The blog for SUNY Binghamton's Spring'09 COLI 214B 02 Literature and Society Class. Chapter summaries, analyses and discussion of prescribed texts written by students.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Tung Kim

In today’s class we started watching a new movie called Pan's Labyrinth. The movie looks very interesting from my point of view since I never really saw it before. It follows a little Spanish girl name Ofelia and her mother Carmen who opens up the movie. Carmen the mother is pregnant with a child of a military man named Captain Vidal to whom she is also married too. Ofelia biological father died in a war and now she is reluctant to call Captain Vidal her father. We find out very early that Ofelia is very much into fairy tales and likes to read a lot. Once they get to the base where Captain Vidal is located, Ofelia find outs that something has been following her since her trip began. Ofelia leave her bed in the night and follows the fairy to a dark labyrinth where she meets a strange looking creature named Faun who tells her that he has been waiting for her and that she is the daughter of the lord of the underworld. He gives her a book and three tasks to complete before the moon is full in order to prove that she is the right girl. The first task leads her to a dark rotting tree where she faces a toad. At the same time her mother is become weaker with each passing day due to the baby and Captain Vidal is busy fighting off rebel forces in the forest. Ofelia returns home to an angry mother who tells her that she has disappointed her. As Ofelia finds time to herself and opens out the book that Faun gave to her, it starts to turn red. Ofelia runs out of the room and finds her mother cover in blood. Right then we ran out of time. Besides watching the movie we didn’t really do anything else in class.

1 comment:

Astraeus said...

Is this supposed to be a summary of the class or the movie?
The movie (which incidentally i saw quite a while back)is structurally made as a christian parable and the war is allegorical of the actual spanish civil war. i think this was quite unique for a warner brother's fantasy film.

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