-1OF CYPRESSES AND SUNFLOWERS

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

French poster for Lust for Life film with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh.

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Those who know and admire the art of Vincent Van Gogh usually cringe whenever

films and TV programmes about him appear because his work - the very thing he is

supposedly famous for - tends to play second fiddle to the portrayal of the man and

the saga of his life. This applies not only to obvious bio-pics such as Vincente

Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956) and Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo (1990), but also

to documentaries such as Alain Resnais' Van Gogh (1948), and films blending

dramatisation and documentary such as Mai Zetterling's Vincent the Dutchman

(1972, with Michael Gough as Van Gogh) and Paul Cox's Vincent (1987). Most film-

makers treat Van Gogh's images as keys to his personality and as illustrations of his

life story. A depiction of a writhing cypress is thus taken as an expression of violent

emotion rather than an objective record of the effect of the Mistral. Resnais' black-
and-white film featured only Vincent's canvases, but the artist's personal crisis was

inscribed in the images on screen by means of accelerated montage. Only the Open

University's educational TV programme The Potato Eaters (1983), gave priority to

the work of art and its socio-historical context rather than to the artist's psyche and

biography.

A recurrent problem of movies about artists is how to represent their artworks.

Often there are difficulties regarding copyright and access. How many viewers, one

wonders, realise that the completed and half-completed 'Van Goghs' we see in these

films are copies? In the case of Vincent, confusion was only too likely because it

included real and fake Van Goghs. For Lust for Life, two hundred enlarged colour

photos were used to represent Vincent's completed canvases; these were

supplemented by copies executed by Robert Parker, an American art teacher. When

contemplating Van Gogh's pictures we enter his world in our imaginations. Kuros-

awa's Dreams (1990) contains an episode in which a Japanese art student is enabled,

courtesy of elaborate sets and special effects, literally to enter some of his paintings.

(Kurosawa once wanted to be an artist, so this episode reflects a personal memory.)

The way in which the film oscillates between photographic naturalism and the huge

painted-scenery effect of the Van Gogh images is at first astonishing, but disappoint-

ment follows when one realises that the 'Van Goghs' shown are not the genuine ones

but crude imitations.

Altman's Vincent & Theo is a slow-motion, low-key version of Lust for Life. Some

scenes in these two films are virtually identical. Where they differ is that Altman's

movie is franker about the sexual diseases the brothers suffered from, and pays far
more attention to Theo and to the financial dimension of art practice. (It seems

obligatory now to start a film about Van Gogh with shots of one of his canvases

being sold for a huge sum.) While preparing for Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas

practised painting crows many times so that he could give a passable imitation of

Van Gogh at work. In contrast, Tim Roth, the actor who plays Vincent in Altman's

film, is completely unconvincing when he applies brush to canvas.

Front cover of Monthly Film Bulletin, which contains several articles on films

about Van Gogh. Cover images shows Tim Roth as the painter in Vincent & Theo.

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How worthwhile are films which turn artists' lives into soap operas? Given the

condensations and distortions such portrayals inevitably involve (one would never

guess from Roth's performance that Van Gogh was a voracious reader), viewers
would be far better advised to read the artist's letters. By their very nature, bio-pics

can only pay perfunctory attention to such issues as the social determinants of art,

artistic intentions, traditions, genres, techniques, the artist's training, stylistic

influences, literary sources and aesthetic theories. Bio-pics about Van Gogh are

primarily tributes to the arts of casting, make-up, costume and set design. Actors

are dressed to resemble the people in his portraits. Rooms are reconstructed from

the evidence of his pictures. The urban and rural places where he lived and worked

become locations. The reality Van Gogh turned into two dimensions, the scenic

artists turn back again into three. Since the images are so familiar to us, the people

and sets inevitably generate a sense of the uncanny.

