Joseph Cornell At Anthology Film Archives

Last Monday, I did something that I probably should have done a long time ago: I went to Anthology Film Archives. For those of you who are unfamiliar (probably most of you), Anthology Film Archives is, for all intents and purposes, the center of the avant-garde film universe. For a rather dingy-looking brick building in New York City’s East Village, that seems like quite a statement. However, despite its lackluster appearance, the building has served as one of the bastions of avant-garde film research, preservation, and, perhaps most crucially, showings in the world.

Anthology Film Archives, on 2nd Ave. and 2nd St. in New York City, NY; via wikipedia.org

Established by Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Stan Brakhage, and Peter Kubelka in 1970, the Archives continues to function today as a preservation tool for experimental film (particularly American ones) and a theater for a wide-range of films, including not only recent works in experimental film, but also retrospectives on important figures in the experimental/avant-garde film tradition and even overlooked figures from Hollywood; currently, the Archives are running a “From the Pen of…” series, which takes a closer look at the oft-unnoticed role of the screenwriter in film.

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Last Saturday afternoon, however, was an offering typical of the Archives: the first part of a Joseph Cornell retrospective. Cornell, an American artist famous in the art world for his ‘boxed assemblages,’ is not as well known for his role as a filmmaker, although he occupies a pivotal role in the American film tradition. Famously, Cornell is often credited as the first practitioner of ‘found footage’ films, notably with his first work, the 1936 film Rose Hobart. Despite the film’s importance to avant-garde film history, it might be better remembered as the instigator of an infamous Salvador Dalí rant.

Dalí, who was present at the first screening of the film at MOMA, reportedly burst out halfway through the film something to the effect (there are differing accounts as to the precise wording…better not to favor one over the other) that he’d had the exact same idea to create a collage of film footage and that Cornell had somehow stolen it from his subconscious. Although the comment might strike most of us as hysterical, it seems to have had a sobering effect on Cornell, who showed his films only very infrequently to the public thereafter.

Which, I should add, is a shame, because some of his early films are wonderful and charming. Those who resent the prickly modern attitudes of Cornell’s sculptural and assemblage work might be shocked to see these films: the triptych of “Cotillion,” “Children’s Party,” and “Midnight Party” (all 1940) are an immediate delight. Combining footage of children at various parties, the antics of several infants, and several entertainment shows—ranging from a tightrope walker to a juggling seal to a knife-thrower, Cornell conjures up some of the magic of childhood and—even in the somewhat academic, overbearing atmosphere (for me, anyway…) of Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater—laughter.

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One of Stan Brakhage’s projects in making films was to recreate the experience of early childhood in his audience, which he encapsulates in his artistic manifesto Metaphors On Vision: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective…” Some of Brakhage’s films, at points, are elusive and atmospheric his his pursuit of that eye. Cornell, to my knowledge, never offered any overt thesis of childhood perspective à la Brakhage, but he does indeed also pull us back into childhood. By eliminating narrative but retaining observable situations, Cornell brings us back to the viewing state of a child.

One of the several amusing infants in Cornell's triptych Cotillion, Children's Party, and Midnight Party; via tumblr.com

Of course, each situation, such as the children bobbing for apples, implicitly involves narrative, but the narrative is not an arcing one—it is slight. A child’s world is one of distraction, of bouncing from one object of interest to the next, of one successive, flitting narrative after another. Innocent, a child always follows everyone’s favorite live-better maxim—carpe diem—before being away of its implications. 

There’s space for reading the film critically, as one might do with Brakhage, but there’s also space, as I mentioned above, for simply enjoying the film. The scenes with the baby trying (and failing) to eat as he falls asleep would put a smile on the face of even the most deadened film scholar. The scenes of the knife-thrower, even as we’re sure of the inevitable (safe) results, still cause a nervous twitch and a fluttery sense of relief, an instinctive, child-like thrill.

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Other films were equally moving, although centered in nostalgia, rather than the retracing of childhood feelings. “Centuries of June” and “Gnir Rednow” were bursting with the longing for days past. The camerawork and composition of both films were especially notable and, as it turns out, for good reason: both were collaborations with Stan Brakhage. Although Brakhage is billed as ‘photographer’ on both pieces, the mere presence of his deft hand on the camera makes an argument for a ‘co-director’ tag. Brakhage’s eye for detail and his swift, hallucinatory camera style possess, respectively, a sureness and a warmth that I’m not sure Cornell could manage on his own.

