MELANCHOLIA MARGINALIA: Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow
Melanchola opens with the camera frozen on Peter Bruegel’s 16th Century painting which suddenly burns and turns to ash. The painting reappears later in the film when Justine rearranges the art books in Claire’s office, hiding the modernist lithographs she has on display and replacing them with medieval and romantic images.
It would be hard to find a painting that better captures the themes of this film. Cast in a spectrum of grays populated with dots of blacks, the scene shows an almost still valley covered in snow. In the foreground, a trio of hunters return to the village, the failure of their trip written in the empty bag one slings over his shoulders and in the way their gazes are cast down, as if avoiding the stares of the family tending the fire to their left. The family does not even bother to glance at the returning hunters The hunters embody melancholy in this hushed landscape. Their shoulders are hunched, they walk apart from each other as if mentally preparing to face the village who down below, skate and go about their business unaware of the hunters return. Even their starving looking dogs look embarrassed and stare at the ground. Down the hill, in the village, people skate and go about their business.
However, forlorn as the scene is, deep within it something is happening that is about to make everything much, much worse. We, the viewers, are poised just above the hunters, on an eye level with the crow perched in the tree, as though we were a crow perched in a similar tree just off the frame. To the right of the perching crow, another crow has taken flight, descending into the valley. Professor James Synder is his book Northern Renaissance Art posits that the flying crow hangs beckoning us to come into the scene below, to join him flying over the valley.
And what is the crow beckoning us to see? He flies far above the skaters, drawing our attention even deeper into the scene. If one looks directly beneath the crow the first thing one’s eye comes to rest on is a little house, far off in the distance, down to the left of the church steeple. Indeed, if one follows the axes scattered around the picture, they all seem to converge at a vanishing point just beneath this house. The strongest one is the tree fringed line of a hill that begins just above the foreground house in the upper left of the frame and dissects the image on a diagonal line which stops just across the river from the house.
So what are the crow and Bruegel asking us to look at in this house? Squinting one can just make out a flame shooting ferociously out of the house’s chimney. There has just this second been a terrible explosion in the house which stands just behind the church. Amidst the snow and quiet and gloom, a great red frame has burst forth to consume everything. In this forlorn valley, the apocalypse has just arrived.
Melancholia: Best film of the year. Saw it for the second time last night and it only got better. Read my review here.
Recent comments