The Garden Of Earthly Delights Analysis

But what is meaningful about a film by Anger resembling a painting by Bosch? These two men lived in extremely different times. The characters of Bosch’s paintings were not fantasies to him. Bosch painted his own reality. He painted the creatures that everyone believed to exist in a world completely devoted to God. Anger belongs to a very different, secular era. He made his films for an audience who, like the people of the pleasure dome, have been disillusioned. We watch Anger’s film and stare into Bosch’s painting and see an invented world. However, for Bosch there is no invention, and for Anger, it is all invention. The world of Bosch is nearly inconceivable to the man from modernity, but we look into The Garden of Earthly Delights, and we try to see Kenneth Anger, and if we simply ignore observations that don’t fit, the two seem to be a reiteration of the other and then just a reiteration of the Bible and the story of creation, the story of the human race growing and sinning and decaying.
It would be interesting to present a theory for why these two works of art are so similar. This theory would be grounded in history or psychology or religion. But such a theory will not be presented in this paper. This paper is to simply expose the subjectivity of art, especially when viewed by a layman like myself. I do not truly believe Anger’s wonderful film and Bosch’s wonderful painting are in anyway related. I do not believe they tell the same story. I do not believe they rise from the same biblical text. But when taking a close look at the two with the imposed agenda to compare, I completely ignored the artistic integrity of