed in red” bomb. Frequently in thin places, Anglesey and its bloodbath
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The ladies of the Namnetes (Samnitae) warrant a further look. From Strabo, book 4 chapter 4

In the ocean, he says, there is a small island, not very far out to sea, situated off the outlet of the Liger River; and the island is inhabited by women of the Samnitae, and they are possessed by Dionysus and make this god propitious by appeasing him with mystic initiations as well as other sacred performances; and no man sets foot on the island, although the women themselves, sailing from it, have intercourse with the men and then return again. And, he says, it is a custom of theirs once a year to unroof the temple and roof it again on the same day before sunset, each woman bringing her load to add to the roof; but the woman whose load falls out of her arms is rent to pieces by the rest, and they carry the pieces round the temple with the cry of "Ev-ah,"133 and do not cease until their frenzy ceases; and it is always the case, he says, that some one jostles the woman who is to suffer this fate
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Snow White as Aubrey Plaza, Roofer/Plotter
 
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