https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Cr7V1kYu8
Willem Dafoe, Mads Mikkelsen, Oscar Isaac, Niels Arestrup... Wow.
Edited to swap a better trailer.
Also...
MacCruiskeen » Fri Apr 27, 2018 5:11 pm wrote:
... I've just read Van Gogh: A Power Seething*, a very short, very sympathetic biographical study by the painter Julian Bell. There are only a few illustrations, but they're well chosen. It's astounding to look at VvG's earliest drawings and to realise how far he came so fast. He did it all in only eight years, as you say, and not so much by an act of will as by an act of desperate self-surrender out of an impulse one might call religious. His time as a priest among the poor was not wasted time.
His ending makes one of the saddest stories in art history, at least as sad as the short life of Keats, another writer of unforgettable letters.
*The subtitle comes from one of his letters to Theo: "Sometimes I feel a power seething within me..."
on edit: Bell dismisses the suggestion that Vincent was murdered. I don't have the book to hand right now so I can't quote it, but his reasoning convinced me, fwiw.
I found the book a very good read. I recall (I think) that Bell made an interesting observation that reading news about Jack the Ripper may have impacted Van Gogh's impulse to cut off a part of his ear and give it to a prostitute.
(I read in a review that Schnabel's film supports the theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was instead shot.)