Director – David Bickerstaff – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 90m
*****
Fascinating journey through Van Gogh’s two plus years in Arles and Saint-Rémy in the South of France through his paintings of 1888-90 (collected in the current National Gallery exhibition) and readings from his letters – out in UK cinemas from Wednesday, November 6th
This is the latest offering in Exhibition on Screen’s excellent series of films about art, which usually tie in with some current, recent or upcoming art exhibition. In this case, the tie-in is with the National Gallery’s current offering Van Gogh – Poets & Lovers, and on one level the film follows EoS’ tried and tested template of shooting footage of the exhibition and paintings along with interviews with exhibition curators (in this instance, Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle) and assorted artists, critics or other biographers.
It also incorporates footage of actor Jamie de Courcey playing Vincent van Gogh – more as shots from moving visual tableaux than anything else (a form of filmic illustration, if you will) – the actor isn’t required to speak dialogue – to break up the whole and make it more manageable by the viewer.
Vincent van Gogh who, as Homburg notes early on, had within 25 years of his death become the best known artist in the world, is something of a gift to anyone making a film about him. His popularity clearly will attract greater numbers of viewers than less well-known artists (Exhibition on Screen do a good job of tackling both big name painters – and to date they have tended to be painters rather than sculptors or ‘third area’ artists working in less easily categorized media – and less familiar names).
Perhaps more pertinently, he not only churned out an awful lot of paintings, but also wrote a great deal about them in the course of considerable quantities of written verbal correspondence, much of it with his brother Theo. These were later collected for publication in 2014, and have been republished many times over the years, so they are out there and readily available as an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to know more about Vincent’s work and life.
(Talking about Vincent’s paintings, I don’t mean the term “churned out” in any pejorative sense, rather that he had a strong work ethic and made an awful lot of paintings, aside from weeks or months when he took time off for mental health reasons. Which is to say, he voluntarily lived in local hospitals that admitted the mentally ill – he was not a rich man in his lifetime).
To anyone making a film about the artist, these letters are a gift.
Movies are made up of image and sound; EoS makes films about paintings, pictures, images, so the images are to some extent a given. The sound in their films are often a mixture both of the sound of people talking about them (sometimes synchronised with footage of the interviewees, sometimes instead accompanying the relevant images) and sometimes accompanied by specially composed music. The deceptively simple-sounding, largely piano-played score here, which sometimes has an almost meditative quality, is composed by Simon Farmer, who has amassed an impressive body of work as a sound technician, frequently the sound mixer, in film and television in recent years (St. Maud, Rose Glass, 2019).
Thus, armed with Vincent’s letters – extracts from which are read on the soundtrack by actor Jochum ten Haaf – we look at Vincent’s pictures and hear him talk about them specifically – what he was trying to achieve in particular paintings as they appear before us on the screen.
Exhibition On Screen: Van Gogh – Poets & Lovers is out in cinemas in the UK from Wednesday, November 6th. Check your local cinema for details or click here.
Trailer: