Yorinda and Yoringel by Bodo Fürneisen: Type of the Hero and Trial in Screen-Presented Fairy Tale

Abstract

The film Yorinda and Yoringel by Bodo Fürneisen, created on the basis of the recordings of a folktale by the Grimm brothers, shows an affinity for both a literary fairy tale and romance traditions, including a post-modern novel with a hero’s free choice of identity as the basis of the plot movement. To analyze the film, we relied on the methodology of psychoanalytic cinema science by Slavoj Žižek, supplementing it with the achievements of fundamental plotology from Freidenberg and Propp to the present day. At the same time, the nature of the film as a screen medium showed how the need for a more flexible plot development scheme, including compliance with changes in the character of the hero or his specific phenomenon on the screen, is not just one option for the development of actions, but a whole fan of the possibilities of such development. It is proved that the screen medium, which requires to monitor not only the correspondence of the hero’s adventures to expectations, but also the unexpected phenomena of the hero, demanded to modify the plot, which acquired not only the features of a psychological and adventurous novel, but also a computer game. At the same time, Fürneisen’s experience requires adjusting the psychoanalysis of cinema, supplementing the study of the effect of reality with the opposite effect of thought. The cinema allows you to demonstrate how not only the hero’s intentions change, but also the content of thoughts that are relatively autonomous from intentions that belong to the hero’s existence. At the same time, the existence is realized unexpectedly, so that the magical item is modified into a McGuffin, and the hero himself can repeatedly pass the fabulous test, while such a repetition will not be a way to correlate imagination and reality, as in a book narrative, but a way to once again appreciate the wonderful character of the hero. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that the literary (Hans Christian Andersen), stage (Richard Wagner) and cinematic (Fürneisen) variations of the fairy tale plot do not simply subordinate it to some rules of the novel, in accordance with the prevailing tastes in society. Most of the changes are secondary to the change in the general concept of the hero, when the scenarios of existential choice are put in place of the test scenario and their uniqueness is defended. The structure of the on-screen memory and on-screen attention accelerates this design of the hero, although it does not completely determine it. Then the function of all the fabulous elements changes, moreover, the plot itself turns out to contain variability. In place of the usual separation between the world of sleep and the world of reality comes the existential test of both worlds. Thus, such processing of fairy tales is productive for the development of virtuality in art and for dialogue not only between different arts, but also art and various social practices related to information technology, from computer games to blogging.