The artist’s last days appear in swirling, scintillating animated frames – it’s an impressive but weirdly exasperating exercise in style
Here is an oddity: intriguing and yet weirdly exasperating, like a sentimental tribute, or a one-joke epic, or a monomaniacal act of stylistic pedantry.
It’s an animation imagining the last months of Vincent van Gogh’s life, and specifically (but inconclusively) investigating the theory first aired in the 2011 biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White, that he did not shoot himself but was actually shot as a bizarre prank by a local bully, one René Secrétan, a 16-year-old who was tormenting poor Vincent and loved to swagger round the fields in a cowboy costume carrying a pistol. So on his deathbed Van Gogh claimed he had killed himself, perhaps out of weary despair, or a desire not to make posthumous trouble for the neighbourhood, or perhaps simply to...
Here is an oddity: intriguing and yet weirdly exasperating, like a sentimental tribute, or a one-joke epic, or a monomaniacal act of stylistic pedantry.
It’s an animation imagining the last months of Vincent van Gogh’s life, and specifically (but inconclusively) investigating the theory first aired in the 2011 biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White, that he did not shoot himself but was actually shot as a bizarre prank by a local bully, one René Secrétan, a 16-year-old who was tormenting poor Vincent and loved to swagger round the fields in a cowboy costume carrying a pistol. So on his deathbed Van Gogh claimed he had killed himself, perhaps out of weary despair, or a desire not to make posthumous trouble for the neighbourhood, or perhaps simply to...
- 10/10/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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