Like Brakhage’s “The Wonder Ring,” the beautiful “Gnir Rednow” is a paean to the play of light created on New York City’s elevated subways. It represents an honest attempt to reexamine the world around us and find something new and original in it. By tackling the subway from so many different angles and perspectives, Cornell and Brakhage transform the oft-mundane experience of riding the subway into something giddy and ethereal, something worthwhile and wonderful.

“Centuries of June” is less interesting, focusing on a dark house on a seemingly abandoned property. The first few minutes of the film is largely tracking shots, which begin on the greenery of the property (sunlight through leaves) before panning over to the dark, foreboding exterior of the house. The film moves on to focus on a group of children playing on the property, as well as some wonderful tracking shots of a bird and a butterfly.

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Some of the Cornell work shown during this part one of the retrospective—looking specifically of “Legend Of Fountains,” “Aviary,” and “Nymphlight,” simply did not appeal to me. In comparison with the other work, these pieces seemed less polished and more informal—maybe a little too ‘experiential’ to be of interest to me. I’ve read that several of these films focused on some of Cornell’s favorite locations in New York City and that loose premise is evident in these films. While there are graceful moments in all of them (a shot tracking a group of pigeons as they flit through the trees), these films do little to create a lasting image of place for me.

With the exception, that is, of the final film “Angel.” Lacking in NYC-monument recognition, I cannot say for sure the statue/fountain at the focus of this beautiful film is, indeed, in New York City, but I assume it's somewhere in the borders of the Big Apple. Focusing on the titular angel and the pool that surrounds her, Cornell plays with the colors of the sky, the plant life, and the striking tonality of the water to create a brief, quiet film resonant with the watery peace of Monet’s Water Lilies—perhaps lacking the Impressionist coloring scheme, but with all the tremulous beauty.

A frame from Cornell's film Angel; via emory.edu

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But the most impressive film of the showing remained Cornell's first film, Rose Hobart. Not only is it an integral part of film history as the first collage/found footage film, it's a fascinating study of a relationship between a fan and a Hollywood star. Cornell discovered a copy of the 1931 film East Of Borneo in a junk shop and became obsessed with the leading lady, Rose Hobart. She portrays a woman on the hunt for her husband in the Borneo jungle; when she finds him, he is in the employ of a mysterious prince. A love triangle, naturally, results.


None of this plot, however, is represented in the film. Instead, the film is almost entirely composed of shots of Hobart, who is, at various times, talking, smiling, flirting, frowning, and generally playing the part of a romantic Hollywood lead. For Cornell, this distillation might have been the result of a self-directed obsession, but for the rest of us it serves as a fascinating study of the leading lady and how she comports herself. Watching her interact with the two principal love interests raises interesting questions about the presentation of women in Hollywood and how relationships are visualized. 

Song Of The Week - June 10

In light of Fiona Apple’s upcoming fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, which is set for release on June 19, I’ve been digging into her discography trying to get to know her better. I’ve listened mostly to her quirky pop masterpiece Extraordinary Machine, released to wide critical acclaim in 2005. The title track, in particular, has captivated me this past week.

Unlike her first two albums, the production on most of this album’s tracks is cleaner and less cluttered, giving Apple’s songs some room to breath. On “Extraordinary Machine,” I was immediately drawn into the curious, hiccupping backing track, which sounds like a mix of marimba, bells, keyboard strings, real strings, and bassoon. (Although I suspect some of it was thrown together on a bunch of keyboards.) At first, the vocal performance and Apple’s lyrics seemed almost like a secondary concern.

Repeat listens, however, draw out Apple’s performance. Starting off with a run of 14 (count ‘em!) notes that dance lightly on the same G# (if my ear is anything close to right…), Apple challenges the listener from the start. It put me in mind a little of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “Soldier,” which also bravely opens with a daunting 21 notes on the same pitch. When used correctly, it’s a masterful technique for building tension in the song, but Apple’s use is far more accomplished. While Michaelson releases that tension and never reclaims it, while Apple builds a series of jumpy rises and falls around how she stalks that G#.

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Of course, it’s not only about the notes she sings, but how she sings them. Blessed with a jazzy contralto voice, Apple shifts gears at the end of the first phrase (“I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes”) with the higher “and,” which releases the musical tension even as it lyrically creates more. That “and” moment, which she uses again in the next verse, provides a neat study lyric relating to music, a push forward and a pull back, two opposing forces caught up in a single word.

