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Paper short abstract

The paper focuses on the entanglements between humans, non-humans, and natural locations in the 2015 film "Tale of Tales." As an adaptation of baroque fairy tales from the seventeenth century, the film arguably reinforces human-nature relations while playing with our sense of place and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Matteo Garrone’s 2015 film "Tale of Tales" investigates the darkest imperfections of human nature while staging Giambattista Basile’s baroque fairy tales in ethereal-yet-real locations in Italy. Garrone’s source material are hyperbolic stories about corporeal metamorphoses, human vices, and social struggles, which Basile wrote in the Neapolitan language and assembled in his literary collection of fifty tales, "Lo cunto de li cunti" ("The Tale of Tales," 1634-1636). Besides being a linguistically adventurous and satirical book, "Lo cunto de li cunti" also established the literary fairy-tale genre in Europe. Yet, "Tale of Tales" is only its second film adaptation to date. The paper focuses on how, while adapting to the screen in an Anglophone international production three of Basile’s stories, the film produces unique cinematic entanglements between humans, non-humans, and the environment. "Tale of Tales" is not only rich in crossovers between human and non-human beings already narrated by Basile—examples are a woman turning into a bat; a flea being raised as offspring by a king; and the battle between a man and a sea dragon, whose heart will be eaten by the man’s wife—but the unbreakable continuum between characters and natural surroundings is also made evident in the film through several production choices such as costumes, coloring, material special effects, and computer-generated images. As an adaptation of seventeenth-century fairy tales, how does a twenty-first-century film reimagine our humanity? The paper argues that "Tale of Tales" reinforces human-nature relations while playing with our sense of place and belonging.