Finding Van Gogh among the stars and sunflowers
The name Vincent van Gogh is so familiar that, to most of us, it invokes a series of clichéd connotations: sunflowers, starry night, the notorious ear episode. Van Gogh’s life and death is an archetypal story of the sad, mad, impoverished but brilliant artist writ large.
Fame, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges affirmed, is “the worst form of incomprehension”.
So famous is Van Gogh that we project onto him and his work our assumptions, our prejudices, our vague recollections of art history snippets picked up at school. Precisely because we think he is well known to us, we don’t try to understand him better. This means we cease to care; we lose the capacity to be moved by his suffering or inspired by his genius.
The great achievement of Loving Vincent (which opens in local cinemas on Friday) is that it gives us an opportunity to feel, as if for the first time, the tragedy and triumph of this incomparable human.
If fame leads to misunderstanding, so too do its supposed opposites: anonymity and insignificance. We may recall that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, or that he was entirely dependent on his brother Theo’s financial support. But it’s very hard to imagine, empathically, a time in which the words “Vincent van Gogh” were unknown outside a small circle of acquaintances in Provence, Paris and Auverssur-Oise – where he was largely derided and shunned.
In Loving Vincent, we travel to Auvers with Armand Roulin, a disillusioned young man who is on a reluctant quest to deliver a letter written by Vincent to Theo shortly before his death. Nowadays, the Roulin family are famous in their own right, thanks to a set of portraits painted by Van Gogh that have since reached astronomical prices at auction. But in the film Armand and his father Joseph are simply two troubled men trying to make sense of the artist’s apparent suicide.
Armand encounters a variety of perspectives that he must try to reconcile; the events of Van Gogh’s final weeks are reported by those who loved and who loathed him. In the end, the mystery remains at least partly unsolved. Still, Armand has learned something about humans and their complex ways of being.
This narrative perspective in itself would be enough to cause viewers to think and feel differently about the subject of the film. But what makes Loving Vincent so astonishing, of course, is that we are visually immersed in Van Gogh’s world.
Co-directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman admit that the technique they developed is the most labour-intensive method of animation conceivable. They filmed each scene with actors in costume – the cast includes Chris O’Dowd and Saoirse Ronan among an impressive ensemble – and then a huge team of artists painted the recorded action frame by frame.
For a 90-minute film, this form of animation requires 65,000 photographs of individual oil paintings.
The result is an uncanny combination of recognition (more than 100 of Van Gogh’s works are incorporated into the film) and alienation. It’s Van Gogh, alright, but not like we’ve seen him before.
Van Gogh’s style hints at restless motion; his staggered brushstrokes show clouds drifting, light changing, water rippling, wind blowing. Even buildings seem to wobble. In the film, that effect is compounded by movement through place and time. At first it’s a little disconcerting, but as you get used to it, the experience is close to sublime.
Earlier this week, Marianne Thamm of the Daily Maverick challenged President Cyril Ramaphosa to make good on his reference to Hugh Masekela in his state of the nation address: if we aim “to understand ourselves and our fellow citizens, then it must be, as Masekela understood, through arts and culture”. Thamm argues that if Ramaphosa wishes to usher in a “new era of looking outward towards others and not inwards towards oneself”, the arts, of SA and the world, need to be cherished.
Loving Vincent is a compelling example of “looking outward” and seeking to understand others.
WHAT MAKES LOVING VINCENT SO ASTONISHING IS THAT WE ARE VISUALLY IMMERSED IN VAN GOGH’S WORLD