Van Gogh (1948)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Film Review

In the late 1940s, emerging film auteur Alain Resnais first came to prominence with this innovative short film which recounts the life of post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh through his own work.  The film put Resnais on the map, earning him an Academy Award in 1950 for the Best Short Subject, and it anticipates some of his later, more substantial work in its use of camera motion, slow dissolves and rapid editing.  Van Gogh was one of a series of short films about celebrated French artists that Resnais made at the start of his career.  Others include Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947), Malfray (1948) and Gauguin (1950).  Resnais would employ some of the techniques and stylistic motifs he developed for these films on later works, most notably his early masterpiece Guernica (1950).

The first thing to say about Resnais's Van Gogh is that it is not an authoritative, or even accurate account of the painter's life.  What the film presents is a highly simplified version of events, as you would find in a child's encyclopaedia, more myth than reality.  Van Gogh's early life is omitted altogether, with the film concentrating on the final turbulent six years of his life, the time he was active as a painter.  Whilst the naivety of its biographical content diminishes the film's credibility as a documentary piece it does not lessen its artistic value, nor its emotional impact.  The film's worth lies in the imaginative and moving way that Resnais presents Van Gogh's tortured spiritual journey through a labrythine montage constructed from fragments of the painter's work.

Given that Van Gogh is renowned for his dazzling use of colour, it is perhaps surprising that Resnais chose to make this film in black and white (presumably the choice was dictated  more by financial necessity than artistic whim).  We can only guess at how much more potent the film would have been if Resnais had shot it in colour, but there is no point wishing for things we know we cannot have.  In lustrous monochrome, the film is still pretty mesmerising.  The pace of editing and the tone of the composition are carefully engineered to create a sense of Van Gogh's wild mood swings, taking us to dizzying heights as the artist reaches his creative peak during his frenzied period in Provence.  Jacques Besse's score adds to the film's expressionistic power, with unsettling dark undertones that hint at the destructive tendencies which are propelling Van Gogh to his doom.  Despite its glaring factual inaccuracies, Van Gogh is a superlative art film, one that distils the essence of the man and his art into a film that is both visually compelling and emotionally troubling.

Film Synopsis

Today, Vincent Van Gogh is considered one of the most important artists in western culture.  His output was phenomenal and he leaves behind an impressive body of work that includes over eight hundred oil paintings.  But in his day, he was completely unknown and spent his productive years as an artist in almost abject poverty, battling against mental illness as he sought to express himself through the art that had become his sole reason for existing.  Vincent only began painting in his early thirties, having failed as both an art dealer and a Protestant missionary.  It was in the dreary Dutch town of Nuenen that he discovered his art.  He expressed his close affinity for others through his sketches and paintings of ordinary folk, most famously his 1885 work The Potato Eaters.

In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris and soon fell in with others who were keen to develop a radically new form of pictorial art.  These included two other leading figures of the post-impressionist movement: Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.  The thronging streets and grey skies of Paris did not seem to accord with Vincent's inner mood, so he headed south, and like a flower suddenly exposed to the sun's life-nourishing rays, his art began to flourish, blazing with its own unique vitality.  It was during his stay in Arles that Vincent painted some of his best-known works, stunning landscapes, vivid still lifes and gently comical portraits, all burning with that ineffable passion that had taken possession of the artist.

But then, just as he had reached the pinnacle of his art, Vincent's mental health took a dramatic turn for the worse.  In a moment of madness, he sliced off a part of his own ear.  Not long afterwards, fearing he was going mad, he allowed himself to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.  He continued to paint, his changing moods reflected in his increasingly dramatic landscapes.  Apparently recovered, Vincent settled in the quiet town of Auvers-sur-Oise just outside Paris, and once again his art flourished.  But, despite his renewed zest for living, his demons would not leave him in peace.  On 27th July 1890, the pain of living had become so unbearable that Vincent decided to kill himself...