Van Gogh and Cinema: words, obsessions and textures

Abstract

How does the filmmaker, in building a perspective on painting, maintain the identity of cinema itself? How does cinema film the creator’s relationship with his work? How are aesthetic memory and the process of creative freedom filmable? Can you, through your film options, transcribe and interpret the painter’s creative adventures?And what are the concepts analyzed by the critical reception of these projects? Do they take into account the specificity of cinematographic codes? Do they compare what is not comparable or do they establish creative paths centered on the unavoidable differences between them? Do they define hierarchies and value judgments or do they lead a dialogic path?This communication intends to answer these questions, having as an analytical corpus the representation of Van Gogh’s work in cinema and the critical reception of that same filmic production. The filmic approaches of Alain Resnais, Vincent Minelli, Akira Kurosawa, Maurice Pialat, Andrew Hutton, Paul Cox, Alexander Barnett, François Bertrand, Dorota Kobiela/Hugh Welchman and Julian Schnabel will join the studies of João Mário Grilo, Jacques Aumont, Pascal Bonitzer, Alain Cohen, François Albera, François Jost and Luc Vanchéri.Cinema and painting seek, in this analysis, the possibility of an identity path and the attainment of what João Mário Grilo considers the “essence of the unquotable” in the struggle for a goal – “rescuing the aura of art and filming it”.