Abstraction in Melancholia

This is an essay on the antagonism between paintings in a film. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia stages, this essay argues, a contradiction in the medium of film itself and its repeated and relentless drive to disavow the stillness of painting for its own temporal economy. Central to the film is a scene in which Justine swaps out a bourgeois display of art books depicting Kazimir Malevich bookplates with those containing Bruegel the Elder, Caravaggio, etc.: the swapping out of abstract art for the figurative. The at-tempt to please her sister with the display of figurative art and to thereby accede to a realism without negativity is flimsy and failed. It fails not only because the disavowal leaves a remainder, but because, as this paper tries to demonstrate, the figurative paintings are themselves always already involved with the very abstraction that might undermine them. Such an enactment of negativity multiplies across the film and almost always involves the problem of concrete figuration, for which abstraction is not the solution but its constitutive dialectical condition.