10 Dec Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Stained Glass

I have a lot of complaints about Disney; what he made personally and the lumbering beast his studio has become.

In particular, he murdered one of the most precious literary structures we have in Alice. But in his first big project, he did well enough to change the world. In its day, this was a rule-changer, the Star Wars of its day. Everything that happened afterward was different.

Many people credit the characterisations, which Disney never did as well afterward, creating a vacuum for Pixar to fill. I admit that except for the “swallow the soap” trick, I liked that element.

But I think there is something more fundamental at work.

Movies are basically about visual notation. It is less about what the stories are than how they are told. One of the evolutions that I track is the business of outside awareness. But this, I think is something different, sort of in the opposite direction. We had comics before, where objects were not masses but boundaries. We had cartoons before, where large blobs of grey and then colour defined shapes that we assigned identities to. But this has two things. They were revolutionary.

The first is the narrative long form. It isn’t complex; it has only one arc. We even know what the arc is and how it will end, the only mystery (for the original viewers) being in the cinematics of the thing. Disney would stumble later, on understanding the nature of long form storytelling but here he does what must have seemed impossible.

The second is more visual. At the time, this seemed more natural and organic than anything that had gone before (except for the Prince — Disney always has trouble with men). We focus on the dwarfs, but the girl has mannerisms that are beyond anything we had seen before, the best being Betty Boop before the censors intervened.

But there’s something deeper, and to explain it, we need some history. Light is magical. Reflected light isn’t very special, light like you see bouncing off a magazine page. The colours you see are dimmer than real world colours because of the strength of the light of course, but what you see is what is not absorbed. You see the leftovers. In stained glass, the light comes through, directly from the source. The colours you see are more vibrant. Ancient glassmasters formulated glass that the moderns do not, so if you have a chance to see one (like the Tree of Jesse in Chartres) you will see millions of facets in each colour because of the way that the colour was layered on in a “flashing” process, creating refractive crystal boundaries.

These windows are a profound experience because of this scintillation effect that is subliminal. Like these old cartoons, the beings and objects are blobs of shimmering colour with outlines that infer identity. Its a deep art that exists no where else, and not even since in stained glass.

Now another fact. Snow is not white. Snow is a collection of ordered micro-crystals that refract light in all colours. The combined effect adds to white, but as you move ever so slightly, you will be receiving millions of millions of flashes of pure colour. And now a final fact. In 1952, when I saw this on a huge screen, the screen technology involved faceted grains of silica that had this snow-effect of micro-refraction. Today’s screens use microspheres, tiny balls with smooth surfaces, so the effect is not the same. And obviously digital screens are another matter. They all preserve this “transmitted light” effect of stained glass, as do all films. (But the new mastering of the cartoon for DVD does increase the purity of the colors, emphasising the stained glass semiotics.)

I recently saw this on DVD, and was instantly reminded of the viewing 55 years ago, which washed over with a blizzard of snow scintillations with medieval weight, both in the story and the stained glass. I’ve never lost that thrill, and I wish it for you. This changed me and it changed film.

Posted in 2008

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB