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Van Gogh (1948) More at IMDbPro »

4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Documentary connecting Van Gogh's life and art, 16 February 2006

Author: michael_chaplan from Japan

I saw this on a Japanese DVD with other early Resnais and Godard short films. (The title of the DVD in Japanese is Alain Resnais, Jean Luc Godard tampen kessaku sen. It is easily available in Japan.) The narration of the film was in French, with Japanese subtitles. As the narrator tells about Van Gogh's life, the camera shows Van Gogh's pictures (in black and white) of the house where Van Gogh lived at the time... the camera is constantly moving... you feel as if you are entering the house and moving from room to room as the camera cuts from one picture inside the house to another....an interesting way to describe the life work of an artist. The technique leaves the viewer wanting more.

1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Affecting -- but puzzling, 21 June 2005

Author: Bob Verini from LA CA

The key events of Vincent Van Gogh's life are narrated (by Claude Dauphin in the French version, and by Martin Gabel in the English), and illustrated by the paintings, with appropriately heightened music score attached. That's it...and that's certainly enough, given the extraordinary interconnection of this particular artist's private life and his career. I have to say that it's extremely puzzling, not to say disturbing, that the entire film is in black-and-white, as if Van Gogh had made only charcoal sketches or woodcuts. Here's a short that cries out to be remade: Digital would make it easy to replace the B&W footage with color photography of the artworks, and both narration and score could remain as is. I was also dismayed that though the film has credits attached, Resnais's name does not appear on the English language print owned by UCLA and screened at the Motion Picture Academy last night. The audience seemed interested and moved, but surely they would have been more so if they'd known that this was an early work by the man who later employed many of the same techniques to memorable effect in "Last Year at Marienbad."

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