Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN THREE FACES OF VINCENT PIALET'S 'VAN GOGH' he late Marvin Mudrick once wrote that "for the mass media...Poe, Van Gogh, and Toulouse- Lautrec are spectacularly visible, they are...
...A completely fictional character holy man, as near-psychotic or saint, are merely reflections of who just happens to be called Vincent Van Gogh...
...Application deadline is February 1. For more information write to : Director of Graduate Programs Department of Theology Loyola University Chicago 6525 N. Sheridan Rd...
...When Jacques Dutronc as Vincent steps off the train in Auvers, the town where his therapist, Dr...
...But, a few sec- chological help...
...He has the languid grace of one of Colette' s playboys...
...Readers of R.D...
...He may lust for life but life boots him up the backside...
...I wish Mudrick had lived long enough to see Maurice Pialet's Van Gogh...
...what Pialet is after here: the drama we see in any great man's No way...
...Those public images may be bequests to the movies but then they are reshaped by the movies...
...Some are easy in the company of women, some are shy, none is a Don Juan...
...Leave me alone...
...Both Vincent Minnelli and Robert Altman boldly juggle the facts of Van Gogh's life but without funda- mentally tampering with the image of Van Gogh as the Great Martyr of Art that has been with us for a century...
...For instance, Pialet's Van Gogh is, after pillow and asks Theo for something to drink...
...These contri- butions to my personal Lincoln may jar and jostle but there is also some overlap, some agreement...
...After all, Vincent was a self-made pariah, constantly yearning to love, yet constantly insuring by his actions that love would never come to pass...
...onds later, we are with Van Gogh's landlady in her kitchen and In this film we occasionally see Vincent's canvasses...
...Fonda may play it coy and cagey in John Ford's Young Mr...
...In the decade of The Organization Man, Minnelli made of Vincent the Dis- organized Man, too clumsy to fit in, too sensitive to love...
...TV and the movies don't make their choices with- out a reason...
...And Van Gogh's lack of ease with women...
...And soon Dutronc-Vincent is also sleeping with Dr...
...Up to now, up to the release of Pialet's Van Gogh, this has held true for moviemakers creating fictionalized accounts of the Dutch painter's life...
...Lust for Life may be a bit too simplistic, but it is an honorable tearjerker...
...He's James Dean with a beard...
...This Vincent is an angry, even ferocious young man...
...This is a partial view, soft-centered and masochistic, for it leaves out the Vincent who drove brother Theo nearly nuts with whining and needling, kicked one of his asylum attendants in the stomach and offered to give one of his analysts "a really close shave" when he surprised the poor doctor at his morning ablutions...
...Public Policy William C. French War and Peace Studies...
...For instance, the Lincoln who roams my imagination is a compos- ite creation by Benjamin Thomas, Walt Whitman, Shelby Foote, Lord Charnwood, Aaron Copland, Carl Sandburg, Henry Fonda, Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, and the Classics Illustrated comic book I read when I was nine...
...All portrayals of Vincent as martyr, as wild man, as Now just who is this guy...
...Lawrence, and all other artists who conceive of their work as a gob of spit expectorated in the direction of the bourgeoisie...
...Even more out of place are the few acts of self-de- life is the drama we have retrospectively created for it, and it structiveness we see Vincent commit, and most out of place is is we, the consumers of sentiment and grand passion, who in- the suicide...
...Hellenistic Judaism...
...But oh, how he would love to be loved...
...He seems to be the empty passenger car of the train they have taken to and from telling us that speculation about the roots of Vincent's behav- all-night revels in Vincent's favorite Paris bistro where he has ior, perhaps any person's behavior, is fruitless...
...Why should we hold Pialet answerable to actions disturb us...
...Screams, yells, scolding, any way this innovative, volcanic art could have been accom- household panic, high drama, virtual Armageddon...
...surface...
...This portray- al narrows our view of Van Gogh as much as Lust for Life does, but it also has some insight into a man who was at times bit- ter, even blasphemous, though not so consistently as Altman's film would have it...
...Lincoln and the hero of Gore Vidal's novel may be downright Machiavellian, but no Lincoln of biography or fiction can be a blackguard or a dunce...
...Ecology John Haughey, S.J...
...The image most people take away from this movie is that of the bandaged, self-mutilated Van Gogh thrusting his 18:6 November 1992 face out of a window and screaming at the jeering crowd below: "Leave me alone...
...Isn't he to be will love this movie...
...In Minnelli's Lust for Life (script by Norman Corwin from Irving Stone's novel), Kirk Douglas's Vincent is all crouched, pleading fury, a fury caused by his love--for individuals, for humankind, for art--being constantly rejected...
...So what is the nature of his psychologi- er leaves the bedroom and, upon returning with the refreshment, cal torment...
...Dutronc no sooner finds lodg- ing in an inn than he is roguishly putting his hand up the serv- ing maid's skirt...
...Gachet's daughter, dissatisfied with his portrait of her, gives him a lengthy tongue lashing...
...Program in Christian Ethics Philip J. Chmielewski, S.J...
...There's no ex- finds Vincent dead...
