(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Written with author Maria Kirpichenko
It is the time of the snowstorms in the north. The snow that blows and falls softly, throughout the winter and well into the spring, covers the ground and the roofs of houses. Some days so light that we can blow it away like dust. Other days it is heavy and slippery to walk. We wake up to a sky that is colored pink like eczema. The bluish evening darkness. A Saturday in Tromsø where the snow has fallen over the city, we are outside with our daughters. The children are still small, the restlessness is in every sinew and muscle, the curiosity, they run through the streets, those who have far too much energy. Two balls of power shooting away, restless, impossible, cuddly like cats, playing, quarreling, laughing again, like most children. We pull them close to us, the long slender limbs, they have shot up in the air in recent months, they don't stop growing.
Cinderella
That Saturday we finally end up at the cinema in Tromsø. Amidst the tears and chaos, the choice falls on Cinderella, an animated family film that happens to be premiering that day. Cinderella is a new major Norwegian film venture, based on the story of CinderellaCinderella is a folktale character that originated in the Middle East and has since spread to several parts of the world. The oldest literary adaptations are from China (800th century), Italy (Basile, 1634), France (Perrault, 1697) and Germany (the brothers Grimm, 1812). Others believe that the earliest known version of the Cinderella story is the Rhodopis, which was told by the Greek historian Strabo sometime between 7 BC and 23 AD, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt. In Europe, around 500 versions of the fairy tale have been recorded. Cinderella is one of the most famous and well-established tales we have grown up with. Cinderella, the despised youngest daughter, who is so badly treated by her stepmother and put to the hardest work in the house. Cinderella, who forgets her shoe and wins the prince in the end – her reward for being obedient and hardworking, in what is both a class trip and fulfills the script about the girl's difficult transition from her own house to her husband's home.
And without prior knowledge of filmThe idea with which we encounter the story is therefore also simple: that this story will take its course and the fairy tale will come true. Is it because this story is so rooted in all of us that any deviation, especially in an animated film for children, creates dissonance?
When history diverges
In a beautiful snowy landscape where animals live, the film begins with Cinderella, a young female fox, outcast and hardworking, as she should be. She goes to a ball, loses her shoe and is found by the prince. The classic elements are accomplished in three minutes.
Cinderella refuses to get married.
But the world is not only winter cold, it is also warm. There is a fire that burns the old tales: Cinderella refuses to marry – and in the course of the film it turns out that she does not love the prince, but princesses. "Happily ever after" is put on the sidelines, and the fairy tale world is on the verge of collapse – because now the story has deviated from what it was supposed to be. Society's sanctions are not absent: King Rex is furious, and Cinderella is imprisoned in case number 357 and charged with "fairy tale avoidance", but is given three days off in exchange for finding a secret and alternative record of the fairy tale about her. She runs and has time against her, runs across the snow towards the great official archives, which are kept behind closed doors, towering rows of books at the other end of the fairy tale world. The defiant sell rushing from one book to another, while the clock counts down and the earth trembles beneath her.
What is an archive?
The archive in the film is both a metaphor and a concrete place. It is a place that contains the old tales, and where Cinderella must find permission to follow her heart. As if a frozen past is the only palette of possibilities that exists. What is an archive? The word archives has its roots in late Latin archive, which in turn derives from Greek arkheion, 'government building'; originally a house, a residence, an address for the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded (see Derrida, Archive Fever, 1995). At its root, the word 'archive' is thus associated with legislation and power. The 'archive' is also essential to a nation-state, its dreamed unity and congruence. It is noteworthy that the film Cinderella explores the relationship between state and archive, and it is the state that exercises violence – in the name of the archive.
In his The archaeology of knowledge ('Archaeology of Science') describes the French philosopher Michel Foucault The archive is not so much a physical space as an arena for cognition, a cognitive structure that limits what can be said and thought about something. It is a historically situated mechanism of power – that is, it reflects the historically dominant perspective of a specific nation-state. According to the historian Ann Stoler The archive is colonial and bureaucratic. For the imperial states of the 1800th century, the archive was a 'state monument', bearing witness to secrecy, law and power: "As archivists are the first to note, to understand an archive, one must understand the institutions it serves." By shaping collective memory, archives establish the 'we' of nation-states – often proud and powerful.
Fairytale world in flames
Cinderella's rebellion literally sets fairy tale world in flames. While she searches in vain for her own story in the archive, an invisible force breaks loose, a purple phosphorescent fire – it is started by two overseers who sit in the clouds, and whose task is to erase history when it does not go its usual way. The two overseers seem to operate on the basis of an 'emergency manual' and in the film they are the ones who sanction the punishment. Are the overseers also the ones who supply the archive with qualified stories? The fire that burns, almost resembles a radioactive material, which eats away at the earth and causes the fairy tale world to crumble as punishment. As the archive takes shape, it simultaneously expels what should not be remembered; the moment when Cinderella disrupts history with her queer twist on the well-known fairy tale. Even the population is affected and consumed by this wild fire. Here too a parallel to Michael Ende classic The never-ending story, 'The Great Nothing' is about the magical world of Fantasia and the hopes and dreams of its inhabitants.
To love the one you want
There are big consequences to loving who you want, and worlds can crumble. Breaking out of society's norms about who it is possible to be, who it is possible to love, sometimes feels like, or is portrayed as, the world will burn and collapse. The idea that a child or young person must be squeezed into these narrow frames – or get lost – no matter how strange or painful it feels, carries with it a resounding message: that the person's life and feelings mean nothing in the face of the inflexible narrative of how things 'should be', in a script that has already been told. A script in which there are no other genders than man and woman, and no other love than between man and woman, prince and princess. And it is precisely this narrative that the film attempts to break up, with defiance and courage.
To rewrite the world
One of the questions the film asks is: What forces are unleashed when we rewrite the old stories? How do we tell new stories? And what kind of world will the new stories create?
Cinderella is imprisoned and charged with "fairy tale avoidance."
Is there also another, more hopeful archive that the American poet Susan Howe speaks of when, during her research, she accidentally discovers “the private notes” of an almost unknown woman from the 1700th century? “There is a level where spirit is word and paper is skin. This is the fascination of archives. There are still traces of the body.» I Howes performance, the writing is carved into the skin of the archive. An archive that does not exclude, but stands open and lets the human in, the body and desire.
The story of Cinderella dares to change the archive. If the stories are kept in the state archive, they must also be recast, and the very architecture of the archive must be changed. We look at each other in cinema darkness. That something as simple as turning an old tale upside down can feel so strong, so surprising. And so straightforward. What the film conveys – in a strange way – is that representation matters. When the story ends up on the 'mouth of the people', when Cinderella hears her story told among the animals in the village, it finds its place in the archive, it gains the right to exist. That it is brought to light, inspires and liberates. Cinderella writes about her own little story and thus the bigger story.
As we leave the darkness of the cinema and walk through the city streets, the snow has started to fall again. Small sparkling flakes in the air that the girls run after. The children have enjoyed themselves, and peace has been restored – at least for a little while. The fact that the old world is burning does not have to mean that it disappears completely, but that we are constantly recreating it with our stories. Like the snow in the evening darkness, which falls on the pedestrians, soft and luminous, and makes the outside world shine.
