Remakes : Why not?

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Nothing seems to raise the hackles like the news that a film is being remade, with the idea more likely to be scorned if it is a remake of an old American classic or a rushed reboot of a modern gem of foreign cinema.

The Thing, the second remake, after John Carpenter's The Thing, of The Thing From Another World from 1951, has just been released and David Fincher's remake/adaptation of the Swedish film/book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo followed a few weeks ago. There are plenty more in the pipeline too, such as South Korean Park Chan Wook's Oldboy in the hands of Spike Lee and Japanese manga/anime staple Akira given over to Jaume Collet-Serra. Soon we will discover who will walk in the footsteps of Paul Muni and Al Pacino to play Scarface.

Why not just watch or promote the original? Whither originality? Is it knocked down in the pursuit of a fast buck?

Why might films be remade?

Perhaps the original has a formula proven to be successful. A good idea is a good idea. Take something strong and economically viable and repeat. Take something cult and roll it out. A name, a brand could represent the closest to a sure thing.

Films might be remade for love of the original - to be part, in retrospect, of the process of the object of one's affection, to be responsible for the extension and curation of its life. On the other hand it could be dissatisfaction with the original that drives the project - the ideas were sound but the execution could be improved upon.

Although we tend to poo-poo the idea, different countries do have different sensibilities. Remaking a film in your own language whilst paying attention to cultural nuances will engage more people. Either way, with a new director, actors, director of photography, landscape, language etc nothing could possibly remain the same.

Likewise, we adapt ourselves as receivers of signals depending on who we know is sending it. Would Exorcist II,  feverish and outlandish as it is, be beloved if it were an Italian horror film? Would its oddness, borderline amateurishness, be more easily enjoyed and admired? I hazard to guess 'yes'.

Subtitles, which distract attention from the image and which turn the aural into visual, change the nature of the film more than we might acknowledge. What is written, even with an aural and acted accompaniment, is experienced quite apart to the same thing heard, responding uniquely to their unique forms and the conventional ways of interacting that appear to govern them.

Was Wong Kar Wai's first English language film, My Blueberry Nights, his least successful critically because his poeticism doesn't work in quite the same way coming out of people's mouths (frankly artificial) as opposed to written and underscoring the action with gobbets of charming romanticism? Does the brilliance in his chinese-language films become soppy and inauthentic in the simple step from those white letters (accompanied by a musical, purely emotion-infused vocal murmuring) to the aural plane? What is said tends to have more responsibility to realism and functionality.

Furthermore, and paying no heed to the snobs, there are those who find it hard to watch subtitled films and it is obvious why.

Remakes (or adaptations from one media to another for that matter) offer fascinating insights into story making and story telling. They make you think about how something is put together, about structure, about characterisation, about technique, cause and effect. These are vital educational tools for the young and old - how has Martin Scorsese transposed
The Invention of Hugo Cabret to the screen in Hugo? How has Middle Earth changed through Peter Jackson's lens? What is happening to the frameworks of Rio Bravo as it transmogrifies through Assault on Precinct 13 and the French film Nid de Guepes? How has Therese Raquin, in tone and pungent odour, been transformed into 21st Century South Korean vampire story Thirst?

Remakes, comparisons, allow us to think about the soul of the thing. To think about the craft of art. Riffs and versions on the same idea - Infernal Affairs and The Departed. [Rec] and Quarantine. Not dispiriting. An exciting opportunity.

[Rec] and Quarantine

Once a film has been remade and we have two passes over basically the same material, a HYPOTHETICAL ORIGINAL is born - a ghost but with a form. The hypothetical original exists in our mind even without a remake but a remake brings it into focus. What it is is not so much what the versions share but what they appear to be responding and commenting on. The two films are in fact both versions of this hypothetical original.

The original isn't the be all and end all, its own mausoleum. It is living. Why do Directors remake their own films? Hideo Nakata remade The Ring in America. Likewise Takashi Shimizu and The Grudge. Yasujiro Ozu remade the black and white A Story of Floating Weeds as the technicolour Floating Weeds, Michael Haneke, Funny Games. Leo McCarey's Love Affair was indeed An Affair to Remember. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much knew it twice, and Cecil B DeMille adapted the play The Squaw Man on three occasions, in 1914, 1918 and 1931.

