Melancholia

These notes (I dislike the word 'blog', and it's not entirely applicable in this case anyway) is primarily about books and everything relating to books and literature. I realized some time ago that I may be shooting myself in the foot by not including any other art/design/film/etc content, since one purpose (and there are several) of these notes is to collect and log all information that interests me or that I need for personal projects. Mostly this has to do with books, but occasionally I do wander towards film and art and design.

I broke my own rule of not making any posts that don't deal with books (directly or indirectly) only once, when I couldn't resist post the Black Swan posters. I realize now, as I did then, that I may need to reevaluate that rule. So I'm adding a new tag to address such subjects. These will be kept to a minimum, with the main focus still on books and literature, but they will be included from now on.

This is the first such post (second if you count Black Swan), and it deals with a film I saw tonight - Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. I just wanted to make a minor notes of the fact that:

1. The stunning image of Justine floating in a stream is based on the painting Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais.


This is the drowning Ophelia from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Picking flowers she slips and falls into a stream. Mad with grief after her father’s murder by Hamlet, her lover, she allows herself to die. The flowers she holds are symbolic: the poppy means death, daisies innocence and pansies love in vain.The painting was regarded in its day as one of the most accurate and elaborate studies of nature ever made. The background was painted from life by the Hogsmill river in Surrey. Elizabeth Siddal posed for Ophelia in a bath of water kept warm by lamps underneath.

2. Lars Von Trier pays homage to Tarkovsky by using Bruegel's winter landscape painting Hunters in the Snow, the painting originally shown by Tarkovsky in Solaris, combined with a heavy musical presence (Wagner in Melancholia, Bach in Solaris).



Two interesting blogs about Melancholia: One and Two.