Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Joel Edgerton Comes at Night

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A "teaser trailer" for It Comes at Night
has been released! Ahhh! Turn up the volume...
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I suppose you can technically call what I just watched a "teaser trailer" but it really felt substantial enough to be just "a trailer" -- I mean we're not given the entire story-line or anything but it's plenty, ya know? I'm sold. Then again I was sold when the director of Krisha signed on to make a horror film called It Comes At Night starring Joel Edgerton, but I am a rare beast, so maybe more selling is necessary for other less-excitable folk. Did you guys see the poster the other day? That sucker sells it pretty hard, too. 

Anyway, some notes. The painting that the trailer opens with is called "The Triumph of Death" and it was painted by the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the year 1562.

Here is a clearer look at it:

(click to embiggen) I thought it was a Bosch painting while watching the trailer (sidenote: I just watched the Bosch doc on Netflix the other night, which I recommend!) but Bosch was clearly a big influence on Bruegel. Bruegel's works have shown up previously in films like Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Lars von Trier's Melancholia - he's friendly to cinema, of the miserablest sort, you could say. But here's what the Museo del Prado, the Museum in Madrid where this painting is hung, has to say about it specifically:

"In this moral work, the triumph of Death over mundane things is symbolized by a large army of skeletons razing the Earth. The background is a barren landscape in which scenes of destruction are still taking place. In the foreground, Death leads his armies from his reddish horse, destroying the world of the living. The latter are led to an enormous coffin with no hope for salvation. All of the social institutions are included in this composition and neither power nor devotion can save them. Some attempt to struggle against their dark destiny while others are resigned to their fate.

Only a pair of lovers, at the lower right, remains outside the future they too will have to suffer. This painting depicts a customary theme in medieval literature: the dance of Death, which was frequently used by Northern artists. Brueghel casts the entire work in a reddish-brown tone that gives the scene an infernal aspect appropriate for the subject at hand. The profusion of scenes and moralizing sense applied by the artists are part of Hieronymous Bosch´s influence on this work."

After watching that trailer I feel as if the "pair of lovers" described above might apply to the film in some way, although given the fact that there appear to be at least two pairs of lovers in the film (one played by Edgerton & Carmen Ejogo and the other played by Riley Keough & Christopher Abbott) ya got me at who's who. We could also be reading too much into the painting and what it's meant to reflect about the film, but seeing as how they decided to begin their first trailer with that image I don't think I'm nuts, finding it important.


1 comment:

Theatre of Zen said...

I like where you're going with this and incorporating the painting with what will occur in this horror film. I can't wait to see this.