I read the signs, I got all my stars aligned.
Nerd alert, as normal.
I'm studying for my Modern Art final tomorrow, and I just, like, really saw Van Gogh's "Le Café de nuit" for the first time.
One of the things that I love about my film class this term is that it challenges me to view films as inherently inspired by paintings and other great works of art. It's impossible for me to think of Fur without thinking about Meret Oppenheimer's "Luncheon in Fur," for the sensual expression of life through fur imposed on the mundane, or to think about Antichrist without thinking about Edvard Munch's "Ashes," for the notions of women being intrinsically connected to the natural world in a powerful, sexual way. I am not going to be able to watch Inglourious Basterds without thinking of Van Gogh, I think. The way he expresses the little restaurant feels so similar to the manner in which Tarantino portrays La Louisiane. The colors are incredibly different, but the tone feels incredibly similar.
My textbook, like Wikipedia, quotes Van Gogh on the piece:
In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin.
It's like, looking at this picture, I'm suddenly able to see the bar for what it is: this den where, under the guise of drunken happiness, the potential for violence and death is always tangible. I know a lot of people find the scene to be jarring, but to think about Van Gogh's depiction of a place where souls essentially go to die, I feel like that interaction between the Germans and the Allies is so much more meaningful. Tarantino has always played with the notion that harshness can be best expressed in unlikely places, like cheerful, neighborhood haunts and the bathrooms of gimmicky chain restaurants, but the one in Inglourious Basterds just feels like the full expression of that, where every word spoken and every sip of schnapps is a damning moment, like threads that weave into one another before the inevitable actualization of tension and violence. I think Aldo and Hicox get that (Donny, to an extent, but his actual relation to the reality is minimized by his posture when he calls it "the death trap rendezvous" because he's got his feet propped up and his hands behind his head like the lazy security guard in every heist film) and are in complete understanding of what the bar represents, and that's so incredibly chilling to me now. Because La Lousiane and Café de la Gare are the physical embodiment of that surreal dance between life and death. They function as a sort of purgatory, the waiting stop before one is cast into perdition.
I've only ever really seen one other artwork that moved me in such a profound way that I started crying because I felt like, fuck, I just get it. It's so amazing to me to see the tangible transformative power of art, of that moment of really seeing pieces for the first time even if you've physically seen them before and written about them in notebooks, or to feel like you get this mystifying bit of a film finally.
Never tell me that Tarantino is not a purposeful director because, even if he's not even aware of this painting's existence, the role of the La Lousiane scene is about so much more than dazzling us with his fanboy intelligence or the sharpness of his dialogue. Michael Fassbender is going to turn me into a big wreck every time I see him now. If that man does not get the power of the scene to cut right into a person, I resign.
I'm studying for my Modern Art final tomorrow, and I just, like, really saw Van Gogh's "Le Café de nuit" for the first time.
One of the things that I love about my film class this term is that it challenges me to view films as inherently inspired by paintings and other great works of art. It's impossible for me to think of Fur without thinking about Meret Oppenheimer's "Luncheon in Fur," for the sensual expression of life through fur imposed on the mundane, or to think about Antichrist without thinking about Edvard Munch's "Ashes," for the notions of women being intrinsically connected to the natural world in a powerful, sexual way. I am not going to be able to watch Inglourious Basterds without thinking of Van Gogh, I think. The way he expresses the little restaurant feels so similar to the manner in which Tarantino portrays La Louisiane. The colors are incredibly different, but the tone feels incredibly similar.
My textbook, like Wikipedia, quotes Van Gogh on the piece:
In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin.
It's like, looking at this picture, I'm suddenly able to see the bar for what it is: this den where, under the guise of drunken happiness, the potential for violence and death is always tangible. I know a lot of people find the scene to be jarring, but to think about Van Gogh's depiction of a place where souls essentially go to die, I feel like that interaction between the Germans and the Allies is so much more meaningful. Tarantino has always played with the notion that harshness can be best expressed in unlikely places, like cheerful, neighborhood haunts and the bathrooms of gimmicky chain restaurants, but the one in Inglourious Basterds just feels like the full expression of that, where every word spoken and every sip of schnapps is a damning moment, like threads that weave into one another before the inevitable actualization of tension and violence. I think Aldo and Hicox get that (Donny, to an extent, but his actual relation to the reality is minimized by his posture when he calls it "the death trap rendezvous" because he's got his feet propped up and his hands behind his head like the lazy security guard in every heist film) and are in complete understanding of what the bar represents, and that's so incredibly chilling to me now. Because La Lousiane and Café de la Gare are the physical embodiment of that surreal dance between life and death. They function as a sort of purgatory, the waiting stop before one is cast into perdition.
I've only ever really seen one other artwork that moved me in such a profound way that I started crying because I felt like, fuck, I just get it. It's so amazing to me to see the tangible transformative power of art, of that moment of really seeing pieces for the first time even if you've physically seen them before and written about them in notebooks, or to feel like you get this mystifying bit of a film finally.
Never tell me that Tarantino is not a purposeful director because, even if he's not even aware of this painting's existence, the role of the La Lousiane scene is about so much more than dazzling us with his fanboy intelligence or the sharpness of his dialogue. Michael Fassbender is going to turn me into a big wreck every time I see him now. If that man does not get the power of the scene to cut right into a person, I resign.