No, seriously, I don't know, but I keep watching movies, and I keep wanting to say something about them, and the best place to do that is this blog, which has so narrow a readership I needn't fear scaring readers away by talking about things that don't interest them. Yes, I know, my opinion doesn't actually matter. But I get a kick out of writing these things, and I'm sure as anything not going to post them to Facebook.
Painted With Words was another youtube find (six fifteen-minute videos this time), another BBC film I'd heard good things about and wanted to see for myself.
It consists of really well-played drama, interspersed with informational narration from one Mr. Alan Yentob, who was also instrumental in piecing the film together.
When I say piecing together, I mean it quite literally. The movie was made up entirely of real letters, mostly between Vincent and his younger brother Theo. It also used the actual testimonies of people who knew the artist. I can neither fathom nor appreciate the amount of work that must have gone into this project! To assemble all of that information, to painstakingly go through it and piece it together into a script and a screenplay? It's absolutely incredible. But it's so wonderful to know, as you're watching the movie, that it has absolute truth. This isn't opinion. No one has had the opportunity to color or distort or manipulate things to bend a viewer's opinion of the life of the biographee (a word my word processor tells me is incorrect but the dictionary assures me actually exists). And at moments, throughout the film, when one feels as though something were too good, or to bad, to be entirely true, there's a sort of comfort in knowing that it is.
It was a great performance, acting wise, on all fronts; but especially from the gentleman in the title role. To take a real person, and to bring him so completely alive, until the viewer feels as though they might just reach through the screen and touch it; well, it is doubtless the mark of talent. Actors are often praised for being moving, for evoking sympathy from the audience, but this went a step further. What I felt was not sympathy, but compassion. An absolutely irrational wish that I could have been born a hundred and fifty years ago, just to have had a chance to make some difference in the life of this mad, hurting, terrifically lonesome artist. As acting, this steps beyond talent to genius.
Visually, the movie is stunning. I could tell, almost, that filmmakers were trying to make their viewers see things as Vincent must have; trying to express the beauty he found in nature.
Also worth mentioning, in the field of things visual, that some of the asides from the narrator (which gave facts and information about the events of van Gogh's life) were filmed in the actual locations spoken of. An art supply store or a bar the artist frequented, a house he lived in! It had a sort of way tying it all together, the past and the present.
And there's something to be said about a movie that makes you want to learn things. As I watched, I found myself infuriated by not recognizing the names of other artists mentioned in passing, as contemporaries of van Gogh or influences on his style. I wished I already knew every name of every painter, and could connect the name in my head with style, with principal works, with biographical data even! And while I may not act on this infuriation (i.e. making a study of every famous painter ever), there's something to be said for the fact that Painted with Words made me want to.
About the man himself, Vincent van Gogh strikes me as, over all, incredibly unlucky. I never knew, before tonight, that he tried and failed both to enter the church and to go into missionary work before deciding to be a painter. Unlucky in love, unlucky in relationships, terrifically unlucky in how ill-received his work was. But more than that, it seems to me that he just had too much passion to get on well in the normal world. I can't imagine anyone I've ever known, myself very much included, to have the capability of ever feeling anything a half, a quarter, as deeply as van Gogh did. We see this in his work, and, through this movie, in his letters; to quote his brother (somewhere towards the end of the movie), "Life weighed so heavily on him."
Throughout the movie van Gogh speaks of the obligation, the duty even, that he feels to make something of his talent, to leave something to the world, as a way of saying thank you. Almost ironic, when you look at how very little the world ever did for him; and yet...apparently he didn't see it that way.
I don't often cry during movies; and, as these things go, Painted with Words wouldn't be classified as a tearjerker. I sobbed, though; less at the end, when the artist died, than about three-quarters of the way through. There was a bit of monologue from his younger brother Theo about Vincent's sad state of mental health, given while he was perusing Vincent's most recent paintings. Hearing the person who loved and knew Vincent the best talk about how troubled and hurting he was, while looking at the fantastic beauty of his paintings; I didn't start really crying until it came to Starry Night.
The quote that maybe sums it all up best comes, not from Painted with Words, but, unsurprisingly, Doctor Who (and, whatever you do, do NOT watch the last ten minutes of Vincent and the Doctor immediately after finishing Painted with Words, unless you are alone, with plenty of tissues, and actually enjoy crying), "Van Gogh is the finest painter of them all...He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind [van Gogh] was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived."
If you want to watch the movie, which you really should, you can find a youtube playlist for it here, and in case the playlist goes down ('cause there's nothing I hate more than a broken link), the first video is here.
As for my favorite parts, or favorite quotes, well, really, just watch the whole thing, and you'll understand why I can't pick favorites.
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