They want to get closer to the perfection in their heads. They want to take advantage of new technologies. The original is not the original. It is in the mind and out there like a mist. They want another opportunity to revisit the same people and places and make right. Art lets you come back and remould, albeit with new clay.

Even though Alfred Hitchcock himself remade his own films and adapted a vast amount of short stories and novels, Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock's Psycho was greeted by outrage. Is Van Sant's film redundant because it is almost a carbon copy? Far from it. It is redundant because it is not a carbon copy (in terms of shots). If it were it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experiment in which variables could be studied and where the magic of film would be shown to reside between the shots and without their confines.

What is a sequel if not a species of remake?

Do remakes hold back American cinema? Are they made to bury the originality of non-hollywood cinema? Are they supermarkets stocking products you can purchase in delicatessens and selling them cheaper?

           The Thing (2011)

Is it vandalism?

Does it do the original works a disservice? Does it alter the brand even if the original remains untouched? Does it replace the original in the public's mind and if so, would people only be aware of the original because of the remake?

Why are commerce and money dirty words? Art has always revolved, and needed to revolve, around money as a facilitator and a spur. All artists should be penniless, destitute martyrs (warming their hands over their authentic inner voice) in their lifetimes and enjoy fame and fortune from the grave.

When we think 'remake' do we actually think that the films are re-made as if something that was sacred is now sinned against and reanimated as a zombie, abhorrent to behold? No two films could ever be the same. Swapping Peter Lorre for James Stewart, or Tony Leung for Leonardo Di Caprio, brings an entirely different colour to a character. A remake will always be worthwhile. The present doesn't change the past. A remake does no trampling and means no disrespect.

We accept countless incarnations of plays because there is no original performance, and endless repetitions of classical music written before the era of recorded sound.

Film is obviously a special case, but perhaps we could try to forget what remakes might mean and enjoy them for what they are - to use something of the approach we take when it comes to the fertile cross-germination of high art when we think of film, an art that, although it may give us pleasure, we are awfully quick to bring low.

Sucker Punch - Film of the Year 2011

Sucker Punch is the story of the abuse of women, domestic and institutional historical and modern. It is the story of five girls/young women, and one in particular - Baby Doll, an orphan.

She has been placed in a mental hospital (framed by her step-father for the death of her sister) in which she is destined to receive a lobotomy. As she is about to be operated on, she finds it within herself to move to a new reality - a brothel. Here she is being prepared to have sexual intercourse with a man called the High Roller. In preparation for this meeting, Baby Doll is told that she must learn to dance.

Her dancing transfixes the men in her presence, which hypnotism her new-found friends (also present in the brothel reality) take advantage of to acquire five items that she believes will help them escape. Just as the men are distracted, so are we, for we do not see her dance but are instead led into a splendidly exciting third reality - where the girls fight battles with samurai monsters, zombie nazis and fire-breathing dragons (traditionally male arenas) - through which we see those quests played out.

Here the girls adapt the costumes of exploitation, cutting their outfits into attractive uniforms for battle against it, draining them of associations of filth and breathing soul into body, turning revulsion into revelry and an adventure of freedom. Within seconds I did not see exposed flesh and live toys to be fondled - I only saw them. We revel in them and with them (and of course there is nothing wrong with finding women attractive or with lust).

What is ugly is made beautiful, just as the tomb of a moth secretly becomes the womb of a butterfly. What may tempt some is acknowledged, laid in front of us and then remodelled.

What is more, there is no hatred, no vindictiveness, no revenge. Baby Doll's abusive step-father quickly disappears from the stage. No-one is hounded, humiliated or 'made to pay'. The girls show mercy throughout. Only inner strength and self-respect count. This is not about women versus men but right versus wrong and humanity versus inhumanity. Calling for a reductive label to be put on a film (feminist, chauvinist, degrading or empowering?) pretzel-twists all nuance, delicacy, and personal responsibility and morality out of the equation.

All that matters is that we care. And I did.

Sucker Punch speaks the right language. It places us both in the girls' shoes, pained, uplifted and inspired, and in those of their oppressors. Sucker Punch lives in the midst of what it criticises (the type of person, the type of film).

