Where is melancholia shot

Justine is in a melancholic blackout. A blindness, an extreme state of stupor, one inked in bile — a blackout of such intensity that she can never pull those moments back into the rooms of her memory. Melancholia is a cousin to the blackout of benzos, of opiates, of booze. Where does the mind go when it singes out?

And might there be a world somewhere where all of these moments are archived? Where might that be? It is the same place the mind goes when it experiences extreme physical pain. And in fact, the words themselves sound like the act of blinding, of being made blind.

The words drop into one another, like Russian nesting dolls, those tiny colored wooden caskets. To black out, to lose memory, is to lose everything one loves and knows; it is to be blossomless, flowerless. What remains is a shadow, an eclipse of who or what one was. The melancholia, the very thing that wants her dead, is the drug that feeds Justine and allows her, in the end, to see. From the outset, she has already consumed melancholia or it has consumed her.

Trouble is the salve. This blackness, this ink, this disturbance of bile. It kills but it also helps its sufferers to finally see. Melancholy and madness are of course akin to death. Melancholia is the specter of death, looming. You can see this in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich born in the town of Greifswald , sorrow woods : the dregs of death, moldering in his paintings, in the black-blackness.

It is the blackness of death, hunched in the corner. Justine dies in Part Two of Melancholia , by blindness, by darkness.

She is consumed. But she is reborn when she learns that the world is coming to an end. Her sister, once pragmatic, becomes hysterical, and Justine, once mad, is clearheaded. Through the black salve of death, she is reborn. She can oppose the superficial nature of the world. The world is coming to an end. Inside this reality is the light of truth, a kind of twilight. Look directly into the strong sun, and it appears black.

Lightness and darkness, blindness and sight. That the world is coming to an end is evident even without its collision with another planet: money cherished above all else; poverty and inequality everywhere; the lack of spirit or Geist , in man and woman.

Instead, a society of automatons consumed by self and ruled by the dictates of society what to buy, what to watch, what to eat. What does it take to see this when so many do not? First one must die.

And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. In the original Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament in Christian terminology, the restoring of sight to the blind is perceived as the ultimate miracle, an event that goes beyond what is thinkable in the terrestrial world and in our present life. Rated R for some graphic nudity,sexual content and language.

Did you know Edit. Goofs There is no reason for Melancholia to cause electricity problems on earth. However, its gravitational pull would have caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to tidal forces.

These would have been globally destructive long before any actual collision. Quotes Justine : I smile, and I smile, and I smile. Connections Edited into 5 Second Movies: Melancholia User reviews Review. Top review. Powerful and meaningful if you've been there. There's a serious polarity in the reviews for this film,and I'm not surprised. If you've ever suffered depression this bleak movie will hit hard, and you'll pick up on all of the subtle messages it sends out.

It's done so well it can't be anything other than achingly familiar. The despondency, and the frustration the sufferer feels at their own despondency, in particular, is well conveyed. Unfortunately I think a large chunk of the people who've seen this film and there aren't many who have, sadly went to it expecting a slightly arty apocalypse movie.

It's not a smarter Deep Impact. The blue planet Melancholia is just a metaphor for depression. Unrelenting and irresistible, Melancholia has the main character in its thrall. For those who don't "get" this movie, no it's not a pretentious, pseudo intellectual flick.

Then, when there is a wide shot of the surroundings, or a moment of painterliness, the beauty surges in again like a sudden rush of music.

It is a film that, over the decade since its release, has become a kind of talisman for film fans who have experienced depression, such is the visceral power of its depiction. It is so powerful because it refuses to do what people in the grip of mental illness are often pressured to do: make the pain small.

There is a defiance to making the pain so big that it literally prefaces the end of the world. The combination of high-concept science-fiction and realistically nuanced characters and relationships is melded together seamlessly.

The film focuses on the wedding day of Justine Kirsten Dunst as her depression engulfs events Credit: Alamy. Undoubtedly, above and beyond the mastery of Von Trier's filmmaking, Dunst's performance as Justine carries the movie.

It's a virtuoso achievement, as primal and physical as it is emotional and sophisticated, and it won her the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

On the press trail for Melancholia, Dunst referred to her own experience of depression, which she sought help for in It's an experience that seems to live in the muscle memory of her body.

Part of what makes Melancholia so special is that it continues to serve as an antidote to the poor record of film and TV when it comes to portraying mental health issues. A report into mental health depiction in film and TV published in May by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the prevalence of mental illness in the top films of was way out of step with the real world.

Out of 4, speaking characters, only 18 or 0. What's more, in cases where depression was depicted, it was most often shown as having an identifiable cause — like the death of a loved one Collateral Beauty, Manchester by the Sea or a physical disability Me Before You, Miracles from Heaven — where, in reality, it does not always have a dramatic trigger. The study also showed how it is often included to express signature story themes involving stigmatisation and suicide.

In other words, it is still instrumentalised for the sake of a broad narrative beat or sweeping social point. By contrast, Melancholia doesn't use depression as a device: it is instead part of its very texture.

Now in her mid-twenties, she saw Melancholia and casually enjoyed it as a teenager but was retroactively awestruck by the parallels when she rewatched it in Like Justine she had married in a castle, and as with Justine in one particular scene, she found herself at the time of her wedding in a bath, motionless with emotional pain. When Part Two opens, Justine is the walking dead, a state that Julie remembers from her own experiences of depression.

It was a very dreamlike state. Whenever I could, I would go back to sleeping or a sort of cocoon. Julie understands the logic here. You just want to feel something. You want to feel like you're part of this moment in space in time. Jamie Graham is another film writer for whom watching Melancholia was incredibly raw; now Editor at Large of Total Film magazine, he recalls first seeing it at its Cannes premiere in May , while privately in the grip of a depression that lasted three to four years.

At first I kept scrutinizing the image, but after 15 minutes, I simply relaxed into it. There was nothing idiosyncratic about the picture that bothered me on an aesthetic level. He has made four digital features and five on film. As a result, he understands that digital works best when the lighting is built primarily around practical sources and the aperture is wide open.

Considering that the vast majority of movie viewing is digital, including home viewing, why are filmmakers still shooting on film if virtually nobody will ever see it projected on film? The soft image with high-key lighting was inherently designed for celluloid. And Spielberg, in his rigidness, shot himself in the foot: Few will ever see it projected on film.