Bruegel as Cinema

 
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Hunters in the Snow, 1565

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow is a study of apocalypse. In 1565, the year the painting was completed, as a number of climatologists and historians have noted, Europe was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. People starved. Agricultural communities regressed to hunting and gathering. Good Christians regressed to survival of the fittest. Except for one dead fox and a tiny, full-ish game bag, Bruegel’s hunters have come home empty-handed. They pass a tavern whose sign shows Hubertus, the patron saint of hunting. The sign hangs crookedly, one stiff gust away from falling. ... Bruegel seems like a better fit for a certain type of film than for poetry. His indiscriminate eye; his contempt for obvious ‘takeaways’; his wide, lucid images withholding judgment—in all these ways, he anticipates the ‘slow cinema‘ of the last few decades. It seems appropriate that director Andrei Tarkovsky, a pivotal figure in the flourishing of this kind of cinema, should be the first major filmmaker to put Hunters to work onscreen. ...”

Art In America

 
Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, 1972

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