Are we to be distracted from what is really happening in the brothel, what is really happening in the hospital? Will we allow, like those men in the dark, our soul to be stolen from under our nose, bewitched by these loud noises,  these propulsive songs and intense gyrations? These abstractions are used to divert us, to make the story palatable, to turn barren, po-faced lecture (many films about abuse tastefully leave our possible complicity and the gradations of exploitation to one side) into apt demonstration and to mirror the closed doors and drawn curtains behind which awful acts are perpetrated.

There are risks to giving medicine with sugar (to having one's cake and eating it) as some will taste only the sickly sweet and relish the boobs (albeit there are no lascivious or gratuitous shots whatsoever), the lipstick smears and the ejaculatory gunfire. For them the film may be encouragement for 'objectification' or 'mindlessness'. Many critics and viewers have indeed seen the film itself, rather than its situation, as degrading and misogynistic.

What do you see?

Each action is code for another on a different layer, each object has a counterpart elsewhere on a second and third map. Sucker Punch is strong and dark with metaphor, its structure brilliantly interwoven with its message. These are not the tangential puzzles found in Mulholland Drive or Inception. Rather they drive to the very heart of the narrative. There is no obfuscation.

We are exhilarated and moved by camaraderie and solidarity and sacrifice. We are saddened and perturbed as the meaning of what we see is exposed by its echoes. Sucker Punch is massively enjoyable and increasingly hard to watch for what's at stake.

When do these stories begin to break through the screen?

What do the dances in the brothel mean in the hospital - do they stand for therapy or for rape? Does sex with the high roller in the brothel mean a lobotomy in the hospital? There is no easy way out. The realities are not dreams or escapes, but vivid and tangible expressions, paths to clawing back a little independence, dignity and happiness. This is non-escapist entertainment that, cleverly and (I believe) necessarily, looks and sounds like escapist entertainment.

Sucker Punch promotes the significance and power of love, of the mind, of stories, of film, of allegory, and of physical intimacy.

Are we perverts for pulling these curtains back? Or are we exposing something true and rotten?

Fun, intelligent and emotionally powerful. The finest film of the year.

Film and Musicality : The Importance of Tempo, Rhythm, Length and Timing

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Why we like or dislike a film may rarely be in step with our conscious rationale of why.

Art is an odd spell and few of us know which of its words make us fall into a slumber and which snap us back to reality. The tiniest things can make all the difference - even a pink sweater instead of red...

We talk about liking the plot, the ideas, the look, the atmosphere, the music, the characters, the acting and all the combinations of the above. It is easier to quantify, understand and communicate these bigger and more obvious components of a film, and much harder to pin down the smaller parts that give each film its unique fingerprint.

We must struggle, too, with the idea that films may be made out of different components but that they categorically do not work on us in that way. These components cannot be fully separated once they have been put together.

One of the elements least (consciously) acknowledged when we look over our experience of a film is what we could call the work's 'musicality'. Yes, we may talk about a film being too long or too short, or about it moving too slowly or too quickly, but little else besides.

So what are we discussing when it comes to tempo, rhythm, length and timing?

Shot length / Placement of Cut 

Is the shot too short or too long? In a film that sets its heartbeat at 40 a shot that lasts for a few minutes may be perfect.  One such is a mesmerising journey on a train at the beginning of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks.

One shouldn't underestimate the difference that a fraction of a second can make. Intrigue can flip to boredom at a moment's notice.

Is the movement of the camera or movement within the frame demanding a cut? Is the action inappropriately truncated? Has an emotional arc, or a developing ambience been betrayed?

Scene length

Is the scene too short or too long? There will come a point where a scene will outstay its welcome or, on the other hand, stop when we wish it hadn't. This may only be felt as a barely perceptible twinge.

The pace/build of action and plot progression

Is the story being served properly? Is it being allowed to breathe the right air? Is it ahead of itself or behind? Is too much said too early or too late? Is there enough in the film to sustain the time given to it?

What is the mix of quickness and slowness? Is it too programmatic, episodic or set to one particular rhythm?

Time spent on each part of the story or each geographical location

Is too much emphasis placed on certain plot strands?

Let the Right One In, having established the core of the story as the relationship between the two youngsters and courted our interest with its flourishing, wastes a surfeit of time on Eli's quest for blood.

