This ingenious detail connects the Batman, Joker and Django Unchained movies

A council that governs the Jokers? You might not know this common point between Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Joaquin Phoenix: they both love the same picture! This is more precisely what we are talking about blue baby By the English artist Thomas Gainsborough, created in 1779.

In Tim Burton’s Batman, we can see a painting in the Gotham Museum as the Joker destroys every artefact he comes across along the way:

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And Todd Phillips wanted to recall this motif by placing a reduced version of the painting in Arthur Fleck’s room:

Laurel and Hardy too!

Note that the painting also inspired the Austin Powers costume and appears in two of Laurel and Hardy’s films, including The Knave (1928), a silent film in which Hardy inherits a bourgeois house. It must be said that in 1921 the painting was sold to an American for an astronomical sum of 728,000 dollars, or 12.5 million in today’s money.

At the time, it was the most expensive painting in the world, and its placement in the film about the fortune only 7 years after the deal was a reference to this purchase and the demonstration of Hardy’s wealth in The Knave.

And finally… Tarantino

The anecdote could have ended there, but we can also point out that the painting was the inspiration for the costume Jamie Foxx wore in the western Django Unchained. When the hero and Schultz (Christoph Waltz) infiltrate Spencer Bennett’s plantation in search of the Brittle brothers.

We find the characteristic outfit of the painting: a blue jacket with gold buttons and matching trousers, as well as a lace scarf expertly tied (albeit a little differently). The idea came from Tarantino, who wanted to adapt the 1919 film Der Knabe in Blau (The Blue Rider), FW Murnau’s first feature film, inspired by the famous painting.

In this film, Murnau invented the technique of shooting with the camera on the move, a technique called the “detached camera technique”. Hence the nod to Django Unchained and the use of the technique in the film. At least a little sharp!

The way cinema, a relatively new art form, echoes one of the oldest arts…but always with the same image!