Movie: At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)
Paul Gaugain (Oscar Isaac) is tired of impressionists! He tells van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) that painting shouldn't be anymore about objective reproductions of reality. Rather, painters should give their own interpretation of how they see the world. In other words, a van Gogh painting of a mountain should primarily tell you something about van Gogh's worldview, rather than the characteristics of the mountain. This would be a revolution, notes Gauguin: "The faces you paint are yours. And they'll stay because of you. People will be known because you painted them and how you painted them, not because of who they are. And people will go to museums to see paintings of people, not to see people who were painted." These words pretty much summarise Schnabel's approach to making the film. It is quite telling that the scene in which they appear is essentially the only one that places van Gogh in a broader context.
There is very little resembling a traditional narrative here. Its key scenes are three long conversations van Gogh has while in treatment. One of those is with a priest played by Mads Mikkelsen, the other two with doctors played by Mathieu Amalric and (unknown to me) Vladimir Consigny. In all three scenes, but especially in the one with Consigny, Schnabel goes out of his way to show as little as possible of van Gogh and his conversation partner in the same frame together, and he also rarely has an actor speak while the camera is on the other person. Moreover, during these conversations, Dafoe is filmed in a medium close up, while the other actors are often seen in an extreme close up, with their heads barely fitting the frame. The result is that it never feels like we are watching a conversation between two people who talk directly to each other, in the same space. And when van Gogh is asked why he paints, he always gives different, somewhat evasive, answers, never letting us feel as if we have a comprehensive understanding of what drives him.
There are more formal gambits Schnabel makes throughout the film. At certain points the lower half of the frame is blurred, while the upper half is presented clearly. Some scenes are shown from van Gogh's point of view, essentially turning his eyes into a roving camera, but not all these POV shots share the same visual markers. Sometimes, a grey-yellow-ish filter has been put over them, reminding you of the visual palette of van Gogh paintings, without going so far to make them resemble the actual style of these paintings. Other times these subjective shots share the exact same color and lighting as the objective ones, but are filmed with a shaky handheld camera. The handheld camera is also used to film van Gogh in third person, showing him painting, or wandering through nature. As a result several sequences feel like they come from a 19th century home video, where we see things from exceedingly odd camera angles. At some point we get a shot of van Gogh's feet with the camera seemingly placed on the floor. There are also multiple scenes where dialogue between the characters is repeated in voiceover, sometimes before the 'original' sentence has even ended. In a similar way, images fade in and out of each other, repeating mulitple times in a single scene.
Especially at the beginning, this strange, incosistently applied blend of filmmaking aesthettics can be quite frustrating, as there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it. It is not an approximation of van Gogh's style, and it gives the impression that the film is somewhat confused about its own view of the painter. As the film went on though, I started to appreciate it as a sensory experience that reflects van Gogh's frazzled mind. After a further while you realise that it also respects his mind. The film is much more interested in exploring how van Gogh may have expressed himself, and in his thoughts about his life, work and mental state, rather than in telegraphing all the ways in which he is suffering. Finally, there is also something to be said for making a film about van Gogh purposefully alienating. Schnabel doesn't follow the conventions of either contemporary biopics or of contemporary arthouse cinema, daring people to be somewhat put off by it and its vision, and disregard it, risking that his film will have the same fate as van Gogh's paintings. Worth noting here that I found most of Schnabel's experimentation quite cool. Even if it doesn't always work, these are not things you see every week in movies.
The film's individuality only makes its postcript more questionable, noting that van Gogh died after being accidentally shot by some kids. This is not the official account of van Gogh's death, but a theory put forward by two historians. It seems to me like the kind of theory that mostly serves to give attention to its creators, and though it is less damaging than, say, the idea that, due to his poverty, Shakespeare couldn't have written his works, it still seems like the kind of dumb thing you should stay away from. I have written before that I really like art that knowingly presents false/alternative versions of history and mixes facts with fiction and mythmaking. I think that this can be more insightful about history and historiography than a straightforward retelling of the facts. Nonetheless, there are good and bad ways to do that. At Eternity's Gate's ending is I think an example of the latter, as the film is explicitly subjective throughout its running time, presenting nothing about van Gogh as objective fact, except for this alternate account of his death. It should have at least made clear that its claim is contested.
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