Timing of reactions to actions / Timing of Edits

We must bear in mind that actors aren't actually 'reacting' to what is news to the characters.
      
Let us take Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an example. On multiple occasions people act and react a split second too early or too late, whether through the fault of the acting or of the editing. We are instinctively alarmed by the unnatural.


These are only brief thoughts, a polite pointing in the direction of something camouflaged. The right thing at the right time can produce magic; the right thing at the wrong time, discordance;  wrong thing at the wrong time, ruin.

All of these elements form part of an overarching mother rhythm and length. Have we spent enough time extracting the juice of the story - exploring implications, feeling emotions, sensing surroundings...?

It is a mistake to think of a film as having one body with one unchanging rhythm. It changes itself and it changes as we change in response. It is constantly adapting itself to serve the story. You cannot think of a film as being in four-four time or six-eight.

This is not pro the metrics of cinema, which are intriguing as tools to map cinema's mechanical evolution, but of limited use in explaining our idiosyncratic thoughts or sensations. Such-and-such a technique can never guarantee such-and-such an effect. We can say that something made us feel in a certain way but there are no universal conclusions to be drawn.

It is for each of us to feel and, in any way we can, explain our individual responses. 

It is useful, nevertheless, to be aware of what may have an influence on the viewer. We should try and engage with the musical in film, that which flits between the scientific, the personal and the philosophical

This musical nature will make or break a film in spite, often, of everything else within it.

Forest of the Hanged (Pӑdurea Spânzuraţilor)

Forest of the Hanged opens on a dusty road. Hundreds of soldiers are marching. Suddenly one of them turns around and looks at us. Conscience, a challenge. He has turned against the tide and looked us in the eye, humanising in an instant the whole machine of war.

This 1964 Romanian film is an adaptation of a novel written in 1922 by Liviu Rebreanu. The novel was inspired by the fate of the writer's brother Emil, a soldier who was executed during the First World War for attempted desertion from the Austro-Hungarian army

In the story Emil is Apostol Bologa, a sub-lieutenant. We first meet him as he attends the hanging of a deserter; the look in the dying man's eyes as he swings from the noose will come to haunt Apostol, a man who prides himself on his acute sense of duty.

The Austro-Hungarian Army comprises many different nationalities. This means that, across Europe, from Italy to Russia to Romania, men are being asked to fight against their own people. The General is aware of these temptations and complications. Loyalties are tested : friends asked to condemn friends, countrymen to kill countrymen.  The man we saw hanged, Svoboda, was a Czech trying to cross to the Czech side. Now Apostol, a Romanian, has been transferred to the Romanian front.

What will Apostol choose, death for betrayal on one hand or moral death on the other?

Eventually, disgusted by the senseless carnage of war and by his part in the fate of his own kind, Apostol takes a stand and refuses to take part in the show trial of twelve Romanian farmers.

In the midst of his turmoil he had found love with a Romanian girl Ilona, the only purity still sparkling in the quagmire. Nonetheless, unable to live with himself, he chooses to die with his soul untouched : he is caught crossing to the Romanian side, an act for which he will pay with his life.

Apostol is taken off in a cart to be hanged. He is taken away smiling. They ride under the trees, from whose leafless branches hang dozens of men like strange fruit. Here is the forest of the hanged:

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Forest of the Hanged, directed by Liviu Ciulei, is an especially evocative film. The characters not only debate their philosophical dilemmas but live them with every fibre of their beings. The world they inhabit is a dirty one in all senses of the word. It is hard to get out of the mud and find your way from darkness to light.

The black and white photography is wonderful and runs deep with rich shades. Two examples :  the carriage surrounded by a wall of old shoes in which Apostol's friend Muller has made a home is a fantastical creation. Even in a black and white film it looks golden; the beautiful embraces that Apostol and Ilona share are bathed in a stunningly clear, virginal, light. Images such as these recall those of Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood. Both films place particular emphasis on quality and tone of light.

In the opening scenes of the film the camera seems too near to, or too far from, the action as if trying to get its bearings. Throughout the film it glides (for example into and out of mirrors - symbolic of reflection and introspection) but also turns violently or even swoons...sometimes the director will leave a part of the image deliberately out of focus. What, I think, helps make Forest of the Hanged so involving is that the film has both rawness and elegance to it; visualising our worse and better natures.