Lyrically, Apple seems less interested in meaning; the song is vague to the point of being unintelligible. One possible reading of the lyrics is that they are a woman’s reflection on the end of a troubled relationship and the happy circumstance of her being more “comfortable” in the aftermath than he is. She finds out, to the possible chagrin of the “opponent,” that she is an “extraordinary machine.” For starters, if that’s the storyline being pursued here, Apple makes some truly odd language choices—who knows what “he’ll hitch a ride with any guide” means? But, more than for meaning, Apple seems to choose the words she does for their sound

For example, take a look at the lines “I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day. / You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay.” Unusual for song lyrics, this couplet is in iambic heptameter, something you can hear in how she stresses the lines. In the second line, every second syllable begins with a ‘plosive’ sound with the exception of the ‘v’ in “view” and the ‘l’ in “lay” (d, d, k, [v], b, p, [l]). But besides her play with ‘plosives’ and iambs, she also weaves in patterns of rhyme and assonance between the lines:

I seem / You deem

To you / me due

To seek / to clean

A new / my view

[Disa— / and be]

—ster e— / at peace

—v’ry day / and lay

Of course, Apple does not treat the entirety of the song with this complex weave of poetic devices, but she does maintain the iambic tone throughout. The question remains, though, of what use this lyrical trickery is to Apple, especially if the song lacks in obvious meaning.

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Most people have heard the story (one that I long thought was apocryphal, but apparently is true) about how Paul McCartney used substitute lyrics for the song “Yesterday” when he was trying to nail down the melody. Instead of the famous first lines, the song once began with: “Scrambled eggs / oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” The songwriting practice of dropping in dud lyrics was a common one for both Lennon and McCartney and certainly one that many songwriters employ. But what does that practice tell us about the relationship between lyrics and music?

This song by Apple is lyrically fascinating, because Apple has made what seems like a conscious choice to largely disregard meaning in favor of ‘sound.’ She’s interested in the patterns she can pull together with words, the fabric that she can weave…not so much in what those sentences actually communicate. “Extraordinary Machine” finds her savoring the words as words. She opens up the space between lyrics and music within this song; the lyrics are not important for meaning, but for their sound, for the resonances she creates among these words. I look forward to seeing how she plays with words on The Idler Wheel...

"Lady Agnew" And Loving Sargent

The Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh is composed largely Old Masters—huge canvases by Velázquez, Titian, Raphael, and Rembrandt leanings down on the viewer off scarlet walls. The rooms are big and the ceilings are high; it’s an imposing gallery. But, at the far end of the gallery, a staircase leads up to a much smaller, less showy series of rooms that host the gallery’s small permanent collection of 19^th- and 20^th-century artwork. Among the painters gracing the walls there are Monet, Cézanne, and the American painter John Singer Sargent. There’s only one Sargent painting in the national gallery’s collection and it is on permanent display: “Lady Agnew of Lochlaw.” I visited the painting three times while in Edinburgh: the first time, I hardly noticed it; the second time, I sat in front of it for twenty minutes, scribbling thoughts in my notebook; the third time, I went to the gallery to see only it, nothing else.

"Lady Agnew of Lochlaw"; John Singer Sargent; 1893; National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

I’ve provided you with a photo of the painting above, but, as is always the case with pixels versus paint, the piece comes out the digital end of things a little worse for wear. That’s partly an excuse—if it doesn’t have the same magnetic pull on you that it did on me, then I’m willing to blame the technology. It’s also another kind of excurse—a kind of embarrassment: you see, I don’t know that you’ll feel quite the same way about “Lady Agnew” as I do even if you did see it in person, not one a computer screen.

In thinking about my reaction to this painting, it struck me how alone an experience with a painting is. You can’t share your look with anyone; it’s a moment just between you and the painting and it’s impossible to put into words. The second time I saw the painting, it was the same draining of emotion that I’ve felt at the end of great novels—a kind of emptying—as if the read world surrounding the novel had been drained of color. Everything else seemed to lack.

