u/thinduke01

Schiele's The Family has always been one of those paintings that stays with me.

For years, Egon Schiele had challenged bourgeois taste and the social conventions of early twentieth-century Austria. His figures are drawn with sharp, fluid lines and colors that seem to carry desire, anxiety, neurosis, fear, and tension all at once. Then, in 1918, the same year he died, he painted The Family.

The father is Schiele himself. The mother is his wife, Edith. Both would die that same year during the Spanish flu pandemic, a catastrophe that is estimated to have killed around fifty million people and infected roughly a third of the world's population.

The painting was originally titled Squatting Couple. It was only meant to depict Schiele and Edith before he decided to add the unborn child resting beneath them. That decision transformed the work into something haunting. On one hand, it feels almost prophetic, a foreboding vision of the tragedy to come, reflected in the painting's dark background. On the other, it captures a future Schiele desperately wanted but would never get to experience—a family that could only exist on canvas.

Yet even as he fulfills that dream through paint, there's no real sense of comfort or security in their faces. The three figures are completely naked, stripped of any protection. Their pale skin glows against the surrounding darkness, making them appear innocent, vulnerable.

Schiele places himself at the apex of a triangular composition, his legs apart and chest exposed, as if instinctively shielding his family. He's also the only figure who looks directly at us. It almost feels like a break of the fourth wall, collapsing the barrier between painting and viewer. Is he inviting us into a conversation that transcends time and the circumstances of its creation? Is it a plea? A warning? Or simply a reminder that, once everything else disappears, what remains is the work itself?

What has always moved me most about this painting, is Schiele's ability to use art to construct a reality he knew he would never inhabit. He painted not what was, but what could have been. Every time I look at The Family through a screen more than a century later, I'm reminded of art's extraordinary ability to communicate across time, language, geography, and history. Maybe that's art's truest legacy—not immortality, but the quiet ability to carry fragments of one human life into another, adding just enough color to make the weight of an otherwise cynical, seemingly directionless world a little more bearable.

Some historians argue that the woman in the painting isn't even Edith, which would undermine much of the emotional framework I've built around the painting. Still, I'd rather believe she is, using Herzog's concept of ecstatic truth.

Silent cinema has always felt therapeutic to me. Not as a history lesson or as some museum artifact you admire from a distance, but as something that's genuinely enjoyable beyond its historical significance.

You're watching a film made for a commercial audience that no longer exists—people who lived in a world that disappeared over a century ago. Everyone it was made for is gone. What's left are moving images populated by ghosts, shadows, and preserved gestures. It almost feels like stepping through a time portal into a reality you have absolutely no connection to, yet somehow the emotions still reach you. That's one of the things I find most miraculous about art: its ability to connect you to a past you never lived through and still make you laugh, cry, or sit in complete awe.

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is astonishing for how much information and emotion it conveys through images alone. The camera movement, the performances, the staging, the editing—even with a fair number of intertitles—carry an incredible expressive weight. It's one of the strongest arguments, to me, that silent cinema shouldn't be seen as merely an early stage in the evolution of film. It was its own distinct art form, operating under a completely different visual language before cinema became a medium built on the combination of image and synchronized sound.

The reason I finally sat down to watch all four hours of it, about a week ago, was that I recently started flipping back through Gravity's Rainbow, where this film along with several other films from the Weimar era keep showing up throughout the novel.

In a documentary made after Kon's death, Darren Aronofsky recalls the famous bathtub scene in Requiem for a Dream. He explains that he was searching for a way to externalize Jennifer Connelly's psychological state when he happened to watch Perfect Blue. Struck by one particular sequence, he wrote to Kon asking whether he would mind if it were recreated as a homage. Kon generously agreed. Aronofsky later recalled meeting him in Japan, where Kon supposedly told him he was proud of the tribute and genuinely delighted by it.

Years later, however, an older interview with Kon resurfaced on anime forums and Reddit after Aronofsky's AI project drew renewed attention to his relationship with Kon's work. In the interview, Kon himself plays the two films side by side, pointing out the nearly identical angles, compositions, and staging. When he asked Aronofsky about the similarities, the answer was simple:

"It's a homage."

Kon laughs as he points to himself with a stick.

"A homage... to me."

Everyone in the room laughs with him. Then the joke fades. Kon remarks that Aronofsky had essentially treated Perfect Blue as a ready-made storyboard. The interviewer tries to soften the exchange by saying that there are certainly many similarities. Kon responds with a question that lingers much longer than the laughter:

"Similarities... or theft?"

In the same interview, almost as comic relief, Kon mentions that he happened to be on the same flight as Jennifer Connelly. She was flying first class with her family, while he was sitting in business class.

Kon died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at only 46 years old, before receiving the worldwide recognition he deserved. Then came Black Swan. This time the parallels were even harder to ignore, yet Aronofsky denied that the film was influenced by Kon, describing it simply as a dramatization of Swan Lake. By then, Kon was no longer around to respond.