We also come to find subtle religious allusions. The film makes an apostle of Emil by calling him Apostol. Furthermore, why, we may ask ourselves, are there twelve Romanian insubordinates?

Apostol, though, is no saint. He values some lives (Romanian), above others. Muller, on the other hand, finds all killing wrong and teases Apostol, who wants to be transferred away from his quandary to Italy, with biting sarcasm : “On the Italian front there are no brothers....only here there are brothers”.

With so much degradation and death around them, and when suffering reduces us to our basic, naked, human characteristics (those we all share), such discrimination on the basis of nationality suddenly seems ludicrous.

The film puts this across in quite brilliant fashion. At one point Apostol is asked to act as interpreter for three Romanian prisoners. All the characters in the film speak in Romanian. However, none of them, apart from Apostol (a Romanian), can understand the Romanian characters. In this way the director underlines the idea that the differences between sides and the reasons for lack of understanding (or indeed for war itself) might as well be imaginary (or at least are intentionally exaggerated). The distinctions between nations are confused and blurred again: Muller is heard musing to himself “Mozart...a great composer”, to which his companion responds: “Ah, one of your Germans”.

With Apostol's fate secured, Ilona comes to bring him his last meal. All dressed in black, she prepares the little table as if it were an altar or a grave. She is honouring and mourning him. They look at each other without saying a word and eat. What caring and dignity...

A soldier stands watch over them. He says that she begged him to let her see Apostol. He gave in. “We are people, aren't we?”, he explains. What beauty...

It is easy to see why Forest of the Hanged is considered one of Romanian Cinema's greatest achievements gained international renown in 1965 when Liviu Ciulei won the best director prize at Cannes.

Words as Visual Storytellers

One rarely come across discussions of the visual manipulation of words and letters in film. I am not referring here to the symbolism of naming characters or places (to denote personality, role, destiny and so forth) or of the sometimes unorthodox presentation of subtitles and unvoiced emotions (e.g. Night Watch or Crank 2 : High Voltage, Scott Pilgrim)

I am talking about putting words (and their constituent letters) on screen and altering them or presenting them in such a way as to add to, or comment on, the story. There is something in the world inhabited by the character, a world whose fabric, imbued with a new and nascent reality (effected by the character) communicates directly with us. An aside, if you will.


As a start, here are three examples I have mentioned in passing before. The first comes from Superman Returns. Superman is taken to hospital through the transparent doors of an operating theatre called "Trauma 1".

We see the name only from the other side, from which it reads "I AMUART". The film is about how the "father becomes the son" and "the son becomes the father". It is also about the ties of life between God and man and how we are made in his image. All that he is we can be. I AM U ART. I am, you are:

Click to enlarge

In a flash that may pass us by, much is encapsulated (like the inscription over church doors) with inconspicuous ease.

Olivier Assayas, in his film Demonlover, uses the same subtle technique, that of simply flipping a word back to front. The purpose this time is to reveal, to those sharp enough to notice, a hidden truth and an imminent danger. Diane is a conniving woman in a conniving business that thrives on back-stabbing. Repairing to an aeroplane restroom, she prepares to drug a colleague's (a superior) tub of water. She thinks, and we think, that she has the upper hand but as she plunges the syringe into it we see that she is:

Evidently Evian spelt backwards is naive, but flipped over visually the clue isn't at all obvious. A little work is needed to decipher this piece of dramatic irony.

A third example, found in a chase scene in G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (full analysis of the scene here), does not alter the word seen on screen but springs it into the frame at the perfect moment.

The scene involves Duke (part of a team of good guys) chasing Ana (and her team of bad guys) as she and her partners in crime attempt to blow up the Eiffel Tower. Duke and Ana used to be together and used to love each other, though we are led to believe that those feelings still linger beneath a new animosity. The chase through the streets of Paris (the city of love) can be seen as a variation on a romantic chase.


Duke gets to Ana just too late, as she already launched a missile at the tower. The missile's load, crucially, works over time, eating away at the metal. It can be stopped by a remote control that Ana wears around her waist.

Ana, fleeing from Duke, boards a craft. Duke leaps onto it and quickly reaches out to press the button strapped to her waist. The physical contact is brusque and Ana's gasp can be read as both one of frustration and gratification.

