The movie Melancholia opens with what director Lars von Trier calls a “doomsday ballet,” a strange, thrilling, eight-minute sequence of hyper-real tableaux that unspool to an overture from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Each scene prefigures a moment from the movie. They are clearly computer-doctored, rendered in otherworldly hues and extravagant slow motion, and yet they are true, both specific and archetypal. We see dead birds falling from the sky, a woman carrying a child through a golf course, a bride walking across a lawn while tethered by vine-like tendrils, and, finally, the earth crushed by a glowing blue planet ten times its size. There have been movies whose stories and characters meant much more to me, but no other movie sequence has held me spellbound like this.

One image is Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting Jager Im Schnee (Hunters in the Snow). It’s a scene of uncomplicated, premodern life, of abundance and good cheer, and yet here it takes on a sinister aspect. After we see the painting it begins to tremble, and then small black spots slide down its surface. Are these falling leaves, (more) dead birds, or some kind of pestilence? The spots get larger and then the entire image peels away from the surface, as if it’s burning. The painting appears in the movie once again, much later, when the heroine Justine enters the library at her sister’s country estate and replaces the art books there, which are open to abstract Malevich paintings, with ones showing more troubling, figural artworks, including this Bruegel painting. After its transformation in the prologue, it can only be understood as an image of violence.