Adding another layer to the story, Perfect Blue's producer later revealed that Aronofsky had previously tried to acquire the live-action rights to the film before eventually making Black Swan.

None of this is new, but it came back to my mind when I remembered the ended wave of AI-generated "Ghiblification."

What surprised me wasn't that AI could imitate Studio Ghibli's visual language. It was learning that Japan allows AI models to be trained on copyrighted works, despite having some of the world's strictest copyright laws and one of the narrowest approaches to fair use.

But maybe the legal question isn't even the most interesting one.

Can an artistic style actually belong to someone?

Can Ghibli's watercolor palettes, dreamlike atmosphere, visual rhythm, and decades of accumulated craftsmanship be considered intellectual property? Should style itself be protected from being compressed into a prompt—not just individual frames or drawings, but the artistic language that gives them meaning?

I don't know.

في انترفيو من وثائقي اتعمل عن ساتوشي كون بعد وفاته، دارين أرنوفسكي بيحكي عن مشهد البانيو الشهير فيلمه requiem for a dream - واللي هو عبارة عن نسخة مطولة من إعلانات محمد صلاح التوعوية ضد المخدرات - واللي اقتبسه بشكل مباشر من مشهد في perfect blue. أرنوفسكي بيقول إنه كان بيدور على مشهد يوضح الحالة النفسية الداخلية لشخصية جينيفر كونيلي في الفيلم، وفي نفس الوقت بالصدفة اتفرج على perfect blue، فقرر يتشجع ويكتب لساتوشي كون يسأله إن كان هيمانع في استخدام واحدة من لقطاته كنوع من الـ "homage" له، وساتوشي كون سمح له بكل كرم. أرنوفسكي كمل وقال إنهم اتقابلوا بعد كدا في اليابان، وإن ساتوشي كون وقتها قاله إنه فخور جدا وطاير من السعادة بالـ "homage" دا.

لكن في مقطع قديم لانترفيو مع ساتوشي كون انتشر على منتديات وsubreddits الأوتاكوز عشاق الأنيمي، بعد ما مشروع أرنوفسكي بالذكاء الصناعي اتشهر، في المقطع دا ساتوشين كون شغل على شاشة تليفزيون التشابهات اللي بين الفيلمين بنفسه، وقال إن أرنوفسكي استخدم المشهدين بنفس الزوايا والوضعيات وكل حاجة، ولما كون سأله عن الموضوع، أرنوفسكي رد بإنه "homage". في المقطع، ساتوشي كون والناس اللي حواليه ضحكوا وهو بيشاور لنفسه بعصاية وبيقول: homage ليا أنا. وكمل بعدها وقال إن أرنوفسكي استخدم شغله كأنه storyboard جاهز واستفاد منه بالكامل. المذيعة حاولت تقلل من حدة الموضوع، وقالت إن التشابهات كتيرة فعلا، وقتها كون رد وقال: تشابه ولا سرقة؟

في نفس المقطع كون بيحكي على الهامش إنه كان في نفس الطيارة مع جينيفير كونيلي، هي كانت في الدرجة الأولى مع عيلتها كلها وهو كان قاعد في البيزنيس كلاس.

بعد ما كون مات بسرطان البنكرياس وهو عنده 47 سنة بس ومش معروف عالميا بالشكل الكافي، فيلم black swan خرج للنور، واللي كان عملية النقل فيه واضحة وفجة أكتر، لما أرنوفسكي اتسأل عن دا أنكر إن فيه أي تأثر بيه، وإنه dramatization لبحيرة البجع. كون كان مات وماعدش فيه حاجة تخليه يقول إن دا homage له.

منتج perfect blue نفسه في لقاء صحفي له كان حكى إنه قابل أرنوفسكي مع كون، وإن أرنوفسكي وقتها كان بيحاول يشتري حقوق الفيلم علشان يعمل منه نسخة live action قبل ما يعمل black swan.

ماكانش غريب تريند جيبلي "Ghiblification" اللي الآلة خدت شغل وأسلوب فريق كامل بيشتغل عليه بالقلم الرصاص لشهور ويمكن سنة علشان يطلعوا مشهد واحد، وعملتله generate في تلت دقايق، الغريب بالنسبة لي هو إزاي اليابان قننت تدريب الـ AI على الـ copyrighted material، وعلشان كدا للي حصل كان مسموح بيه. اليابان معروفة بقد إيه الـ fair use عندهم ضيق، وقوانين الملكية الفكرية عندهم صارمة أكتر من أي دولة تانية. لكن يمكن حتى لو ماكانش دا حصل، هتقدر تقول إن الدفا البصري والألوان المائية والإحساس الحالم بتاع أفلام جيبلي دا ملكية فكرية محمية بحكم القانون؟هل الستايل نفسه المفروض يكون محمي من انه يتحول لمجرد prompt مش بس الفريمات؟

ماعرفش