danse macabre.

still from biutiful.

 recently a good friend and i went to see biutiful, a film billed as a love story between a dying man and his children. the plot focuses on uxbal, a man who is desperately trying to provide his two children with some sort of financial and emotional life preserver to carry them through after his fast approaching death. albeit grim, the film was beautiful and left us both with an unsettled feeling that betrayed simple shock and sadness at the horrors of one family falling apart. the film genuinely asked questions about what was to be done when everything foundational in one's life simply vanishes. i feel as though many films over the last few years, another example would be cormack mccarthy's novel-turned-film the road, have kept up a tone of unapologetic grittiness that seems to hold as its foundation a refusal to look away from true and ugly things.

danse macabre, micheal wolgemut, 1493.

 it may seem an obvious comment but i am always astounded at how reflective the arts, film especially, can be of a specific socio-political climate. in north america the two-thousands have brought us a post-911 era of cynicism of our personal safety, burgeoning concern over population issues, a post-bush era distrust in government, the ever present tumult of middle eastern countries, and the cautionary tale of the financial meltdown of two thousand and eight. it is furthermore no surprise to see that these same reactions, boom and bust of faith in ourselves as a species if i may, have cycled throughout history, manifesting themselves in some of the only relics left behind, the arts. as anyone who has had any rudimentary education in european history would know, the continent was ravaged again and again by plagues cycling from the sixth century on. the infamous bout of black death, as it is often called, peaked in roughly the mid fourteenth century and wiped out nearly half of the european population by the beginning of the fifteenth century. when exploring the woodcuts, paintings and drawings of this era there is a distinct grimness present. one example is the danse macabre, (dance of death, in english) a genre of work that depicted skeletons (often of different classes and backgrounds) dancing together. it was meant as a memento mori (latin for remember death), a reminder that no matter who you are, regardless of riches and sins, death was universal.

letter a in the hans holbein "alphabet of death", 1538.

 i suppose the question that this leads us to is what is our danse macabre? is it films like biutiful and the road, or does it manifest itself in the pop nihilism of authors such as palahniuk and copland? we seem, as a whole, fairly overwhelmed right now with the horrific possibilities of our future. but before letting fear mongering rob us of our rationale we must realize, that with every other era that came before us, there is always going to be an ebb and flow of conviction in ourselves. a distinctly human dilemma that is no more beautifully illustrated than in films such as biutiful. watch it.