Film and fine art: while both can be used as forms of graphic medium storytelling, they are still virtually incompatible visual ontologies, aren’t they? Film gives us audio-visual moving images and art presents us with static, inaudible images. If paintings speak, as Vincent Van Gogh avers, then they can only be heard through our eyes as we stand before the painting. Directors, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, however, attempt to bridge the gap between the two mediums through their stunning, melancholic remediation, Loving Vincent.
As a story, Loving Vincent narrates the mysteries surrounding his death through the memories of characters based on Van Gogh’s famous portraits. Leading us through the investigation is Armand Roulin who reluctantly agrees to deliver one of Van Gogh’s undelivered letters to his brother, Theo, on behalf of his father, Postman Joseph Roulin. Traversing the countryside of France, Armand discovers that Theo has also died and is sent to Auvers-sur-Oise—where Van Gogh spent the final years of his life—in hopes to find someone who can deliver the letter to Theo’s widow. As he meets and talks to the locals who personally knew Van Gogh, Armand transitions from disgruntled indifference about Van Gogh’s life to inquisitive empathy for him. The mysterious controversy of Van Gogh’s death enraptures Armand as much as his guilt for not caring more about a man so misunderstood and tortured by his anxieties.
Loving Vincent functions as a predictable crime-drama, developing several incomplete narratives to engender mystery and spectator hypotheses to explicate the crime. If you’ve read or watched anything about Van Gogh previously, odds are you’ve heard the story before.
While lacking engaging narration, the film’s novel style is nothing short of a visual masterpiece. Loving Vincent is the world’s first fully painted feature film. You can call it an animation film, but that barely scratches the stylistic surface. I prefer to call it a remediation since the film is more of a hybrid of “distinct and oppositional forms of visual representation.”* Live-action footage, visual effects, and CGI are only used as referents for the 125 oil and canvas painters who paint each frame in Van Gogh’s impasto style. The footage is comprised of 65,000 frames; After painting each frame, the painter takes a 6k resolution digital still and continues to layer oil paints to create the next frame. The artist repeats the process until the “shot” ends – there were 898 shots in this film!
Some avid filmgoers find remediation distracting as it eschews classical cinematic storytelling which strives to absorb you into the film with narrative coherence. Remediations call attention to themselves, reminding you that you are watching a fabrication; that the diegetic world of the film was stitched together or, I guess in this case, painted. To disparage the film, one critic described Loving Vincent as “more pictorial than expressive.” But that’s exactly the point of a remediation, and, I believe, the aim of the filmmakers. It seemed that Kobiela, Welchmen, and crew wanted to further fulfill Van Gogh’s desire to “show by [his] work what this non-entity has in his heart.” Instead of just telling us a story about Van Gogh’s perturbed life and hostile world, Loving Vincent shows this to us through their remediation.
Along with painstakingly mimicking the impasto technique, the film’s aspect ratio is the traditional 1:31:1 but meant to be screened on the contemporary 1:85:1 (wide screen) evoking the dimensions of a canvas on a museum wall. There are some “shots” compositionally designed to mirror Van Gogh’s classic portraits and landscapes. While calling attention to itself with these recognizable frames, the film gives audiences a chance to sit and meditate on busy yet static images which most animated films would breeze past. As a hybridization, however, Loving Vincent brings the dynamism of the audio-visual experience of film by synchronizing every little movement with sounds and creating the illusion of camera movement. I found the conversation between Armand and Eleanor to be the most visually captivating scene in the film. During their conversation, the sun begins to set, and the lighting and coloring of each person changes throughout the shot-reverse-shot pattern. It was a tad surreal to see how the temporality of film would affect a painting, to share time with a portrait.
To return to the idea of showing versus telling, this demonstrates the importance of the titular artist and artists in general. The remediation is a call to act hospitable towards the abnormal creatives in our midst, to consider what beauty and inspiration can come from such people. But prose can only do the film so much justice; if you want to learn more about Loving Vincent, check out these videos which show how and why the film was made.
* Dru Jefferies, Comic Book Film Style: Cinema at 24 Panels a Second. (University of Texas Press, 2017), 21.