Snow White as Creativity

In Paul Saffo’s article, “The Place of Originality in the Information Age, Saffo discusses technology and originality. How the machine has reproduced work with a precision and speed never before seen. Machines are taking us into an “age of infinite recall”

Human culture has been shaped by a dance of two opposing forces: memory and forgetfulness. Memory gives us context while forgetfulness provides an opening for invention and originality. Successful creativity occurs when the two are balanced and originality is set within the larger context of tradition.

In an age of infinite recall, any information can be traced back to its origin with machine like precision with paths of duplication diagrammed to perfection. According to Saffo, this is a myth, “origin is not a point but a continuum, and the process of originality is much more linked than we imagine.”

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) is Disney’s first full-length animated feature. It is hardly the first telling of this story. The Internet Movie Database (IMD.com) shows more than thirty separate examples of Snow White. Now some of these could just be the title, but they range from 1917 to 2007, most recently perhaps in Shrek the Third. Here is an Internet example of the Snow White story as told through Betty Boop. (http://www.archive.org/details/bb_snow_white)

The site http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/snowwhitetext.html has a version from 1898, while http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html have a slightly different version from 1812.

Snow White is listed as a Aarne Thompson type 709 folktale. The Aarne Thompson scale tries to collect stories by the elements in them

The indexed AT motifs are limited mainly to European and European-derived tales that are known to have been told by mouth at the time they were published. … AT-numbers may be used to (1) identify tale types, (2) isolate motifs, (3) locate cultural variants.

(http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html)

This fits I think into what Saffo was saying about creativity. The Grimm brothers aren’t the original creators of the tale, they are just the creators of their variations. I say variations because details change between them, such as the mother becoming a stepmother and how the apple was dislodged from Snow White’s throat, bring her back to life.

As Professor Edwards pointed out in lecture, creativity comes into play when you add something of yourself to the project. The authors have done that here. The story has been spread over cultures, and been around for more than 100 years. The continuum of creativity continues.

I know that when it comes to characters, the first version is the one I remember the most. It takes a lot for that second version to become more popular. I remember that one of the writers on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings said she was sad in a way because their version of the characters might take away from the version readers had created in their minds.

This might cause some people to call a movie remake a “knock-off.” What is the difference between a homage and a rip-off? Is just semantics, or giving credit where credit is due?

Authors who are writing a story may look at other author’s work because they need to learn how others have written themselves out of corners. I think that creativity comes into play when the author looks at a situation in a unique way.

The great authors and movie-makers can break the rules, because they know how to uniquely bend the rules. They understand the tradition that has come before them. I find myself looking at my own work in the same course as a resource on how to perform a certain task.

As far as originality, there are apparently only a few original plots. The Internet Public Library lists one, up to 36 plots. (http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html)

As a New Media professional, I hope, in this time of infinite recall, we can use it as a resource, not for personal gain against other artists, but as a way to make our projects better. Surely, we can be recognized for our creativity without infringing on the art of others.