Holbein, Obarski, and the Enduring “Gif” of the Danse Macabre

Reformation-era German engraver, painter and printmaker Hans Holbein and quirky contemporary Polish animator Kajetan Obarski are two artists separated by several centuries that, in their similarities, attest to historical parallels and ramifications of the fantastic. As this post identifies, both artists illustrate the grotesque through a Carnivalesque trope in their work of the Danse Macabre. Both also prophetically remind their viewers of the stark facts of mortality, of people who are “like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall” (Peter 1:24-25). Through a close analysis of these two artists and their works, we see a Gothic symbol that summons viewers to awake to the ultimate horror of the natural life, and yet to wake with a laughter on one’s lips.

One of the essential roots of the fantastic animated film can be traced back to the traumatic aesthetics of late medieval artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, and others who expressed ideas of sin, judgment, and redemption through vivid imagery that almost seems to move. Along with dreadful images of the devil and the four last things rides the medieval theme of memento mori, the admonition to “remember that you must die.” Everything in these artists’ paintings and projections - from rotting fruit and wilting flowers to skulls - symbolize the inevitability of one’s demise. Hourglasses and waning wax candles warned of the inescapable fate of all fallen humanity. However, the dominant and pervasive image of death is that comic collection of bones we recognize as a skeleton. Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin described the nature of Carnival as a communal celebration of the lower strata (the grotesque, the body and its desires) over the higher strata of thought and speech, along with a ghastly ambivalence of life and death (with the enduring trope of a pregnant withered old hag about to die). The insertion of comedy into a dance of death subverts a modern mindset, provoking spectators to laugh, however uneasily.

Fig. 1 - Holbein’s morbid illustrations.

Called the “portrait cameraman of Tudor history,” Holbein provided marginal etchings of Dame Folly and her fools in Erasmus’ Encomium Moriae (1511). He found his stride with his stunning allegorical woodcuts in Danse Macabre (1526), with their capering images of death interfering with everybody’s lives.  In Basel, Switzerland, Holbein published his wonderfully grim Dance of Death series, a stunning triumph of Renaissance woodblock printing and Reformist satire. Significantly, in 1522, just before he began The Dance, Holbein had illustrated Martin Luther’s influential translation of the New Testament into German. He enlivened the biblical passage of the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), putting his morbid sermons into a visual vernacular. His mini-visual parables showed how death interrupted all the estates. For example, Death seizes a Mendicant friar just as his begging box and bag jingle with coins. Death also sneaks up in a pulpit behind the loquacious Preacher, and prepares to strike him down with a jawbone, I suspect from preaching a bit too long. His time is up, thank God (Fig. 1).  

Fig. 2 - Death in Holbein’s “traumatic aesthetics.”

In particular, Holbein likes to drag off monks with unopened prayer books and Roman Catholic clergy, like the Pope, who at the pinnacle of his glory in having his feet kissed by an emperor, is about to be called to eternity. While a young nun kneels at the altar, her troubadour playing his “lute” distracts her. Death, meantime, arrives as a hideous old hag, to tidy up and “extinguish” the altar candles (Fig. 2). No matter what estate, no matter what status, no matter what gender, Death stalks and slays each mortal being, from knights to peddlers, nobles to peasants, drunkards, gamblers, usurers, and lawyers.  Holbein's subsequent Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort (1538) set the standard for the early animated shorts that traded in ironic images of dark fantasy, from Disney’s Silly Symphony short The Skeleton Dance (Ub Iwerks, 1929) and the stop-action of Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton battles in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) to the hilariously ubiquitous art of contemporary “Gif” artist Kajetan Obarski. Obarski’s Death Fairy, as will be explained below, would skip along the paths of Holbein’s messenger of mortality. The wand would supplant the hourglass. A vermillion tutu would adorn the bones. Filmmaker Obarski would ultimately become the happy, even giddy, heir of Holbein.

Self-proclaimed misanthrope Obarski’s ironic and surreal Kiszkiloszki Death Fairy Tales follow the theme of Danse Macabre with his skeletal fairy wearing pink wings and a purple skirt. The cheery bony creature prances about with his lethal wand, striking anyone and everyone with what seems like arbitrary destruction (Figs. 3 and 4). Creating dark animation riffing on classic art works became what Obarski called his “main indoctrination tool.” He teaches the lesson of carpe-diem (and of futilely trying to run away) in what we may easily recognize as via negativa. Like Holbein’s skeletons, his harbingers of Death show no favorites.

Fig. 3 - Kiszkiloszki Death Fairy Tales.

Fig. 4 - Kiszkiloszki Death Fairy Tales.

