Pialat & Van Gogh: Fellow Outsiders

by Sabrina Marques (2013)

“To look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.”
– Vincent van Gogh,
letter to his brother Théo about the painting “Bedroom in Arles”

SOCIETY'S SUICIDE

In one of his famous art history books, Gombrich portrayed Van Gogh as an artist who crossed art
by faith with a “sense of mission”. He fought with his brush, he battled until the last
consequences. He remained a painter even when absorbed in a desperate loneliness. He kept his
freedom as few like him had. He was a “society’s suicide”, as Artaud put it. He attacked
conformism and conventions with “incendiary mixtures and atom bombs”, and he became an
outcast. Madness? Or an active lucidity that any medicine might have helped? A clairvoyance that
his time couldn’t understand, maybe?

By the end of May 1890, Van Gogh withdrew to Auvers-sur-Oise to consult Docteur Gachet. The
three months that followed were his last. Those are the humble times in the south of France we
watch through Pialat’s fiction. In fact, the director had always preserved a special interest for the
Dutch painter. Almost thirty years before, he had already directed a documentary short-film
named Van Gogh [1965] included in the series Chroniques en France. And in À nos amours.
[Here’s to Love. / To Our Romance., 1983], Pialat (playing the role of the father) quotes what’s
assumed to have been Van Gogh’s last sentence – “La tristesse durera toujours” [“Sadness will go
on forever”] – before commenting on it: “I thought Van Gogh was talking about himself, about his
misery, but no. He was trying to say that the battle will last forever. It’s you who are sad.”

EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES

The simplicity of Van Gogh’s life is inscribed in the depurated surface of the film. Its main feat is its
concision. Historical reconstitution has been wrested away from its usual elaboration. In fact, the
accuracy of historical reconstruction doesn’t interest Pialat – we can see, for example, how the
famous question of the chopped ear (even though it is mentioned in the film) is ignored by the
physical characterization of Van Gogh. Pialat is focused on the presentation of a man and the
battles within him apart from his name (thus, we rarely see his paintings and, even more rarely, his
most iconic ones).

In spite of its apparent simplicity, the production difficulties grew and the diminutive budget of
forty-five million francs was not enough. The shooting had to be interrupted. However, at the time
of its première in 1991, the film was enthusiastically received both by critics and by the public.
Pialat had surpassed himself and this was to be his masterpiece. And still a film of a painter about
a painter.

A detailed attention to cinematography, a skillful mastery of perspective, and a regard to

composition construct, in this film, images of a persistent beauty – both in episodes of immense
genius and of immense squalor. But it isn’t Van Gogh’s vivid chromaticism that provides the film
with its colors. Actually, Pialat is inspired by the incipient palette of the Impressionists, the
sovereign canon in Van Gogh’s days. We therefore see his world as Van Gogh didn’t see it. We
could never access with any exactitude his genius, his vision, his mind. This is one of Pialat’s
triumphs, in permanent insurrection against academicism. The formal aspects of Van Gogh are a
demonstration of this liberty. The shots bloom with fluidity. If in one moment, the studied fixity of
the camera holds the actors’ movements, in the next zooms and pans it coordinates the speed of a
chat at the table. Everything exists naturally. The characters exist within reality, they converse
with a sincerity that is sometimes brutal. And the beauty is there, raw, inherent to the layers of life
in pasty smudges of small precision.

BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDERS

This permanent sensation of Beauty – beautiful fields, beautiful colors, beautiful girls, beautiful
songs – comes with an intoxicating monotony. This is Van Gogh’s portrait of inadaptation, he
whose troubled personality couldn’t be contained within pleasant conventions. His painting
doesn’t reproduce reality, it rather interprets it; it interprets itself. Sky and land are mixed up,
water and sky are mixed up, detail is absent. He discovers the affectivity of solid colors, he relates
forms and colors hoping to alter the world by altering the look of the things in it. The feverish
energy of the brush continues. The noisy strength of the spatula attacks the canvas. The furious
convulsions of the hand are intuitive. The strokes don’t detail. As the urge rises, the secret reality
of the eyes is born in solid colors. The style is impulsive. The style is the message. As the “eye is a
great heart that sends the camera hurtling” (Jean-Luc Godard, in his letter to Pialat), the fingers of
the painter are his heart too. Van Gogh painted the world he wished others saw. In a letter to his
brother, he describes his urge to cleanse form and color, “giving by its simplification a grander
style to things”.

These paintings are raw wounds of color. Van Gogh had the vortical need to invent his own mirror.
All is free there, all stands beyond the order of the visible. Expression is emotion. This rush carries
the strength of life. One lives his life for art until one loses his life – but art remains. In the end,
isn’t the overcoming of time the ultimate aspiration for any artist? And Van Gogh and Pialat
arrived there through incomparably different paths.

THE DESTRUCTION

Pialat’s state of struggle was of a different kind. Famous for his unstable posture, he has always
interpolated the most prodigious moments with the most irascible words of resentment. Like Van
Gogh, Pialat was an outsider, rambling among schools, movements, groups. Having dedicated
himself to other arts such as painting (which he declared his favorite art of all) and theatre
(admittedly without vocation in this field), it was through the cinema that he had formulated the
deepest dialogue with himself. If with this Van Gogh the mastery of his cinematographic art
overcomes itself, it is also here that the confrontation of the artist against incomprehension is
portrayed, in the figure of a Van Gogh that is (also) Pialat.

