Jean Eustache
France,
1981
French television series Les enthousiastes asked art afficionados to offer their thoughts and interpretations about paintings that they themselves selected. For Eustache’s episode, Jean-Noël Picq (of Une sale histoire) chose the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, an apocalyptic nightmare-scape that predicted the darkest reaches of surrealism by almost 400 years. Looking beyond its obvious grotesqueries, Picq points out several notable qualities of Bosch’s masterwork, including its near-absence of perspective, its conflation of ontological categories (human and animal, living and dead, time and space), and its objective depiction of sadomasochistic pleasure.