JULIAN SCHNABEL GOES DEEPS ON VAN GOGH.
Julian Schnabel discusses sensory experience while in his New York home, lying on his back in bed with his eyes closed. The painter and filmmaker is talking about artist Vincent Van Gogh, and in doing so, he chooses to be in the most relaxed environment he can find.
“I’m talking to you,” he says. “But before I got on the telephone, I was just lying here thinking thoughts and hearing my own voice in my head speaking to myself.”
He compares that experience — a relaxed solitude in one’s own mind — to what he wanted to achieve with “At Eternity’s Gate,” a new film about the 19th-century Dutch painter. You could call “At Eternity’s Gate” a biopic, but that would sell short Schnabel’s film, which feels freer and driven more by feeling than historical markers. His film is less interested in the bio part. It instead feels like an artpic, an attempt by one artist to convey some of the experience of one of the greatest painters to have ever lived.
“At Eternity’s Gate” opens with a black screen and actor Willem Dafoe’s voice, a mechanism the occurs several times in the film, a striking and spare way to open a movie about an artist known for his radiant use of color. I was struck by the textural quality of Schnabel’s film: the resonance of Dafoe’s voice, crisp and crackling as a fallen leaf; the director of photography’s ability to capture the three-dimensional quality of paint thickly applied; and the landscapes through which Van Gogh walks, dense patchworks of branches, trees and flowers.
As the camera traverses this world, Dafoe’s Van Gogh then serves as a sort of tour guide through himself.
Dafoe is 63, far older than the painter when he died at 37. But age in this case truly is just a number. The goal was an expression of Van Gogh, rather than an impersonation.
“I feel like those moments with the black screen, we were just trying to put you into Vincent’s head for a moment, him speaking
to himself and then they segue into another moment,” Schnabel says. “It’s black, then his eyes open, and there’s a psychiatrist sitting in front of him. Or these others where he feels God’s energy radiating in nature, and it’s so intense he loses consciousness. Going in and out of consciousness was something I wanted to capture. You see him move into this crummy room and move around there. It’s unfriendly and uninviting, and still he turns it into a thing of beauty with a painting of these old shoes.”
To watch “At Eternity’s Gate,” which opens in theaters Wednesday, is to feel Schnabel trying to work beyond the frame of the film. Turns out that’s something he’s done for years.
A native New Yorker, Schnabel moved with his family to Brownsville as a teen in 1965. He came here in 1969 to attend the University of Houston and had his first exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Museum in 1975.
“I don’t get back often, but I have a deep feeling for that place,” Schnabel says of Houston. “A lot of important things happened to me there.”
By 1979, he was living in New York and quickly found success selling his paintings. His work exhibited a disinterest or fatigue with a simple frame: His canvases grew larger and larger and larger, and he routinely incorporated found objects to give his work greater texture and depth.
An established star in the art world, Schnabel looked for a new mode of expression. He found his way into filmmaking in 1996 with “Basquiat,” a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat, his friend and fellow famed artist from 1980s New York.
Schnabel hasn’t made many films since. But when he does — like “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” — they’re often about expression, with both the struggle and radiance that comes with it.
No surprise, then, that he says he sees a film screen “almost as a sculpture.” He’d rather not be fenced in.
With “At Eternity’s Gate” Schnabel sought to generate as much feeling of expression as possible into the frame. He describes an almost merry method of discovery working with Dafoe and director of photography Benoît Delhomme. The film was scripted, but with ample space for improvisation.
“We worked spontaneously,” he says. “We worked with the weather and the light. There was a magic hour every day, and we took advantage of that and invented scenes. If you look at the script it might read, ‘Vincent walks through nature.’ The landscape presented opportunities. What caught Vincent’s attention? We wanted to be as accurate as possible while trying to experience what he may have experienced.”
Sometimes Delhomme would don Van Gogh’s pants and shoot himself running through a field.
“We devised a way for him to hold the camera at his chest, so if I asked him to shoot the sky, he could do that. He was very connected to me. We were all very connected to each other.”
Other times, Dafoe would take the camera and shoot from his point of view.
Schnabel taught the actor to paint, and the two would go out with easels and create two different representations of the same scene.
Conversations in the film were not presented in a traditional pingponging manner between two people speaking. Schnabel instead would frame Dafoe’s Van Gogh and hold the shot for an almost uncomfortable amount of time. The contours of the actor’s face change beautifully and subtly, registering his reactions to what was being said to him.
“It’s not about makeup or illustrating some particular thing,” Schnabel says. “It’s instead a person being changed by what they’re doing. You take Willem to a landscape and different things happen to him. He’ll react differently in the light than in the dark. Being in the asylum, with real patients, that affected his performance. He was responding to everything.”
The resulting film bears a remarkable variation in its expression that, Schnabel hopes, in some way resonates similar to viewing a painting. “If you look at a painting multiple times, you see something different,” he says. “The painting stays the same. But you are altered.”
Elsewhere, Schnabel and Delhomme used a split diopter, which rendered part of the frame out of focus, frequently when Van Gogh was in a state of agitation or anxiety.
“The split focus wasn’t fixed to the lens, so the DP could move it in his hands,” Schnabel says. “That felt more human to us. I guess the way we shot the movie, we wanted you to feel somebody breathing. Like you were participating.”
Cumulatively, these efforts present Van Gogh not as a tortured artist myth nor as the sum of a series of known biographical facts. They draw from biography and letters, and shot in Arles, where he spent much of the last few years of his life. But even Van Gogh’s death is presented without the accentuation one would expect from a biographical drama.
Popular mythology for decades was that Van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, though a revelatory biography published in 2011 presented a theory that he was shot by someone else. “At Eternity’s Gate” appears to support the more recent narrative. Still, presenting Van Gogh’s death wasn’t the point of the film any more than offering a tortured trope. Van Gogh’s struggles were real and appear as such. But Schnabel’s intention was to illustrate as best he could how Van Gogh’s eyes and mind served as a filter to project what he saw in a beautiful way to the world.
“I care about the paintings,” Schnabel says. “We all cared about the paintings. So we tried to make a film about the experience of being an artist. How he saw the world, and how the world affected him. And how he turned that into art.”