...For all we know of this Van Gogh's aesthetic credo, he might be an exponent of art-for-art' s-sake, a movement quite popular in Vincent's day but firmly rejected by the Dutchman, who thought of his paint- ing as one tool among many to enlighten and comfort all peo-ple, not just the aesthetically sophisticated...
...Q Studies Thomas J. Tobin, S.J...
...Some Lincolns stand ma- jestically erect, some gangle, none is short...
...Poe's dank tarns and ghoul-haunted baggy eyes, Toulouse-Lautrec's half-sized legs, the piece of Van Gogh's ear that he sliced off and carried as a gift to one of the girls at the brothel...
...A youngish Charles de Gaulle in profile, well- spoken, decently appareled, easy in his approach to strangers but, as is the way of all mature Frenchmen (at least in movies), weary and wary of life and love...
...Program in New Testament & Early Christianity David E. Aune Hcllcnism and Christian Origins Wendy J. Cotter, C.S.J...
...Financial assistance is available...
...There is a sort of tonal center to the image of each famous historical character and each biographer, novelist, and moviemaker strays from that center at his peril...
...Is there a misplaced board falls on her foot...
...allowed to sculpt his own fictional figure out of the raw mate- And Pialet also draws a bead on one other cherished notion: rials of facts...
...nothing that we have seen has led up to it...
...Whether denouncing the stuffy clergymen who forbid him to minister to miners, or on all fours to cousin Kai, pleading for her love, or imploring smug tough guy Gauguin for a little understanding, Douglas's Van Gogh is kin to all those misunderstood kids of fifties movies like Rebel without a Cause or East of Eden...
...Synoptic Gospels...
...Business Ethics Michael J. Schuck Social Ethics James J. Walter Bio-medical Ethics...
...Dutronc doesn't even raise an eyebrow when Dr...
...When Van Gogh walks out of that famous wheat- sist that such lives come to a satisfying conclusion with a mov- field with his self-inflicted gunshot wound draining his life away, ing death tableau...
...The younger broth- all, a mental patient...
...Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo (script by Julian Mitchel) presents another partial but valid view of the painter...
...In the dispensed with biography altogether) are rendered preposter- final scenes of Van Gogh, the dying Vincent looks up from his ous by his inventions...
...If he had, he might have shaken his head and growled...
...This Van Gogh is stuck in a prolonged adolescence but, unlike Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth es- chews pathos and emphasizes the artist's abrasiveness...
...And by biographies, biographical novels, poems, plays, TV plays, songs, comic strips, et al...
...Social Ethics...
...our own need to romanticize and to pigeonhole those whose Well, why not...
...Gnosticism Urban C. von Wahlde Johanninc Studies John L. White Pauline Studies Two programs fbr full-time students which draw on the distinctive resources of the Roman Catholic theological tradition...
...Yet Lust for Life also has a firm purchase on its cor- ner of the Van Gogh story...
...This Van Gogh is of the race of Rimbaud, Henry Miller, D.H...
...Chicago, IL 60626 312-508-2353 LOYOLA WERsrrv CHICAGO \ ,/ Department of Theology Commonweal 6 November 1992:19...
...The film begins with his decision at age twenty-seven to dedicate himself to art...
...Never trust a French director with a public image...
...Every human just drunk Toulouse-Lautrec under the table and taken part in being is a mysterious surface and nobody can penetrate that a line dance with the gusto of a Gallic Zorba...
...But, if a board falls on a landlady's foot and Ph.D...
...No last words, no pathetic farewell, none amination of the artist's familial relations or religious crises or of Kirk Douglas's "Oh, Theo, I want to go home" orTim Roth's anything else that brought him to the point where he needs psy- "Could I have my pipe7" No death scene at all...
...And what about Van Gogh's famous enthusiasm about art, argumentativeness, and volatility...
...SCREEN THREE FACES OF VINCENT PIALET'S 'VAN GOGH' he late Marvin Mudrick once wrote that "for the mass media...Poe, Van Gogh, and ToulouseLautrec are spectacularly visible, they are public images congenial to a visual medium...
...Fundamental Ethics Ph.D...
...It's clear plished by this perpetually laid-back guy that Dutronc portrays...
...This movie doesn't give us a clue...
...Gachet, lives, he looks the very model of a mature, sophisti- cated Frenchman...
...Watching the opening scenes of Pialet's Van Gogh, you wouldn't dream of calling the movie's hero tormented or an artistic martyr or even Dutch...
...the feeling that artists, as the antennae of the human race, are But suppose the facts left in Pialet's fiction (for he hasn't more deserving of attention than the rest of humanity...
...Laing and Michel Foucault countless biographies and pseudo-biographies...
...Gachet's daughter, Marguerite, even daring to possess her on To be fair, that may be Pialet's very point...
...This Vincent consorts with prostitutes, as did the real Vincent, but they are gorgeous, graceful creatures, not the wretches that Vincent, a wellspring of non-stop pity, faCommonweal vored...
...The Minnelli film is gratifyingly clear about this...
...Unlike Lust for Life, this film makes no reference to the painter's early religious aspirations so we can't place his artistic zeal in the context of a larger zeal to serve humanity...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19
