Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Loving Vincent
2017 · Hugh Welchman · Loving Vincent on Sightlines
A man Van Gogh painted once sits down and starts talking about how the painter died. He is made of the same restless yellow as the wall behind him, and when he leans in, the wall leans too. Nothing in this film holds still. Not the sky, not the wheat, not the face of the person telling you what he thinks happened.
The idea Kobiela and Welchman had is small enough to say in a sentence and mad enough to take ten years: if Van Gogh's paintings look like they are moving, film them moving. They shot live actors first, then handed every frame to painters trained into his idiom — more than a hundred of them, working between Poland and Britain — who repainted it in oil. Sixty-five thousand canvases. There is no photographic image anywhere in the finished film.
Deleuze, reading Bergson, separates two ways cinema can handle perception. Most films give you a stable world and move things around inside it. A few show perception itself as a current, and for that he borrows a word, reume, reaching for water: rivers, rain, drift, the boat-shots of the French silent directors, where seeing flows instead of pointing. Loving Vincent takes this literally because Van Gogh did. The film's real claim is that the stillness was never his; a static canvas was only ever his compromise with the medium. Give him a projector and the wheat finally does what he always said it did.
Then there is the plot, which is a detective picture and a strict one. A young courier arrives in Auvers-sur-Oise carrying the painter's last letter and nobody to give it to, and starts asking. Everyone he asks was painted by the dead man. Everyone tells him something different.
Deleuze has an exact name for the hinge this turns on. In a classical action film a small gesture points back to a situation you cannot fully see — a door left open, a coat on a chair — and the detective's work is to read the gesture back to the crime. That is an index. But some gestures fit two crimes equally well, and he calls that the index of equivocity: one act, legible inside two incompatible stories. One gunshot in a wheat field. A suicide, or something involving the local boys that nobody in town would admit to. The film never picks.
Withholding an answer is an old trick. What this film does is stranger: it paints every version with the same conviction. Deleuze called this the powers of the false. It is not lying and it is not ambiguity. It is a film that quietly drops the requirement that its accounts reconcile, and discovers it has lost nothing it needed. Bazin built the case for cinematic realism on the photograph's odd authority — a real thing stood in the light, and that is why the image carries a weight painting cannot claim. Loving Vincent surrenders that entirely. Every assertion it makes about Auvers in 1890 went through a human hand a century later. It holds no evidence at all, so it does the one honest thing left: it gives you testimony, and shows you the brushwork of whoever is testifying.
The flashbacks are where this turns beautiful. They arrive in monochrome, sober, almost photographic, the single register in the film that behaves like a document. An ordinary flashback is what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: dated, retrievable, a hole in the present that memory fills. These fill nothing. Lay them side by side and they disagree. So you stop reading them as retrieval and start reading them as regions — Deleuze's sheets of past, layers that coexist without agreeing and that you move between the way you move between rooms. The film sets those grey sheets against the blazing colour of the present and lets the two trade places. That trade is the crystal-image: two faces of one moment, an actual and a virtual, with no way to say which is real. The grey looks like proof. The churning colour looks like a man's opinion. By the end you trust the colour.
Someone should also say plainly what the production method was. A hundred painters were trained to make new Van Goghs, sixty-five thousand of them. Anywhere else that word is forgery. Deleuze's name for the figure at the centre of the powers of the false is the forger, and he means it with admiration: not a man hiding a truth, an artist manufacturing one, because waiting for the real thing to turn up and authenticate itself was never on offer. Vincent never touched a frame of this film and his hand is in all of them. And every image asks to be read rather than simply watched, which is Deleuze's lectosign — the picture loses its self-evidence and becomes something you decipher. For this film that is the correct instruction. The witnesses are portraits. The investigation is a man looking at paintings and asking them what they know.
Two long lines cross here. One runs through wet paint: The Street (1976), pushing pigment directly on a lightbox and animating by reworking a single surface; then Petrov's The Cow (1989), where each frame is a canvas repainted; then The Old Man and the Sea (1999), whose paint-on-glass proved a moving-oil-painting look could carry a feature. The other runs through tracing: Fleischer's patented rotoscope in the Koko shorts of 1919, redrawing filmed movement frame by frame; American Pop (1981), which made that patent a fine-art surface rather than a shortcut; Waking Life (2001), repainting photographed actors into a coat that will not stop shifting. Loving Vincent runs both lines through one frame and adds what neither had: the repainting is done in a particular dead man's style, and that man is the subject.
Nobody has repeated it at this scale. A decade, a hundred painters, an Academy nomination, and no school. Its influence so far is a dare. But it settled something about the medium: the photographic index is optional, and giving it up costs precisely what Bazin said it would cost while buying something he never priced. With no document to defer to, style becomes the evidence.
It also refuses the job every biopic accepts. It declines to explain its man. The letter is delivered. The case does not close.
Here is the question I cannot put down. Who is seeing, across those sixty-five thousand frames — a hundred painters in a studio, or one dead man in Auvers? I think the film's answer is that this was always the wrong question to ask of painting. Go and stand in front of one of the real canvases afterwards. The swirls will look like they are mid-sentence.
Concepts in play
- falsifying-narration — Each citizen of Auvers — every one of them a figure Van Gogh painted — gives the courier a different account of the painter's final weeks, and the film paints all of them with equal conviction rather than adjudicating.
- index-of-equivocity — The detective structure turns on one gunshot in a wheat field that reads equally well as suicide or as something the town's adolescents did and would not admit (the film's 'murder & homicide' and 'adolescence & bullying' threads); the same act belongs to two incompatible situations.
- sheets-of-past / order of time — The monochrome flashbacks, shot with photographic sobriety, do not add up to a single retrievable memory — they contradict each other, so the past becomes a set of coexisting regions the film moves between rather than a dated event it recovers.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — The film runs two mutually reflecting registers — sober monochrome past and blazing oil-painted colour present — and lets them exchange authority, so the 'document' and the 'vision' become indiscernible as to which is the real one.
- reume (liquid perception) — 65,000 hand-painted oil frames make the wheat fields, skies and faces flicker and reconstitute themselves continuously; the film's argument is that Van Gogh saw the world in currents and eddies and the still canvas was the compromise.
- le faussaire (the forger) — More than a hundred painters were trained into Van Gogh's own idiom to produce 65,000 new 'Van Goghs' over nearly a decade — forgery raised into the film's creative principle, truth manufactured rather than found.
- lectosign (the readable image) — With no photographic image anywhere in the film, every frame is a painting to be deciphered, and the investigation itself consists of interrogating Van Gogh's portraits — the witnesses are pictures that must be read.