Someone—in this case, John Singer Sargent—figured how to capture that dizzying feeling of great fiction, the elation at the end of the story, and distill it into a frame, catching it there like an insect in amber. That sounds hyperbolic and silly, but there’s no easy way to explain it. Everything else looked uninteresting once I had really seen “Lady Agnew.” That might trouble some people, given that Monet and Cézanne graced the walls of the same room, but when I looked over at these paintings, I felt only appreciation, none of the same sense of experience that I felt with Sargent’s painting. I had lived, however briefly, within that painting. It changed me—and the way I think about art.

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This past week has seen me (much as you could have predicted) in a major John Singer Sargent phase. I thought, somehow, that knowing more about Sargent would bring me closer to understanding this painting and my reaction to it. I read about Sargent’s early life with his family in Europe and his interest in art as a child. I read about Sargent’s training in Paris and his work under mentor Carolus-Duran, who introduced Sargent to techniques drawn out of extensive study of Velázquez’s works. I read about his later successes and his even later disdain for that same portrait-based success. I read about how art critics have long been at odds over how Sargent should be classified: as a member of the avant-garde Impressionists who retained ties to the academic school or was he more of a black sheep figure of the academic school, who took on Impressionistic techniques without ever fully entering their world? I delved deep into the minutia of these arguments, hoping for a clue.

In her concise, insightful book Interpreting Sargent, Elizabeth Prettejohn argues that the dependence of critical discussion on these categories—academic vs. avant-garde—has actually restricted our understanding of Sargent’s work. Prettejohn offers instead that the tonal system Sargent learned from Carolus-Duran via Velázquez was a third way; it was neither the academic painting of the Paris Salons nor was it the avant-garde of Monet. Sargent’s tonal method included neither the extensive preliminary studies and diligent finishing of the academic tradition nor the patches of color method of painting that was de rigueur among the Impressionists at that period. Prettejohn sets up Sargent not as a middle-of-the-road man, but as someone who forged a different road altogether.

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But that didn’t get me anywhere. None of it did. I can confidently say that I love Sargent more fully now that I know more about his life and the context of his work, but I am no closer to ‘understanding.’ I thought—wrongly—that knowing the details would be the way into the painting. (God is in the details, is he not?) I don’t need to tell you that it didn’t help. To learn about how Sargent chose to arrange the posture of his subjects—often painting them leaning and at ease instead of properly erect as the art establishment would have dictated—was to understand the genesis of Lady Agnew’s curious pose, but not to understand me looking at the painting. And even if someone (Prettejohn! Please!) could have explained to me her inscrutable expression—that direct, confident gaze leveled at the view, coupled with her lips that verge on either a smile or a frown—it still would not have led me to understanding my own reaction. What is she thinking? What’s going on behind those eyes? Are those even fair questions to ask of the painting?

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In her book, Prettejohn addresses just that—the crucial problem of psychology. Many art critics were dismissive of Sargent in the latter part of his career and after his death in 1925; they shrugged off his work as lacking in ‘psychological depth.’ In the wake of Freud and the boom in psychoanalysis, painters and visual artists—especially portraitists—were expected to imbue their subjects with a psychological profile. It would be anachronistic, Prettejohn points out, to apply psychological criticism to a painting like “Lady Agnew.” Freud—and the artistic fashions that followed—were simply after Sargent’s time.

However, there is still a case for finding loosely psychological perceptions in Sargent’s portrait work. As Prettejohn notes, the entire practice of portrait painting had already undergone a revolution thanks to the rise of photography. By Sargent’s heyday, portrait photography was already in full swing. If someone simply wanted a likeness of himself, he would go to a photographer; he wouldn’t bother with a painter. So when people paid Sargent for a portrait, they weren’t paying for just a likeness; they were paying for something more than that.

Drawing off the work of American philosopher and psychologist William James (with whose ideas Sargent would have been familiar as an acquaintance of William’s brother, the novelist Henry James), Prettejohn argues that the ‘more’ is the subject’s ‘social self.’ In his 1890 psychology milestone, The Principles Of Psychology, William James, introduces the ‘social self’ as “the recognition which [a man] gets from his mates.” James later continues, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” Prettejohn suggests that Sargent’s mission as portraitist of high society was to approach the portraits of his subjects as more like portraits of their social selves. In most cases, this perspective on Sargent’s work is especially fruitful.

