Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)
Painting is a craft. It works up its grandest, largest-scale effects from a set of familiar coloured substances. Usually, looking at the way these substances go to make a world within the rectangle, one is aware of the special motion of a hand putting them on: a hand and a forearm, or occasionally the whole arm swinging from the shoulder. Poussin, whose hand in later life trembled from the effects of syphilis, devised a way of painting through the trembling — but also taking advantage of the slightly broader patchwork it dictated — that seems to me ‘handling’ in the most moving form we have. But all painters are handlers, even those, like Ingres, who want to show us the manual activity covering its tracks.
Painting is material. Materialism, for it, is not one view of the nature of the world among others, but the view — the felt reality — it cannot help but inhabit . . . One thing that seems to follow naturally from painting’s material nature is that it sees its task as always turning on the human body — the body conjured up immediately and substantially. But the human animal is not painting’s whole subject (here is what marks it off from sculpture, to say nothing of dance). For painting is also convinced, in the way of no other art but architecture, of the reality of space. And it thinks that painting is uniquely equipped to give us this space, to contain and articulate it — to show its specific shape and pressure. The world in painting is one of bodies, but bodies in surroundings. Many accounts of the human might follow from this, and have. -T.J. Clark
Pialat’s Van Gogh begins with a spellbinding image, at once a landscape and a portrait: a slow motion shot of van Gogh’s hand texturing a blue sky in delicate, lateral brushstrokes as the camera follows them. Pialat takes care to stress, as much as the motion itself and the smears of color, the particular sound of the brush against the canvas, registering as it does the painter’s contact with the world, his immediate surroundings, as well as the contact between paint and canvas. “Van Gogh” materializes in titles in the course of the shot, as if the painter himself and not merely the artwork is constituted by this process. The camera gently takes leave of the brush and watches a bead of wet paint trickle from a line produced just seconds earlier, until a cut brings on a regular-speed shot of a locomotive arriving at a station, replacing one acoustic intensity with another.
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