To read the letters of Van Gogh to his good brother Théo, an art dealer, is to unveil the
confessions of a spirit in doubt, which alternates a fierce faith in his own work with a profound
disbelief held by a sense of failure, doubt, and guilt. In Pialat’s film, the painter never theorizes,
debates, explains, or legitimizes his own art, contrary to what happens with Minnelli’s Van Gogh in
Lust for Life [1956]. Dutronc encloses himself inside a body of permanent tension. He seems
incarcerated in a mutism from which he frees himself only through excess: the rip of the brush,
the verbal fury, the sexual promiscuity, the frenzy of the dance, the physical confrontation. One
senses the ultimate abyss where, in desire for the absolute, his destruction will arrive. This rupture
is inscribed in the simplicity of that moment of so much interpreted symbolism: Walking with Jo,
Van Gogh throws himself suddenly into the river, noisily, staging a suicide. It is the calm perfection
of the Impressionists that is shattered by the impetus of Van Gogh, at the same time that, in a
cynical and almost burlesque tone, it foreshadows what is to happen. Art is not splendour, art is
not dazzle – art is something else. It exists in the soul alongside brutality.

This is a film about a slow end, almost voiceless. Loss is everywhere. It is the process of a body
untying from itself, falling into a secret madness and letting go at the mercy of a mind without
sovereignty, in the margins of society. He belongs nowhere, he belongs to a time that hasn’t
arrived yet (and that he won’t live to experience).

We will remember the sore sight of madness in that mute and dry body folding inside itself. This
Van Gogh with his “eyes fixed in the land and never in the sky,” as Serge Toubiana wrote in “Il
s’appelle Van Gogh et il n’en a rien à foutre” [“His Name Is Van Gogh and He Doesn’t Give a Damn
About Anything”], constantly alternates between contention and emotional outburst. Jacques
Dutronc knows how to depict the calm intensity of that sadness, in a virtuous interpretation that
deserved the César.

Maybe the social inadequacy of Van Gogh, who has failed in his plan to create a brotherhood of
artists in Auvers-sur-Oise is in the first place inflicted by the successive exclusions among his peers.
In deep disbelief, he carries his sorrow into all the other worlds he passes by. A blockade, he
rejects everything and everybody. Van Gogh is the extreme personification of that old idea (very
recurrent in Pialat’s heroes) that we are ultimately utterly alone and forsaken. There is not a
person in the film who doesn’t feel incomplete or betrayed. Not even the couple, apparently
happy at first.

THE MOVEMENT OF LIFE

Pialat’s camera accompanies the fading of hope. Pialat is the filmmaker of solitude but never
leaving behind the quiet dream of integration. Even under a melancholic shade, hope doesn’t
cease its flow, close to life. The film is crossed by the torrent of an overwhelming energy. And in
these moments of ephemerality, all evil seems to be overcome. A brief instant... A cheerful lunch
with the Gachet family, where everybody has fun without fearing the ridicule of contributing
somehow to the general laughter... An improvised song at an outdoor ball... The relief of frenzied
dances in pairs... And the most remarkable of all moments: that frantic collective dance in the
brothel, an organic whole wonderfully filmed and choreographed, reminding us of John Ford or
Jean Renoir.
THE WOMEN

The idea that, in Pialat’s Cinema, women are “positive heroes” (the exact expression is by
Laurence Giavarini in her article “Hommes et femmes” [“Men and Women”], Cahiers du cinéma,
no. 449, November 1991) is crucial to this movie. There’s the old hostess and her teenage
daughter with their motherly attention; there’s the red dress dancer-prostitute ready to love him
one day without any money being involved; but the most relevant of all the characters is
Marguerite (Alexandra London), the bored young bourgeoise who is fascinated with the distinct
personality of Van Gogh. Introduced as a soft, candid being, she will evolve into his antagonist. She
will affirm that he can’t paint (after he paints her portrait), she will insist that life is more
important than art, she will accept and love him as he is. Van Gogh would obviously dedicate
himself as a whole to his art (in his last letter to Théo, unmailed, he would write "my own work, I
am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered because of it..."), admirably trusting his
destiny to art until the end. He resists; he carries on painting even when nobody, not even his own
brother, believed in it, even when not having sold more than one painting in his entire life.

Away from romanticism, both Marguerite and Vincent travel a transformative path. Marguerite
initiates a ritual of emancipation, against the conventions of her own class, against the feminine
privations, against the patriarchal authority, against what she used to be. In spite of the hours
spent with Marguerite in light and company, Vincent’s tension confines him as the resistance
vanishes. And in that memorable close-up in the final scene, when Marguerite assumes that Van
Gogh used to be a close friend of hers, in her triumphant face the apprenticeship she owes him is
complete. She recognizes him now as, more than an intermittent lover, a unique being who she
had the privilege of meeting and, somehow, understanding. The artist stayed alive.

Pialat and Van Gogh: How many eyes don’t owe them their fortunate corruption?