There are people who find the visual arts a complicated, incomprehensible affair. And who therefore think that it is only intended for a small club. That’s a fallacy, and the proof is film. Take the popular science fiction movies of recent years, such a movie as dune for example: who can tell me that he completely understands it? And who Mad Max: Fury Road doesn’t find it complicated is a genius. And they are movies that have not exactly been watched by a small number of people. dune grossed 394 million euros worldwide, Mad Max: Fury Road 369 million euros.
Sometimes you don’t look at things because you want to understand them, but for other reasons. For example, to experience beauty, amazement or awe, in short, all those helpless words that people use to justify art. You won’t realize it until you see it.
Directors are artists, and many of them are fond of visual arts. Movie scenes are sometimes directly inspired by a painting. Mad Max: Fury Road is in our opinion a pearl of an example. Director George Miller pays tribute to centuries of apocalyptic visual art in almost every scene. And he serves it up with an ease that seems almost casual, like a ball that he taps into the goal with his heel. For example, his ode to Salvador Dalí in the film lasts only 10 seconds. Tenon a two full hour film.
In it we see two monstrous figures on stilts meters high, slowly stumbling past in a weathered and orphaned landscape. Furthermore, there are only dead trees, with some crows on the branches. One of the stilt monsters pauses to watch the main characters’ vehicle driving through this wasteland. The waders are too heavy for such gigantic stork legs. An unlikely balance, vulnerable and menacing at the same time.
crow fishermen
The film makes no effort whatsoever to these crow fishermen (‘Crow Fishers’) explain. Miller later seems to have said that they are the remnants of the Vuvalini, the motherfolk who lived in that godforsaken Green Place lived. Show sketches that they wear clothes made of crow’s feathers.
Fans immediately noticed the parallel with the painting The elephants (1948) by Salvador Dali. It is of course not very strange that directors who want to depict an ominous and wonderful world turn to the master of surrealism. Dalí is the ancestor of the dystopian dreamscape. Into the scene Fury Road looks like a deep blue version of the bright red painting. Equally unreal and unclear. Perhaps even more terrifying, because of that dark blue. Twice dominant giant figures on long, wiry legs in a ghostly landscape. Dalí painted those elephants more often, including in a painting about the vision of Saint Anthony, the most painted subject in the past thousand years with such an apocalyptic landscape. He based the elephants himself again on a famous statue of Bernini in Rome.
Nobody knows exactly what Dalí meant by those elephants, although endless symbolism is sought in it. It’s best just to endure it like you do a scene from Mad Max undergoes in 3D, as if you were in it yourself.