Lust for Life - the novel and the movie - contributed to the cult and myth of Van

Gogh which is so powerful today. Abraham Ségal's seventy-minute colour

documentary Van Gogh ou la Revanche Ambiguë (Van Gogh or the Double-edged

Triumph, 1989) is an examination of this cult. The film consists of scenes of the New

York auction of Van Gogh's Irises, of the Van Gogh centenary celebrations in Arles,

St. Rémy, Auvers and Amsterdam, interspersed with vox pop interviews with the

people of Arles, a medical expert, Kirk Douglas, Johan Van Gogh, writers and

artists obsessed with Van Gogh, and with readings from Artaud's famous essay

claiming that Vincent was "suicided by society" .

Ségal employs the recursive device of showing a scene or interview and then

returning to it later on; by this means the various themes of the film are

interwoven. As the film progresses, a number of ironic contrasts emerge: in his

lifetime Van Gogh was unknown, now he is world famous; once he evoked
indifference or antagonism, now he is worshipped; he was poor and his pictures

were valueless, now they are valued in tens of millions of dollars; he lived without

the help of state institutions, now they fall over themselves to honour and

incorporate him.

When Kirk Douglas is asked about his contribution to the legend of Van Gogh, he

disclaims responsibility - saying it was due to the man's genius - but shots of a bar at

Auvers, with a large portrait of Douglas playing the part of the painter in Lust for

Life on the wall, reveal how subsequent mass-culture simulations overlay and blend

with the originals. Shots of the interior of Amsterdam's Van Gogh museum with his

actual paintings on display serve as a corrective to the myth. They show that his

canvases are quite modest in size and that they now appear low-key in colour

compared to brightly coloured postcards and slides. Ségal spoils this effect by

ending his film with a sequence of whole images of Van Gogh's paintings which,

although intended presumably to return the viewer to the originals, makes them

seem too lurid.

Ségal’s documentary is an intelligent account of the Van Gogh cult but it is more

description than analysis/critique. For instance, it shows a number of

contemporary artists who apparently have nothing to say about the major issues

and problems of the world today and are reduced to making paintings after Van

Gogh or in response to his life and work. Ségal offers no critical evaluation of their

work. Again, as in many other films and TV arts programmes, he points to the fact

that vast sums are now paid for Van Gogh's work. But what response is expected to

this from the audience? Are we supposed to be outraged by this information? What
exactly is the objection to such prices? As Ségal’s film shows, saleroom audiences

delight in high prices, they applaud when bidding reaches fantastic figures. Only if

one believes it is morally and politically wrong that certain people are extremely

rich while others starve, wrong that the super-rich should be able to exploit the

work of dead artists to become even richer, does it make sense to object to the

millions being invested in art. Without such a perspective, films about the cult of

artists and the machinations of the art market are somewhat futile.

While the cinema audience has little power to change the social circumstances

which have given rise to the Van Gogh cult, and which continue to fuel it, personal

liberation from it begins with a critique of the cult itself. The next step is to combine

present-day aesthetic appreciation of Van Gogh's works with a deeper knowledge of

their historical origin. (This is necessary because of the double existence - past and

present - of Van Gogh's works.) Such knowledge is available via the agency of the

social history of art. The advances in this field in recent decades - in particular, the

scholarly writings of Griselda Pollock - have been ignored by film-makers attracted

to the subject of Van Gogh. Pollock's most recent research considers the Van Gogh

cult historically and seeks to identify the reasons for it in terms of the character of

the art itself, the sequence of major exhibitions, and so on. Because its primary focus

is the present, Ségal's documentary fails to provide a comparable historical analysis.

Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract and The Belly of an Architect prove

it is possible to make perceptive films about the visual arts that also succeed as

cinema. At the moment, Greenaway seems the only director equipped to make an

intellectually challenging movie about Vincent Van Gogh.

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This article first appeared in the magazine Monthly Film Bulletin, vol 57, no 678,

July 1990, pp. 184-85.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of the books Van

Gogh Studies (London: JAW Publications, 1981) and Art and Artists on Screen

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) plus periodical articles on Van

Gogh and films about art. He is also an editorial advisor for the website:

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