Loving Vincent

Dir: Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

2017

*****

Loving Vincent is one of the most incredible films I’ve ever seen. The work and craftsmanship that went into making it is unbelievable, a great idea that most people would shrug off as neat but impossible. Each of the film's 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh used, created by a team of 125 painters from around the world (whittled down from 5000 applicants). It was originally conceived by self-confessed Van Gogh obsessive Dorota Kobiela as a seven minute short film, which even then was a challenge, but with a run time of 90 minutes + it is an astonishing achievement. Dorota Kobiela and co-director Hugh Welchman decided to hire classically trained painters over traditional animators as they wanted to avoid any personalised styles and wanted painters who understood the artist as well as his technique. Van Gogh’s paintings informed the storyboard and were modified, only slightly, for the screen. It is a technique that is similar to that seen in Richard Linkletter’s A Scanner Darkly. In that movie the finished principal photography was transferred to Quicktime were an 18 month process of interpolated rotoscoping took place. It’s a clever program that uses a technique called interpolatedrotoscope that was developed by filmmaker Ralph Barkshi. In Loving Vincent, a total of 65,000 frames were hand-painted painted, but since artists painted multiple frames from the same shot on a single surface, only 1,000 of these paintings survived. It is really as simple as that, principal photography took place on a green screen, Van Gogh’s paintings were composed into the background and oil paint was applied on each and every single frame with some touched up and modified ever so slightly as they went. They shot each individual frame onto a blank canvas and the artists painted over every single image. It’s just incredible. Unsurprisingly, it took quite a while, four years in total. Co-director Welchman admitted, "We have definitely without a doubt invented the slowest form of film-making ever devised in 120 years.” It isn’t just the technique that makes the film special though. There are quite a few Blue Plaques around the area of London that I grew up in that stated that Van Gogh had lived there for a time and I have visited the south of France where he lived and worked many times. I’ve sat outside the café he painted under the stars, I’ve seen his little yellow house and have even been in the room he painted while staying in at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence. I’ve stood in several places where he painted some of his most famous works and I studied him greatly when I was in art school (all those many years ago). I thought I knew pretty much everything about him and I thought that there was no question that he committed suicide – case closed. So aside from the magnificent animation, the story is utterly intriguing and a complete surprise. I love how the ‘stars’ of his paintings come alive and speak of the young artists, exploring the various things that were said about him at the time. Being a huge Van Gogh fan, director Dorota Kobiela read through all of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother and has created a magnificent mystery that can be explored through the artist’s actual work. I thought the cast were very good, with many of the actors looking very much alike the people in paintings that they were portraying. I thought Robert Gulaczyk was great as Van Gogh himself and that John Sessions and Jerome Flynn were both great as Pere Tanquy and Dr. Gachet respectively but I did have a few issues with some of the vice work and accents. It really should have been recorded in French, to give it that final bit of authenticity but it certainly doesn’t taint the film as it is. The beautiful score by the great Clint Mansell is the cherry on the cake. It is a stunning piece of work and worthy of every ounce of praise it receives. Much like Van Gogh’s paintings, it is a masterpiece.