I just watched At Eternity’s Gate again, and noticed/realised something that I hadn’t before.
When you mentioned the scenery shots today what came to me first was the moments before a bunch of school kids found Vincent. When I saw that scene again I noticed that he was painting tree roots, which was allegedly the last painting he made. Perhaps it’s just that the timeline in the film was nonlinear, but I wondered if those harsh words of that teacher were the last comments Vincent heard about his work? I really hope not.
Two typical symptoms that I know of bipolar disorder (and/or depression) are frequent vivid disruptive flashbacks and dissociative amnesia. Flashbacks are not hard to film, neither is dissociative disorder difficult to describe, but I think this movie does the best job in terms of depicting those things. In particular, I was mostly thinking about the long take of Vincent and Paul arguing in that chapel. The world was swirling around Vincent; the words of Paul became so overwhelming, that his instant response became incomprehensible to himself, and that he had to process everything again, and again, until the flashback of their voices formed a fugue.
(Funny, a casual search tool me to a page for a mental disorder called dissociative fugue. Wikipedia says that the musical term fugue came from the Latin word fuga, which is related to words “to flee” and “to chase” in Latin. It makes total sense, because it feels like that the four or more defining voices in a fugue are fleeing away and, at the same time, chasing each other. It seems that fugue state is in reference to one of the outward symptoms that one impulsively flees away with a temporal loss of sense of personal identity.)
Besides the dialogues Vincent had with the others, all the conversations he had with Theo and Paul were quite in line with what I’ve read in those letters and biographies of Vincent. I really appreciate it. The two relationships the film focused on were both very touching. And they are probably the most popular ones in fanarts: people tend to ship Vincent and Theo, or Vincent and Paul. Some of the gestures and lines in this film make them even more ‘shippable’. In Lust for Life, a biographical novel, Irving Stone wrote stories about Vincent being crazily in love with several women based on some truths, and one completely fictional woman falling in love with Vincent at the end of the book. In the movie Loving Vincent, it seems that Vincent was really close to Doctor Gachet’s daughter. But I don’t remember those romantic relationships being confirmed anywhere in his letters (and his letters to Theo were very close to diaries). Only today I came to guess that perhaps he just loved everyone and everything so equally passionately, and so intimately, that to him there were no distinctions between friendship and romantic love or love for family or love for the nature or love for God. Now listening to Starry Starry Night again, even the line “you took your life as lovers often do” makes more sense. He cut his ear off for Paul, yes, but he wasn’t insane - he really just loved his friend that much. He said he couldn’t live without painting, no he wasn’t exaggerating, he really couldn’t - that was how much he loved painting. He just wanted to free them, and shared them, the things that he saw.
The world didn’t deserve him, it still doesn’t. No one understood him, no one does yet.
(Just found what I wrote first time I saw the film: They say that Arles sun bewitched him, but what happened when the sun wasn’t shining on him? He drew his shoes, as the howling wind clanged the windows next to him. I wish he knew that people would love him. I wish he knew. The flowers he painted are long lasting, and the people he painted seen. The yellow, the blue, the green, the pink, the night sky, and the sculptures.)