Saturday, November 11, 2017

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - S5E16 - "The Lawless"

This post contains spoilers.

In the Rebels Recon episode for the beginning of season four of Star Wars: Rebels, there were a few shots of Mandalore from Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  This reminded me of something I noticed about a particular shot in "The Lawless" but forgot to write about.

What had been the group Death Watch has split into two factions: those who are loyal to Darth Maul, who has taken over Mandalore, and those who refuse to let an outsider rule them.  Meanwhile, Maul uses Duchess Satine to lure Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mandalore, so he can have his revenge.  Bo-Katan, the leader of the Mandalorians who are against Maul, helps Kenobi escape and tells him to go back to the Republic and explain the situation, knowing that it will lead to a Republic invasion of Mandalore but also that such an invasion will remove Maul from power.

During Kenobi's escape, he and a group of Mandalorians encounter a giant, closed door.  As it opens, the camera angle tilts.  At first, the camera is level with the ground:


But as the shot goes on, the camera shifts so that everything is at an angle:


The shot as a whole illustrates the civil war that has beset Mandalore.  Previously, there had been stability, but now there is confusion.  Along with this shifting camera angle, the chaos is illustrated in the background, where Mandalorians are fighting each other and there are various blaster shots and explosions.

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While exploring the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode guides on StarWars.com, I ran across a bit of trivia relevant to this episode.  In the Trivia Gallery for "The Mandalore Plot" (S2E12), it's explained that "The repeated cube imagery [on Mandalore] extends to the cubist painting seen in the various Mandalorian spaces, including an epic painting done in the style of Picasso's famous Guernica."  I don't recall seeing a Guernica-style painting in those season two episodes, but - even before I read that trivia - I thought I'd found a Guernica-style painting in this episode.  I noticed it the first time I saw the episode, but I wasn't convinced of its resemblance then.

The best view of the painting is provided by a wide-shot at the end of Sidious' lightsaber battle against Savage and Maul:


For comparison, here's Picasso's Guernica:


This article about the painting explains that Guernica was Picasso's response to the bombing of the city Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, so its appearance in this episode - also about a civil war - is fitting.  The article also provides a quote in which Picasso says that Guernica "clearly express[es] my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death."  This is similar to the pacifist view that the Mandalorian Duchess Satine held before she was killed by Maul in this episode.