Obarski’ recent “Gif” animated works harken back to another legendary manuscript illumination from the 14th century De Lisle Psalter of the "Three Living and the Three Dead." Three gentlemen ride out on a hunt and stumble across three corpses, who warn them “Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis” ("What we were, you are; what we are, you will be"). Such a shocking encounter previews several animated films (e.g. Ruth Lingford’s woodcut like Death and the Mother, 1997) that bring the dead and living into disquieting meetings. In particular, one senses the grim dread of losing a child to death as Holbein engraved a mother cooking dinner, looking forlornly as Death abducts her young son (Fig. 5). Obarski redirects this profound grief to a droll juxtaposition of the Death Fairy being in a quandary about what to do when confronted with a little girl and her red balloon. Death simply wants the red balloon. In one brief episode in a forest, the Death Fairy merely looks quizzically at the girl holding her balloon (Fig. 6). Distracting her, he is able to strike quickly. In a subsequent scene, we see the red balloon silently floating above the trees.

Fig. 5 - Holbein’s engravings for “Three Living and the Three Dead.”

Fig. 6 - The Death Fairy in Obarski’s ‘Gif’ art.

Obarski’s perversely sanguine character dances macabrely through life destroying whatever is in his path, although he does waver a bit considering what to do with that little red headed girl and her toy balloon. His fatal strike with his fairy wand is fully egalitarian; he takes normal businessmen, Victorian women, and even John Travolta (Fig. 7). No one is exempt from his lethal power.  Even one man standing by the water fountain arrests the strike of the fairy by pointing to a “no wand” sign (Fig. 8). However, the fairy points to a greater law above it: “no man.”

Fig. 7 - The Death Fairy meets John Travolta.

Fig. 8 - The Death Fairy.

Such diverse forms as Francisco Goya’s Black paintings, a slice of Kafka, several dollops of Greek mythology, and a slew of Slavic folk tales twisted Obarski’s unique imagination. As he conceded of his “Gif” work, “When you connect dying with Chaplin’s slapstick vanity with Frank Zappa’s music and misanthropy with Lechosław Marszałek. Reksio you get Kiszkiloszki.” It is a deliciously lethal and bubbly stew. Obarski also follows the literary tradition of a poet William Dunbar as well. The Scottish makar’s work attained a quality best described as “eldritch.” Dunbar combines the weird, sinister, and exuberant in his Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, where writhing vices frolic with spooky abandon. Their riotous dance mixes horror with sheer dark comedy, where fiends make lurid gestures and laugh so hard that hearts would burst. With Obarski, one gets that frisky, grisly sense of the uncanny that Dunbar captures so well.

Yet, Obarski is quick to point out that his key interest through these tiny Gifs is narration, even in ten seconds of animation. Here is the genre of revelatory parable of the rich man trying like a camel to go through the eye of a needle, only to be squeezed into oblivion or zapped with the rod of destruction. Obarski asserts that, “I’m more of a story teller than a visual artist.” Pictures are there to stimulate the imagination, and, like Holbein’s own darkly humorous reminders of memento mori, Obarski follows suit, in spades. His loopy images linger too long into the nighttime, evoking both fantasies of fear and prayers of laughter.

Fig. 9 - Obarski’s Death Fairy Tales.

Where Holbein transformed the medieval allegory of the death mask into a reformist satire, fetching at the most inopportune time, and striking down Roman Catholic monks, bishops, cardinals (busy selling indulgences), and even the pope, so Obarski strikes at every “innocent” character. None escapes the clutches of the bony fairy. The two artists share the same fantastic sources, the same weird images, similar inside cultural jokes, and a joint, almost indescribable, ability to birth comedy out of an abrupt end of life.  What Obarski does with silly brilliance is condense his narratives into moments. A simple Gif of Death riding a cloud or skipping through urban streets works as effectively as Holbein’s woodcuts in telling a parable with economy and wit (Fig. 9). Short animations can work fantastic wonders.

Finally, Obarski, like Holbein, also avoids monotonous repetition of his characters, with just enough tweaking to make each bizarre scenario uniquely compelling. Among the medieval four last things, death came first.  Then came judgment. Holbein starts with original sin and travels along until Judgment Day. The postmodern Obarski, both a hikikomoro and a trickster, is still tinkering with the seeming randomness of death. Who knows what may follow. Yet, for now, the subliminal memento mori message will suffice.

**Article published: July 10, 2020**

Biography

Terry Lindvall (PhD, University of Southern California) occupies the C. S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He has taught at Duke University, the College of William and Mary, and several other universities, was a consultant for Dreamworks' The Prince of Egypt, and has authored twelve books including God on the Big Screen (NYU Press, 2019), Divine Film Comedies (Routledge, 2016), and God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert (NYU Press, 2015). He is currently researching a book on Seven Deadly Cartoon Sins: Short Animated Films as Parables, Proverbs and Fables and is also producing a documentary feature on A History of Prayers in Hollywood Films from the Silent Era to Today. He is married to Karen Lindvall, a musician, and identifies with the dwarf Sleepy.