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Not only was Sargent’s era interesting for the riotous change happening in the art world, it was also notable for the sweeping social changes in Europe, especially in England. Social boundaries that were once seen as stable and impermeable were suddenly being fractured. Society was being turned upside down by a class of newly wealthy, whose appearance threatened the inherited positions of the landed aristocracy. American women who married into established European families, like Madame Gautreau (of Sargent’s infamous “Madame X”), scandalized the social words of European cities, reporters referring to them as  ‘professional beauties,’ essentially a 19^th-century synonym for ‘gold-diggers.’ Social classes were subject to constant redefinition and reevaluation.

"Madame X"; John Singer Sargent; 1883-4; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA

As such, Sargent’s task was to document a world in flux. His portraits reveal not confident stasis—as portraits of royalty by the Old Masters might have—but an encroaching insecurity and anxiety. Critics have noted the strange, ‘posed’ forms of some of his subjects; notice, for instance, the ‘pose’ of Madame Gautreau, the strain in her neck and the awkward positioning of her right arm. These signs, Prettejohn argues, are signs of the emerging ‘social self’ of Madame Gautreau. An American woman who is not European aristocracy, part of her ‘social self’ is contortionist, trying to play the part and make herself fit in. Several of his famous portraits bear out this thesis, including “Lady with the Rose” and “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” (both of which I will hopefully soon see in the Met); there is a deep insecurity lingering in the subjects of both of those paintings.

But what about “Lady Agnew”? As everyone else in Sargent’s greatest hits looks at least a little discomforted, she exists in a state of odd ease. Why?

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To tell the truth, I probably haven’t dug deep enough. I shouldn’t come to hasty conclusions. Neither of the two books I read on Sargent (the other, for those interested, was Sargent by Carter Ratcliff) addressed her in any depth. There might be some detail about her ‘social self’ that I could still dig up and explain it all away. But as of yet, I have found no key that might help me unravel the curiosity of this painting.

The more important discovery is the suspicion that nothing out there will fully explain my fascination—it will remain like that moment at the end of a novel, except without any words to latch onto…just a slouching figure and a suspect expression. And, as I knew all along, words might not be able to do it justice, but, goddamnit, I’ll keep on trying. 

The Rise Of The Princess Warrior: Stewart Breaks Out The Armor In "Snow White and the Huntsman"

Not so long ago, the sight of a woman in chainmail could only have served as the butt end of a joke in a Hollywood film. But by the time scenes of Kristen Stewart in armor roll around toward the tail end of Snow White and the Huntsman, her metal attire is not a laughing matter at all. “You look good in mail,” comments Chris Hemsworth’s grizzled Huntsman and, besides being a flashy pun on the part of the all-too-clever writers, the comment rings with sincerity. The Huntsman means no humor in pointing out Snow White’s dress; she does look good in the armor.

Kristen Stewart dons armor for her role in Snow White and the Huntsman; via altfg.com

Directed by first-timer Rupert Sanders and written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock, and Hossein Amini, Snow White and the Huntsman isn’t so much a return to the darknesses of the original Grimm Brothers fairytale (moving away from Disney’s light-hearted 1937 film, which has come to define the story in the modern day imagination) as it is a revisionist, feminist take on the tale, as both Disney and Grimm defined it: the helpless princess is a creature of the past.

More today than ever before, the archetype of the damsel in distress is an embattled figure in the modern film landscape. Twilight’s Bella Swan (conspicuously also played by Kristen Stewart) might be the last of a breed; the admiring eyes of tween girls seem to have shifted to The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence in the recent film adaptation) and Stewart’s incarnation of Snow White as potential role models. Not only are these young women strong and independent, they possess the warrior spirit, the special knack of roughhousing with the boys but escaping the tags of either ‘tomboy’ or ‘femme fatale.’

I like to think of Hollywood’s acceptance of something as a kind of societal measuring stick: how far have we made it? Take, for example, Sean Penn’s Best Oscar win for his portrayal of Harvey Milk in 2008; that acceptance into the inner Oscar circle represented an important cultural victory for gay rights in the U.S. As the final frontier of American culture, once a movement or social concept breaks down the battlements of Hollywood, then it’s there to stay—perhaps even to rule. The successes seen by Katniss and Snow White—The Hunger Games owns the distinction of being the first film in the top-grossing action films of all-time helmed by a female lead and Snow White and the Huntsman has already grossed over $100 million in the worldwide box office—will not be isolated ones; I suspect that we will see a parade of warrior princesses in the near cinematic future.