 He reaches to push the button...

Ana gasps.

The word that tells us everything both in terms of the bomb and Duke and Ana's future is on the screen of the remote control in bright red letters. The bomb and she have been :

The same double entendre, I suggest, could not have been done verbally.

The reconciliation is not complete, though, as the Eiffel Tower is already falling and beyond help.

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Now for the transformation of Selina Kyle into Catwoman in Batman Returns. As she undergoes this change she does many outrageous things : gulps down cartons of milk, stabs her soft toys and sets fire to her doll's house.

She does one thing, though, that is a throwaway gesture. On one of her walls she has the words "Hello There" written in neon lights. Sashaying through her apartment she nonchalantly flicks at these letters, smashing two of the bulbs. She doesn't seem aware of what she is doing. We though are shown a long shot from outside the window of a new message she has spelt out that sums up the fieriness of her metamorphosis : "Hell Here".

The next example comes from an episode of the television series Moonlighting called "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice". One of the main characters, David, is a self-satisfied sort. In the dream of the title he is a horn player. We see him sitting on a window sill..."I always play my horn with my shirt off, late at night, by an open window  next to a flashing neon light, I know I look good that way".

Across from the window is a neon "HOTEL" sign. The camera slowly moves back and then stops. Now, next to this apparent paragon of manliness, with a couple of letters now obscured, is the flashing word : HOT.

One final example, not so much of manipulation but of subtle and amusing visual commentary, comes from Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme est Une Femme. A young woman, Angela (played by Anna Karina), is waiting on the street at night. Before we see her, we are shown a large neon sign affixed to a building which we presume houses a beauty shop. The sign is in the shape of an arrow pointing down. On it is the word "Beaute".

We pan down the arrow...

...which points almost straight down at Angela:

Melancholia - Lars Von Trier

Contains spoilers

Justine suffers from depression. She is detached. She is sad. She is mournful. She feels things both deeper and not at all. She is a foreign body weighed down by the world. Her emptiness has such mass, this black bile.

At first things simply happen to her: a wedding she cannot delight in, a job that follows her all the way to the reception. As the night draws in she withdraws from the festivities and, through apathetic bitterness, takes control. Her active disinterest makes her husband see that their marriage is already null ("What did you expect?"). She erupts in a vicious parting shot at her selfish boss. She doesn't want the rituals, the constraints of position. She doesn't want the company. These are the death throes of social niceties. This is the casting off of artifice.

The next day, with the reception over, she falls deeper into depression, unable to eat or wash or even get out of bed. She seems defeated.

As night turns to day and as our focus moves from the disastrous wedding to the threat of looming planetary catastrophe, Justine moves (slowly, as if across the night sky) from mourning...to acceptance...to complicity.

Somehow knowing her fate, she succumbs to it. Nay, welcomes it. Her and it are magnetised and in unison. Melancholia has destroyed her life and now it will end it. She, suffering for too long, believes that the world is "evil" and that "no-one will miss it". Before Justine's depression appeared like mourning. Now she stands in a sublime and calm detachment. There is nothing to lose.

Her sister Claire, meanwhile, seeing the end coming, trembles from her very soul. The film's power comes from these two opposing forces - halting panic and the dark eye of peacefulness.

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It is wrenching to see Justine suffer. It is painful to see her tangled in the grey roots of melancholy and to see Claire's passionate love for her sister disguised in passionate loathing : "sometimes I hate you so much". Cynicism and nothingness show the opposite. It is amusing and triumphant to hear her scorn her sister's tasteful plans to celebrate annihilation with a glass of wine on the patio ("I think it's a piece of shit").

And it is overwhelming, all of it. Moving, battering and crushing. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde prelude (the only non-diegetic music in the film) swells aloofly, comforting, teasing, epic, romantic and tender. It is played in its entirety to begin the film and from then on dipped into; parts are introduced, played and replayed, the canvas repainted with an echo of those first images.

The key to a brilliant film can often be the spectacle of something strange, new and extraordinary witnessed by characters whose every movement, decision, and every uttered syllable makes perfect sense. Even though no reason is given for Justine's state of mind, we understand. It all becomes terribly clear.

Top: Melancholia, Albrecht Durer

Above : Melancholy, Paul Gauguin