Schneewittchen
Michael Ball or The Fall I could listen to them all
Hello, here is some new writing.
Schneewittchen (Stanley Schtinter, 2025)
Schneewittchen opens with a gag. A montage of three still black and white images move us closer to a body in the snow. In the second and third we see the face of a young, fair haired man.
How this joke plays to the viewer relies on three things:
a) the viewer having seen the photos of Robert Walser’s dead body.
b) the viewer having seen João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000).
c) the viewer knowing what Stanley Schtinter looks like.
Schtinter’s film is a remake of Monteiros’s Branca de Neve; a Portuguese language adaptation of Robert Walser’s anti-fairytale addendum to Snow White almost entirely set to a black image. The original text begins as the fairytale ends, with Snow White returned to life and the accusation of guilt levied at the Queen. From henceforth, Snow White, Queen, Prince and Huntsman, all of whom seem unsure of what has happened and their role in it, each try to find some foundation of understanding by revisiting or recomposing the fairytale.
Schtinter’s stated impetus for the remake was a reflection on what, in a bloated Hollywood film culture limping on, reliant on franchises and remakes, would be the absolute last film to receive an english language remake but Branca de Neve. The irony of this is that the obstructing force of subtitles on a black image renders perhaps no film more lost to the viewer not fluent in Portuguese. In pursuit of his joke the director has assembled a celebrity cast and hired the go-to celluloid DOP Sean Price Williams to make a shot for shot remake. As in the original, we hear a ‘performance’ of the play against a black image, whose scenes are broken up by images of the sky and clouds. A pan which appears about midway through the original of the foundations of a mosque in Portugal is not recreated and no alternative image appears in its place.
I have watched the original film subtitled and was moved by it. Comparatively, Schneewittchen is careless. Little direction seems to have been given to the actors in line readings, despite the film’s form necessitating precise control of pauses, stresses, and pronunciations. Instead we have sentences running into each other, unnatural shifts in the sound, and muffled audio. One of the cast members seems bored, others vary between Brechtian recitation or RADA emotion. In tune with the latter of these inclinations, the decisions on environmental sound and foley work are to overdramatise the text, the calm of the garden pushed to a kitschy level of twittering birds and trickling water, superseded by thunder and ominous tones when a scene approaches a climax. The strength of this results in a structure which moves through a simple binary of sound (play) and image (sky), where Monteiro left the dialogue sparse and unified the sensation of music and image.
To watch Branca de Neve is to feel that there is an image, only one that is behind a veil, lost to us. The actors engagement with eachother and presence in the space is immanent even if it cannot be perceived. It is this which creates the structural affect of dislocation which coheres the spectatorial and fictive. The complete failure of this element of Schneewittchen means that any poetic connection or emotive power which could emerge between Snow White as revenant and the films conceit as a zombie remake after the death of (a) cinema simply doesn’t. It also means the film collapses on the level of montage as all that remains of its images are the eyes sudden adjustment from darkness to light, and the pleasure of looking at the sky, without any echo of the text.
In Monteiro’s film the opening images of Walser’s dead body casts a pall across the entire film, excavating and interrogating the death of the author and the death of the author. Snow White’s displacement and uncertainty, untethered in a world after death, becomes the ghost of Walser reanimated from the text, the clouds and skies maybe those the last one the author saw. There is a queasy sensation upon the realisation at the start of Schneewittchen, that these are not the same photos that opened Monteiro’s film. And the suggestion of digital interference in their uncanniness might be the film’s closest hit against the culture Schtinter has set the joke up against. The one moment in the film which dares to be gaudy, insensitive, and provocative. More frictionless is the eliding of the mosque foundations as a comment on anglophone Islamophobia, implying a besuited studio exec somewhere looking at the entirely enigmatic pan in the original and saying “this won’t do”. Yet as a position this appears in the film only as valuelessness. Without the awful concrete materiality of death, we are merely left with a signposts to the films conceptual construct of Schtinter after Monteiro after Walser, and an unease which the production fails to instil into the performance. The death of cinema is a cliche, it is not the death of a man.
To emphasise its comment on film culture a sole 35mm print has been struck, which will continue to degrade as it tours. The quality of its black is already pretty poor, appearing as a dim brown in projection. Despite the focus drawn to the materiality of its exhibition Schtinter seemed reluctant to talk about the specifics of the film’s material production, whether it be the actual filming process or the work with the performers. A dropped hint seemed to suggest that the actors had not worked face to face. Cheaper actors with more availability might have produced some affect, though a recognisable name is of course more important to the structure of the joke.
While these issues explain the limpidness of watching the film, I agree there would be as little use in a well done remake. Instead I wonder if there is a version of this film more willing to be tasteless or funny, which makes more imaginative use of the ‘image breaks’? A version that irks the purists while functioning as a film. But the joke is on me and the film simply exists to be bad in a mundane way, as a lazy anglo-remake. The film, as a conceit, recognises its own redundancy and is constructed to head off what would be two common responses: the anger of the bored, aggravated, or frustrated viewer, who can be laughed off as ‘not getting it’, or the banal pretension of the knowing audience member who says “the original is actually good”. Either way the film’s point about the futility of contemporary film culture has been made. For its pretensions towards the celluloid and the cinema house, the film is resolutely of the white cube: its existence fulfils its own purpose without the necessity of anyone having seen it. To engage critically is futile: the joke has already been made, the filmmaker already dead in the snow.