"Re-enchantment: Ways To Interpret Fairy Tales" Now An iBook

If you're not familiar with Re-enchantment, it's a wonderful multimedia exploration of fairy tales, what they mean and how we use them. Inspiring for students, writers, artists and fairy tale enthusiasts in general, this is a wonderful and different fairy tale tool to have in your fairy tale library and research arsenal.

It's one of those presentations you can't quite believe has been created until you see it, and then you wonder why it has't been done before, because it makes so much sense. And it will excite you about the importance and power of fairy tales, more than ever.

I previously posted information about Re-enchantment: The Hidden Meanings Of Fairy Tales DVD HERE (and I thoroughly recommend the DVD!).

Re-enchantment is an immersive journey into the hidden meanings of fairy tales. Presented as an interactive multi-platform documentary project, it explores why fairy stories continue to enchant, entertain, fascinate and horrify contemporary adult audiences. From Rapunzel to Cinderella, and Bluebeard to Snow White, Re-enchantment challenges us to think about the hold these stories have on us and the way they are reinterpreted throughout our life and culture.

Recent good news to add to this, is that Film Art Media and Inside Out productions have also just released it in iBook form, available through iTunes.

Take a look at the intriguing trailer:

Here's more information to give you a better idea of what this project is, in case this is your first time hearing of it (emphasis in bold is mine):

Fairy tales are incredibly popular and well suited to an interactive landscape. The stories shape-shift over time and throughout cultures. They are mysterious. They can be entered from many angles and in different media. They are full of motifs and symbols. They can be interpreted in a multitude of ways that lend themselves to a multi-platform approach. 

Traditional fairy tales have a powerful hold on our cultural imagination. Adapted, revised and bowdlerised, they greet us in print and popular fiction, as a reality TV show to find an Australian princess, at the movies as Pan’s Labyrinth, Fur, Sex and the City and in advertisements for everything from Chanel to Moccona Coffee. They have been reworked by visual artists and photographers from Cindy Sherman and Corinna Sargood to Paula Rego and Rosemary Valadon. 

Rather than stripping away the mystery and enchantment, Re-enchantment shows how threading together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture, deepens our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairy tales. 

Re-enchantment has been four years in the making and is groundbreaking in its originality and its scope. It is a poetic and provocative act of creative interpretation of fairy tales, bringing together digital video, documentary footage, feature film sequences, advertising, cartooning, photography, 
animation, artwork, still images and sound. 

Re-enchantment iBook Description:

Why do fairy tales continue to stir our adult imaginations? Fairy tale narratives and motifs are everywhere: in cinema, advertising, theatre, fiction and the visual arts. Why do they still enchant and entertain?  What are their hidden meanings? RE-ENCHANTMENT : WAYS TO INTERPRET FAIRY TALES, proposes new approaches to fairy tale interpretation: unlocking their archetypal motifs, symbols and psychological wisdom. 

Written by filmmaker and Jungian analyst Sarah Gibson and designed by Rose Draper, this visually stimulating eBook features video, audio, animation and stunning graphic design. It showcases re-imaginings by over thirty contemporary artists. Be curious. Be surprised. Be inspired. 

Here are the specs:

$4.99 - Available on iPad and Mac.Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iPad with iBooks 3 or later and iOS 5.1 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later.

There's also a multimedia "multi-touch" study guide for Re-enchantment available HERE. The description is below:

Re-enchantment Study Guide by Sue Maslin & Sarah Gibson 

Re-enchantment is an immersive journey into the hidden meanings of fairy tales. Presented as an interactive iBook, it explores why fairy tales enchant, fascinate and horrify contemporary adult audiences. 

Re-enchantment provides users with an experience that is both immersive and interactive. As a creative interpretation of fairy tales, it brings together text, digital video, documentary footage, feature film sequences, cartooning, photography, artwork, still images and sound.  

$1.99 - Available on iPad and Mac.
Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iPad with iBooks 2 or later and iOS 5.0 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later.

This book is available for download with iBooks on your Mac or iPad, and with iTunes on your computer. Multi-touch books can be read with iBooks on your Mac or iPad. Books with interactive features may work best on an iPad.

You can find and follow Re-enchantment on Facebook HERE.

by Jazmina Cininas

Google is Celebrating American Folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston's Birthday Today

Google pays tribute to an African-American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston today (and I finally added her to my board of Influential Fairy Tale People as well). She was a fascinating woman who found herself overlapping in disciplines and fields of study, both in anthropology and the Arts. While it would seem anyone who dips a serious toe into the waters of fairy tale and folklore tend to do this, Ms. Hurston did this, not only with a subject that hadn't received too much serious scholarly attention till then (the subject of black American folklore), but particularly during a time in which black culture in the US was undergoing serious cultural and political changes (20's to the 50's).

I just love this brief selection of anecdotes regarding her work as it describes so much of her drive, her work and how far ahead of her time she was in her research (from the Kislak Foundation):

In 1927 a wealthy patron, Charlotte L. Mason of New York, gave Hurston a car, a camera and $200 a month to travel throughout the American South and record the folklife and lore of the people she encountered. She explored Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, and gathered hundreds of folk tales, most still unpublished. The tales have been described as a "cultural window into how people lived." 

She continued her writing and research, traveling to Jamaica, Bermuda, Honduras and Haiti. In Haiti, she studied voodoo and collected Caribbean folklore that was anthologized in her book, Tell My Horse, published in 1937. The title came from Haitian Voodoo ceremonies, where a person possessed by a spirit is ridden like a horse by the spirit. The spirit speaks through the person, the horse being ridden, and may say, "Tell my horse..." She also wrote about zombie beliefs and the idea that there was a poison that certain Bokors (Voodoo Priests) knew about that produced a deathlike state in recipients. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) she wrote:

What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.

Almost 50 years later her theory was scientifically confirmed.

Although it has taken a while for her work to be properly recognized for a number of reasons she's had a lot of posthumous recognition and in 2002 was named in the list of Greatest 100 African Americans.

There are now a lot of resources available to read up on her life and work but to give you a brief overview (Google it!) but I'll post some quotes to get you started.

From Mules and Men, the book Roger D. Abrahams called "Simply the most exciting book on black folklore and culture I have ever read", here's the publishers blurb:

Mules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her "native village" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, "big old lies," and the lyrical language of song. With this collection, Zora Neale Hurston has come to reveal'and preserve'a beautiful and important part of American culture.

Regarding her work with folklore, here are a couple of excerpts from Wikipedia:

By the mid-1930s, Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), a groundbreaking work of "literary anthropology" documenting African-American folklore. In 1930, she also collaborated with Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts, a play that was never finished, although it was published posthumously in 1991. 

In 1937, Hurston was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse (1938) documents her account of her fieldwork studying African rituals in Jamaica and vodoun rituals in Haiti. Hurston also translated her anthropological work into the performing arts, and her folk revue, The Great Day premiered at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1932. 

Hurston's first three novels were also published in the 1930s: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). 

...Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of cultural and political reasons. 

Many readers objected to the representation of African-American dialect in Hurston's novels, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. For example, a character in Jonah's Gourd Vine expresses herself in this manner: 

"Dat's a big ole resurrection lie, Ned. Uh slew-foot, drag-leg lie at dat, and Ah dare yuh tuh hit me too. You know Ahm uh fightin' dawg and mah hide is worth money. Hit me if you dare! Ah'll wash yo' tub uh 'gator guts and dat quick." 

...In 2001, Every Tongue Got to Confess was published posthumously. The book was a collection of field materials Hurston had gathered in the late 1920s to create her book Mules and Men. Originally entitled "Folktales from the Gulf States", filmmaker Kristy Andersen had discovered the previously unknown collection of folk tales while researching the Smithsonian archives when they were placed in computer catalogs in 1997.

I've included images of a number of her folkloric works in the post so you can keep an eye out for them in your travels.

Happy 123rd birthday Zora!

Thanks for all the stories.

Additional links: HERE, HERE & HERE

Poster: Fairy Tale Composers, Creators & Collectors

Fairy tale - composers and creators by secondlina

Here's something neat you don't see too often: a poster with a collection of influential fairy tale people in history! It's not a complete collection by any means and I would have added more but I love that quite a few often-overlooked but very important people are shown here.

If this has your research-antennae vibrating and you'd like more in this vein, I started a Pinterest board of Influential Fairy Tale People HERE. It's a long way from complete (there's only about 75 people there at present) and I'm actually not sure it ever could be complete!) but it's a good collection of faces behind the names of people we are all very grateful to for there passion and work in a field we love so much.

This is by Isabelle M. (aka secondlina on deviantArt) who has a number of fairy tale illustrations in her gallery.

She also has posters of the ":Fairy tale composers and creators" available for purchase ($10 for an 8.5 x 11) HERE as well. (Check the rest of the products on this page as well - there's a lot to appeal to fairy tale folk here - especially Wizard of Oz fans.)