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As culturally relevant as the film might be, the question remains of whether or not it’s any good. As it turns out, Sanders et al have turned out a pretty decent popcorn flick. Chief among its delights are Charlize Theron’s turn as the evil queen Ravenna and the stunning visuals, put together by cinematographer Greig Fraser, who served as director of photography for Jane Campion’s Keats biopic Bright Star, another film that played around in the lushness of nature. Fraser’s eye for detail sometimes feels overwrought, but he hits the right note in key moments, like the woodsy charm he provides the fairy paradise, which could easily have teetered into ham-handed hokeyness.

The plot is a bit convoluted and the characters, besides the queen and Snow White, are a little too shakily drawn to be of any enduring interest. Both the Huntsman and William, Snow White’s aristocratic love interest, beg for further development. All around, the acting is no better than you’d expect from a summer blockbuster; Stewart’s turn as Snow White is the one bright spot in the film. (Although I admit the talent I detect in her performance might be partly due to how little the Twilight series asks of her in comparison.) Either way, I admired how she balanced a character composed of equal parts muted anger and wide-eyed wonder, of singleness of purpose and self-discovery. She is both warring firebrand and sensitive caretaker. One might go so far as to say that this incarnation Snow White is even a series of paradoxes: a paragon of innocence edged with anger and violence, a damsel in distress who does not ask for our help.

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Beauty, as a cultural entity, finds itself under attack in this film—not only literally, as in the case of Charlize Theron’s CGI-assisted facial wrinkles, but also conceptually, in terms of how humanity chooses to understand beauty and the pursuit of its ideal. After all, every story of Snow White—no matter how revisionist—begins with the same question: Who is the fairest of them all? It seemed like a harmless, natural question when I came across the story as a child (and probably still seems that way in the recent film Mirror, Mirror), but this film transforms the question into a much darker dialogue.

One of the film’s most successful scenes is that in which Ravenna is speaking to the mirror on the wall, which, it ought to be noted, has oozed off its Zildjian-cymbal surface and taken human form. However, Ravenna’s brother, whose point-of-view is picked up as he spies on his sister from around a corner, sees her speaking to no one; the mirror remains motionless on the wall. It is a brief, but powerful point about the captivating power of one’s own image and the obsessive battle that some people have with their own likenesses.

Additionally, the film implicitly questions the notion of an ideal of beauty. Once Ravenna asks the mirror who “the fairest” is, she enters into a relation with the world in which beauty is a measurable commodity, in which women can somehow be slotted onto a scale. It is, of course, a nonsensical notion—one that you hope could only ever exist in a fairytale…except for the fact that it doesn’t. Many people carry that kind of illogical conceptualization of beauty with them through their everyday lives.

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The best moment in this film is the end. (Spoiler alert, if you somehow didn’t sense the parade of spoilers headed your way.) Snow White is crowned queen and the court, which fills the castle hall, looks on in joy. The film gives us close-ups of the Huntsman and the duke’s nephew William. They both flash admiring (adoring?) glances in the direction of Snow White. In the final shot, the camera backs down the hall’s center aisle, away from Snow White’s throne, and out the heavy wooden doors, which close in on us. The credits roll. Crucially, the closed door cuts us off from the romantic entanglements of the story; the film provides Snow White with a choice, but it doesn’t make her choose. The two male suitors are left hanging. They may or may not be chosen by Snow White. Unlike her counterpart Bella Swan, there is a third choice (outside of Edward and Jacob)…that being no choice. However, that’s not the end of the door’s significance.

The most famous door closed in the face of the audience is, of course, the door swung shut on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers. It might come off as humorous at first, but the closed door is, in fact, weightily symbolic, serving as a reminder of the separation between the audience and the character and vice versa. When the door closes on Wayne’s receding back, it contextualizes an obvious statement: we can’t get out there and he can’t get in here. It seems to me that the door at the end of Snow White and the Huntsman serves a similar purpose.

It remains to be puzzled out, however, who we, as the audience, represent and who Snow White, as a fairytale character, represents. In my reading, Snow White represents a new kind of female hero, who may or may not be separated from the rest of the world—the rest of Hollywood in particular. I think there’s room, however, for her kind of character on our outside. Indeed, I consider myself one among many who would like to see a world filled with young women who choose one version of Stewart over another—the Snow White version, of course. And who doesn’t want to be a princess?