Despite several acts of protest on behalf of the cultural sector, cinemas remain closed in Belgium. Since the start of the second lockdown, this brings us to the 25th week in which Sabzian presents a selection of films from the online offer. This week, we focus on three films that look at the work and life of the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Commissioned for a Paris exhibition featuring the painter’s work, Van Gogh (1948) was Alain Resnais’s first effort in his series of short films on the subject of art. Starting from Van Gogh’s paintings, Resnais charts the artist’s self-destructive tendencies while celebrating his genius and “lust for life”, paced by a narration written by Gaston Diehl and Robert Hessens, and a score by Jacques Besse. Based on the novel of the same title by Irving Stone, Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) is a biographical account of Van Gogh’s life. Kirk Douglas plays the tormented genius, whose obsessive devotion to his art engulfs, consumes, and finally destroys him. A fan of fauvist and impressionist painting, Minnelli traces the path of this pastor’s son with theatrical lyricism and seduces the viewer through its photography and its landscapes in saturated colours, inspired by the artist’s numerous paintings. “Van Gogh seems to stagger through a landscape of his own paintings,” as Darragh O’Donoghue notes. In contrast to Minnelli’s lyricism, Maurice Pialat approaches Van Gogh in his final days in Auvers-sur-Oise, avoiding the trap of a romantic portrait of the “tormented artist” or the “cursed mystic”. In Van Gogh (1991), Pialat presents the bitterness of a misunderstood and somewhat misanthropic man, stifled by the bourgeois concerns of his contemporaries and their demand for realistic fidelity. At its centre is the compulsive attraction of art, and its flipside, the resignation of life. In his austere, demythologised portrait, “Pialat achieves a true miracle,” Hans Kroon writes. “After all that has been said, written and filmed about Van Gogh, after all the romantic clichés about the tormented and suffering artist that darkened our view of him, Pialat still manages to wash our ears and eyes and completely purify our vision of Van Gogh.”
Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, 1948)is available on Vimeo.
Lust for Life (Vincente Minelli, 1956) is available on Amazon Prime.
Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991) is available on Amazon Prime, La Cinetek and Apple TV.
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