The Van Gogh Enigma: Re-Mythifications of the Artist’s Genius in "Loving Vincent" and "At Eternity’s Gate"

Abstract

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist’s creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.