Paper Short Abstract:

The presentation examines the ways in which popular visual and oral adaptations of folk- and fairy tales in different media (e. g. storybook illustration, glass slide, slide film and animation film) have fundamentally shaped our knowledge of traditional tales in terms of narrative style, tale types and motifs since the late 19th century.

Paper Abstract:

Folk- and fairy tales essentially convey images, their narrators think in pictures rather than in words, which are transmitted orally in traditional communities. It is this characteristic that makes tales particularly suited to presenting their plots through visual representations. As Ágnes Kovács pointed out in the 1940s, when she introduced the outstanding Hungarian storytelling tradition of a village in the Kalotaszeg region (now: Ketesd/Tetișu, Transylvania, Romania): „A fairy tale is a series of letters only in transcription and in print, but in reality it is a chain of images. This series of images is alive in the Ketesd storyteller” (Kovács 1943: 52.). A few years later, Stith Thompson emphasised in another context that the „cinema, especially the animated cartoon, is perhaps the most successful of all mediums for the presentation of the fairy tale. Creatures of the folk imagination can be constructed with ease and given lifelike qualities.” (Thompson 1946: 461). It appears that contemporary urban mass culture, originating in the late 19th century, has developed its own traditions of oral and visual storytelling, spread through various forms of mass media. The presentation focuses on a specific visual technique and art form (the projected image) from a folkloristic point of view and examines a unique media genre, the slide film (also known as 'diafilm') which was extremely popular in the Soviet bloc in the second half of the 20th century and which brought many folk- and fairy tale adaptations to a wide audience.