A weekend screening in the Walker Cinema of the new 4K restoration of The Juniper Tree by Nietzchka Keene (1952–2004) prompts an insightful conversation with Jack Zipes, a University of Minnesota professor emeritus, critical theorist, storyteller, a prolific author on fairy tales (including 2011’s The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films), and editor of scholarly collections such as Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1987).
DEBORAH GIRDWOOD (DG)
Tell us a little bit about the original Grimm brothers’ fairy tale, The Juniper Tree.
JACK ZIPES (JZ)
The Grimms’ The Juniper Tree recounts the bloody murder of a little boy by a stepmother who wants her biological daughter, Marlene, to inherit all the family’s money. This tale is extremely important in folklore because it is only one of two printed in dialect in the Grimms’ collection and contains motifs that may hark back several thousands of years. The tale begins with a childless mother, who wishes for a child under a juniper tree. She eats its berries. When she gives birth to a baby boy, she dies. The father remarries, and her new wife gives birth to a girl named Marlene. The stepmother mistreats the son and kills him by slamming the lid on a chest of apples to cut off his head. She places the blame on her innocent daughter, cooks the boy in a stew, and serves it to the father. Marlene, who is distraught, collects the bones of her stepbrother and places them beneath the juniper tree. The bones disappear and a magical bird flies off and sings a song, revealing the murder. Eventually, the stepmother is also killed and the bird joins the family.
DG
How does Keene’s adaption differ? What is the context she explores with her film?
JZ
Unlike the Grimms’ tale, Keene’s film takes place sometime in the late middle ages, as indicated by the persecution of witches. Made in Iceland, it is clear that Keene was looking for a landscape that reinforced the barren atmosphere of her film. This historical connection and the setting immediately distinguish the film from the Grimms’ tale. The choice of black and white cinematography is, in my opinion, perfect.
In Keene’s version, you know right from the beginning that this is not a tale about a boy being killed and eaten, but this is a tale about two desperate daughters of a witch who was unjustly executed, stoned and drowned. Keene signals from the very beginning that this is going to be a story about the plight of women.
DG
What connection do you see between the director and the feminist movement of Keene’s time? And why would feminists use fairy tales?
JZ
When Nietzchka Keene—an American film director, writer, and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison—made The Juniper Tree during the late 1980s, she was in her mid-30s and would have been influenced by the feminist movement of that era. In the ’70s, the two key writers were Anne Sexton and Angela Carter. Their two major publications, I think, set a standard for all writers, filmmakers, and so on who were part of the feminist movement. Sexton’s Transformations, a collection of feminist poems retelling the Grimms’ fairytales, appeared in 1971 and was then followed by Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in 1979. Those two books challenged how traditional fairytales tend to be patriarchal in some way or another even though they may have great social justice themes in them. Female characters are generally persecuted, victimized, and are not very strong in in the Grimms’s tales, with some exceptions.
Women began realizing that these tales that were fed to them, like milk from their mother’s breasts, were actually poisonous. Women had been told for hundreds of years that a young man must come by and save them. And so this myth that fairytales were good for children was something that a lot of very intelligent, capable, talented women and men began to question, ideologically. They realized that these tales were told to make women conform to laws, rules, regulations, and customs that were not of their own making. And so a revolution began, and I think it began first among the women writers of that time and up through today. Women artists began questioning all of the standard Grimms’ tales. It also led to women making their own fairytale films. Aside from Keene’s work, there are other exceptional works, like Ericka Beckman’s Cinderella (1986), which is absolutely brilliant and similar as a low-budget film made by a woman who has a conception of what it means to be caught in a web, a systematic web imposed upon women as to how they should behave and live their lives.
DG
Is Keene’s version a witch story or a fairy tale?
JZ
The film is indeed eerie, and one of the reasons is due to the fact that we cannot explain the irrational. The rites or rituals that take place remain mysterious, and we are compelled to see life through people who have mixed pagan beliefs. One might call it a hybrid fairy tale. Its origins in the folk tradition are clear. In this sense, it is more a folk tale than a fairy tale.
In Keene’s time, the use of the term witch had already been changed by the feminist movement. To be a witch was to be a good thing. Witches were known to have power, and men, in particular, were afraid of this power or, let us say, the ruling elites would be afraid of witches and what they might do. This is why Keene starts the film with two young women whose mother had just been stoned and drowned for being a witch. They search for some place to go where they would not be discovered as being her daughters.
DG
Can you talk about sewing in the film, and the relevance to fairy tale scholarship and to feminism?
JZ
You see this in several of the Grimms’ tales, where sewing is very, very important—in Rapunzel and even Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin. Spinning is also exceedingly important in the medieval period and up to, and actually through, the 19th century because peasants used to make their own clothes. The more you could sew, the more you would be valuable to some man who was looking for a young wife who would be productive.
The whole notion of sewing is used in a different way in Keene’s film. It’s used to sew the mouth of Jonas so he won’t reveal what has happened. So sewing is used not just to appeal to a man but to keep the secrets that are important for her safety, for her, to safeguard her own future. She uses it in a controlling way, whereas sewing was, one could say, controlling the fate of young women.
DG
I thought of the myth of the three Fates, spinning and controlling human destiny, when Margit put her own hair into the wool she’s spinning and said a spell over it.
JZ
Going back to the Greek myths about the Fates, people believed in these three Fates and that they were very powerful. They were then transformed in the medieval period, again, into witches and branded as dangerous. Fairies, in fact, were also considered dangerous. And so all of these sorts of originally pagan goddesses who were worshiped lost their sacred status.
DG
What do you say when people question how the stepmother gets a bad rap or how the mother is always killed in fairy tales, including The Juniper Tree?
JZ
My interpretation, at least with regard to the Grimms, is that they revered their own mother, and because they revered her they did not want to depict mothers as potential witches and murderers. And so the Grimms felt that instead of blaming a mother we have to shift the blame to a stepmother. We have to remember that tons of women died in giving birth to children, and they had like five or 10, 15 children in a family. So, what does a man do to look after his four or five children? He finds a 14- or 15-year-old or 18-year-old girl, marries her, and she comes into the family and is as old as perhaps one of the children. So, in other words, it’s true that there were these major battles that went on between stepmother and stepchildren, and yet stepmothers should not be blamed for being in a situation which is very complex. Instead of pointing the finger at the criminality of the stepmother and punishing her for her crime, Keene’s film is a radical reinterpretation of the stepmother’s actions and demands a more nuanced reading of infanticide, especially when it is caused by women. In this regard, the film is a feminist reinterpretation (without being didactic) of the Grimms’ tale.
DG
The film is immersed in tragedy, isolation, loneliness, grief, fear for survival. Is there a message of hope?
JZ
You put your finger on the film’s essence! However, you forgot to add that the film is about women’s anxieties, not male anxieties, loneliness, grief, and desire to survive. It has a dreamlike desolate atmosphere, and due to the hills made of lava and lack of vegetation, it appears as if this film signals the end of the world. Life can be very savage if you are not privileged. It is a bleak and honest film. As a feminist film, it certainly strikes a positive chord, for the independent young women have caused no harm and are running away from danger. They are good witches, searching for survival.
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