The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters

반 고흐, 세잔, 카라바지오, J.M.W. 터너, 안드레이 루블레프

 

Lust for Life,  1956

 

One is fixed on canvas, the other in constant flux. One is a solitary practice, the other—in most cases, at least—communal. Painting and filmmaking are, in many regards, arts a world apart, which perhaps explains the fascination that the practice of one holds for practitioners of the other. In The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, audiences will find fiction and documentary contemplations of the painter at work, including depictions of a self-taught Georgian painter of peasant life (Pirosmani), a Norwegian master of conjuring gut-gnawing dread (Edvard Munch), and a certain Spaniard using the very screen as a canvas (The Mystery of Picasso), as well as a successful painter turned filmmaker producing a biopic of an esteemed contemporary (Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat) and a failed painter turned successful filmmaker’s biopic of a ruinously unprosperous predecessor (Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh). In short, a collection that puts to shame those in the Prado, the Hermitage, or the Louvre—and all without leaving the five boroughs.

 

 

 

#열정의 랩소디 Lust for Life by Vincente Minnelli / 1956 / 122min / 35mm

Sat Jun 6, 2:00pm

 

One audacious colorist pays tribute to another in this emotionally raw biopic of Vincent Van Gogh, featuring a fanatically committed Kirk Douglas as the frustrated artist, clashing with even allies like his friend Paul Gaugin (Anthony Quinn) as he struggles to work through destitution and depression. Miklós Rózsa’s magnificent score gives expression to Van Gogh’s tormented inner state, while Minnelli, shooting his passion project on location at the actual locations of the artist’s life, gives us a cinematic analog of the painter’s searing vision of the world around him.

 

 

 

#안드레이 루블레프 Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky / 1966 / 205min / 35mm

Mon Jun 8, 3:30pm

 

The story of Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn), a medieval icon painter and Russian Orthodox monk who struggled against rampant brutality to produce works praising God, becomes, in Tarkovsky’s hands, the story of art and artists, for all times. (And perhaps particularly his own: the film would be banned by Soviet officials for “historical inaccuracy.”) Imagined incidents from Rublev’s life—of which very little is known—are rendered in brilliant black-and-white widescreen, exquisitely composed, until the paean to unbending faith erupts unforgettably into transcendent affirmation.

 

 

 

#반 고흐 Van Gogh by Maurice Pialat / 1991 / 158min / DCP

Mon Jun 8, 6:45pm

 

Having aspired in his youth to be a painter before settling for becoming merely one of the mightiest French cineastes of his generation, Pialat was perhaps uniquely qualified to give us a screen Van Gogh who felt genuinely new—as played by musician-turned-actor Jacques Dutronc less manic and combative than crabbed and resigned, not a wild-eyed ear-cutter but a man growing near to the exhaustion of passion. Pialat’s coup was to make a Van Gogh film that doesn’t assume its subject’s preeminence any more than did his age, a “biopic” that doubles as an entire portrait of an era, that of the Belle Epoque, in which the supporting players are every bit as interesting as the vaunted Great Man. “Astonishing, totally astonishing; far beyond the cinematic horizon covered up until now by our wretched gaze.” —Jean-Luc Godard

 

 

 

#세잔 + 루브르 방문하다 Cézanne + Une Visite au Louvre by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet / 1990 / 101min / 35mm

Thu Jun 11, 5:30pm

 

Director: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet

1990 / 101min / 35mm

A lovely tribute to the painter Paul Cézanne—a figure near and dear to Straub and Huillet—which incorporates passages from Gasquet’s book about his long-time friend Paul Cézanne, scenes from Jean Renoir’s film of Madame Bovary, photographs of Cézanne by the painter Maurice Denis, and material shot at Mont Sainte-Victoire—a location of great importance to the painter. Screens with Une Visite au Louvre, a companion work likewise drawing inspiration from Gasquet’s Cézanne, in particular a chapter in which the author describes the events of a visit to the museum with the painter.

 

 

 

#미스터 터너 Mr. Turner by Mike Leigh / 2014 / 150min / 35mm

Sat Jun 13, 12:00pm

 

Timothy Spall took home a Best Actor prize from Cannes for his portrayal of the gruff, brusque Joseph Mallord William Turner, the prodigiously gifted London barber’s son who, by the time he’d reached the middle age depicted here, had risen to the position of national institution thanks to the elemental force of his revolutionary art. Moving between the capital and Margate, between merry widow Marion Bailey and put-upon housekeeper Dorothy Atkinson, the irascible, barely articulate Turner of Leigh’s film is all-too-human in his lusts, his saturnine moods, and his inconsideration of others, but also superhuman—and, after a fashion, heroic—in his inexhaustible pursuit of the transcendent.

 

 

 

#카라바지오 Caravaggio by Derek Jarman / 1986 / 93min / 35mm

Sat Jun 13, Sun Jun 21, Sat Jun 13 3:00pm

 

A brazenly anachronistic and sensual imagining of the life and love of Renaissance renegade Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), seen juggling two lovers (Sean Bean’s Ranuccio and Tilda Swinton’s Lena) while scandalizing the establishment with both his insubordinate behavior and his insistence on populating his religious artworks with images of prostitutes and panhandlers. The debut film for Swinton, who would collaborate with Jarman until his death in 1994, and one of the finest British films of the 1980s.

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