They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of the upcoming biopic on >Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh , it is probably worth a thousand frames, or more. The idea for Loving Vincent, the first animation feature film to be made entirely with paintings, came from the artist’s own words. Slated for release in 2016 and produced by BreakThru Films, best known for their Oscar-winning short Peter and the Wolf (2006), the film draws upon one of the last letters that Vincent wrote to his brother Theo and which was found on the painter’s body after his tragic death. Van Gogh’s words — “…we cannot speak other than by our paintings” — perhaps betray his faith in the power of the form he practised. But more importantly, in the context of the film, they draw attention to the subjectivity of the artist and how it translated onto the painted canvas.
Sucheta Chakraborty In a way, the film is one more addition to the abounding biographical material — novels, poems, songs, films — which has become a part of popular culture and exists as a result of a persistent interest in the painter’s life. What sets the film apart, however, is the way in which it promises to tell the story of van Gogh’s life. An ambitious project from the outset, it hired close to 100 artists to hand-paint around 57,000 frames in the style of the famous Post-Impressionist painter. The trailer offers a glimpse of how through animation these beautiful masterpieces have been brought to life, their characters and landscapes acquiring a reality accorded by the medium of cinema.
Films on art The basic idea that the film hinges upon — creating a narrative of the artist’s life entirely out of his paintings — is not a new one, however. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, French filmmaker Alain Resnais set out to make a couple of documentaries about artists and their paintings, which, as Emma Wilson notes, contributed to the genre of the ‘film sur l’art’ (‘film about art’) which developed in France between the period 1945 and 1960. Resnais, along with filmmakers like Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Henri Colpi and Jacques Demy, belonged to the Left Bank Group of the French New Wave movement who were known for their radical experimentations with the form and their interest in bringing cinema closer to the other arts.
Starting off with a series of 16 mm. shorts on young unknown artists, Resnais soon shifted focus to more prominent figures. Van Gogh (1948), his first widely recognised work, makes self-conscious use of several cinematic tools to give life to and cull out a story from a set of static, albeit exquisite, paintings. At the same time, it throws light on the inner world of the artist. In this carefully narrated 20-minute film, one sees the kind of editing effects which would later lead critics to align Resnais’s filmmaking to that of Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of montage. Together with the relentless cutting and pasting together of details from painted canvases, there is the tracking movement of the camera over the paintings which gives the images an inherent sense of motion. This is a technique especially evident in the closing minutes of the film where the camera flits in a frenzied pace across paintings evoking van Gogh’s last days to portray the growing crisis in his life. These tracking shots are accompanied by slow fades and dissolves, and the use of a soundtrack that does more than simply complement the images.
Resnais continued to explore the potential of the genre in films like Paul Gauguin (1950) and Guernica (1950), based on Picasso’s famous painting composed in response to the bombing of innocent civilians at Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Each of these early films is remarkable for the way in which it highlights the creative workings of both artists — the one making the film and the one whose works it features.
The tortured artist had once believed that his paintings were his only way to communicate with the world. The world in turn seems to have followed his example — time and again, it has turned to his art to tell his story.
Watch the trailer of Loving Vincent here:
Sucheta Chakraborty is a Mumbai-based freelance writer
