CONTOURS: Lust for Life (1956) / preceded by A Colour Box (1935) / in partnership with CINSSU

Innis Town Hall, Mar. 8 2024

Ostensibly a Hollywood Biopic of Vincent Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas), Vincente Minelli’s tortured, fragmentary melodrama is at once a painterly emulation and filmic reinterpretation of the historic Dutch painter’s visual style. The film, based on Irving Stone’s 1934 novel, bypasses Vincent’s childhood, instead following his various encounters—and subsequent failures of reconciliation—with the forces of the material world that will become inseparable from his artistic sense of self: faith collides with theology, longing with rejection, ambition with scarcity, and ardor with pragmatism.

These episodes are refracted through Vincent’s relationships with his brother Theo, who provided emotional and financial support throughout his life, and Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), the post-Impressionist French artist whose experimentation both provoked and ennobled Van Gogh’s own work. Minelli’s forceful, passionate staging—married to a fiercely self-destructive star turn by Douglas—not only thematizes the artist’s creative and emotional struggles, but meets his turbulent psyche with unmatched clarity and empathy. 

Liner notes by Alexander Mooney.