BrueghelBrueghel the Elder, of whose biography we know almost nothing, painted in 1565 a cycle of six masterful paintings grouped under the name of Seasons. At the risk of saying it grandiloquently, they lastingly fixed, for the Western eye, the way of seeing and representing a landscape. Of the five that have come down to us – we have lost track of one of them, illustrating spring, from the 17th centurye century –, three are visible at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Austria), including the one that concerns us here, Hunters in the snow : a winter view, in depth, which closes the series.
Adopting a classic approach, Thomas Sipp gives the floor to two art historians, Michel Weemans and Reindert L. Falkenburg, also co-authors of a monograph on the Flemish painter by Hazan, to examine this painting closely. The camera stops with delight on details of the painting invisible at first glance, and which give the whole thing a more disturbing tone than expected: the footprints of a hare in the snow that the hunters neglect, the ensign of an inn where people are about to slaughter a pig, the marks on a brick facade in the distance which give the house a human shape, silhouettes which we can make out in the darkness of the houses…
The two historians defend the idea of a painting thought of as a trap for the eye, like the bird traps which populate the master’s paintings. We will be careful here to judge the relevance of their erudite analysis, but the effect of astonishment of the table works to its fullest, reinforced by the insertion of an extract from Solaris (1972) by Tarkovsky, where the characters of the film discover weightlessness in the station, alongside reproductions of Seasons by Brueghel.
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Mediapart broadcasts a documentary film every Saturday. This selection is ensured by Guillaume Chaudet Foglia and Ludovic Lamant.
Trap to seeFrance, 2023, 26 minutes:
- Director: Thomas Sipp
- Writing: Thomas Sipp, Michel Weemans
- Image: Hugues Gemignani
- Sound: Simon Garette
- Editing: Nicolas Sburlati
- Original music, mixing: Jan Vysocky
- Color grading: Hugues Gemignani
- Production: Isabelle Carlier, Pénélope Yatropoulos and Antre Peaux
