Pans Labyrinth's opening scene shows the cyclical framework associated with the City of God thus linking both Post-civil war Spain's practical random violent and fascist truth in 1944 with the underworld where laws and consequences make sense Pans Labyrinth immediately begs the questions from the beginning inside the audience-is the underworld real? I don't personally think that way. I think it can be argued both ways easily, but we are evident to me by film type in which world we really live in. Mercedes Melody, which we also hear in the closing sequence, opens the scene. The contextual subtitles not only create the harsh reality in which our heroine lives, but also the one from which she desperately wants to escape. Then a close-up that eventually opens into an intense close-up in Ofelia's eye follows to convey that we are really in her mind, perhaps to the people who assume that the underworld is a coping mechanism for Ophelia The cinematography has a very dim and cool tone. The cinematography plays the conventional roles of warm and cold toned lighting in the film, where the natural world is warm toned, which is harsh and violent, and the soothing underworld appears dim and cool toned. Del Toros' use of camera movement is the only thing that makes the life of the underworld unclear. Unclear unclear unclear. Instead of jarring cuts or some cuts at all, he pans the camera smoothly and uses continuity editing to blend both worlds together seamlessly. The shot of the eye of Ofelia is used without cutting to get the viewer into the underworld. As the narrator tells Ofelia's storey, the camera slowly pans upwards. upwards. The screen goes absolutely white as it hits the sky and it fades into the warm-toned real world, again without cutting.
We are taken to the mis-educating-en-scene of the ruins of an old church with strong symbolisms The Catholic Church is later portrayed in the film for its role in facilitating fascism, but perhaps at this stage it means the destruction of hope or virtue. There is a very creepy and expressive use of shadows, though it is warm-toned, resulting in an empty and unnerving feeling. Another image used in the first scene is a book a fairy-tale book surrounded by fairies that Ofelia reads with a very familiar looking silhouette. Perhaps I think this means that Ofelia was enchanted with this book by the way kids are always with certain things or feelings, and uses this as her coping mechanism; a clever and subtle use of mise-en-scene.