Lust for Life

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn

Release: 1956

Lust for Life stars Kirk Douglas and presents the career of Vincent van Gogh, including the influence of his friendships with painters Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin (a part which won Anthony Quinn an Oscar). Although melodramatic at times, the film presents a surprisingly honest portrayal of the artist's life – his live-in relationship with a prostitute, his mental illness, and his suicide are all represented in a fullness that you might not expect from a movie released in 1956.

Sitting to watch this movie, I figured there wouldn't be anything further from the last movie on the list. After all, Andrei Rublev is a fairly inaccessible Soviet era Russian art film, while Lust for Life is a lavish Hollywood biopic. And on first viewing, my expectations were met. Where Andrei Rublev relished its artist's subject more than it celebrated his work and pushed the painter to the sidelines of his own namesake film, Lust for Life savors van Gogh's larger-than-life status. When young van Gogh argues with his instructors in the opening scenes, insisting that he passionately wants nothing more than to become a minister, the movie feels almost too self-aware – it knows that the audience already knows where this story is going and that young Vincent will fail in religious life.

Andrei Rublev only displayed the painter's work at the very end of the film, while images from van Gogh's paintings appear frequently on screen, sometimes through shots of the actual canvases, sometimes through on-screen, live recreations – the subjects themselves in the poses that would make them famous. Andrei Rublev withholds its master's genius, but Lust for Life rejoices in showing work after work; the movie even begins with a lengthy list of museums that are thanked for graciously allowing the filmmakers to film their collections.

Upon closer study, though, the soul of the two movies couldn't be more similar, because the two artists' souls are so similar. I'll confess that before watching Lust for Life, I hadn't realized that van Gogh had ever sought to be ordained, never mind that he was sent to minister to an impoverished Belgian coal-mining community, where he lived in squalor in order to better relate to his congregants. But that desire to serve and to uplift the poor, as well as his belief in the inherent dignity of all people, recalls closely the life of Andrei Rublev. Throughout Lust for Life, van Gogh's life is used as a lens through which to view the painter's contemporary social and economic structures. Early in the film, a jaded coal miner tells van Gogh about the difficulties faced each day in his community, and van Gogh becomes determined to reach out to them, first by working alongside them and eventually by sketching and painting them. In Arles, we see the day-to-day lives of prostitutes, barkeeps, and day laborers, as well as the small town itself, he glorified in his work there. And during his stays with his brother Theo in Paris, we experience both the cattiness and the surprisingly elitism of the Impressionists. As it was in Andrei Rublev, here the subject is as important as the artist. Andrei captured the suffering of Christ, Van Gogh the suffering of the worker.

Like bringing a textured impasto custom oil painting into your home, the film takes what we've only seen in museums and art books and makes the man accessible. His illness and his frantic painting are treated respectfully and realistically, and, while the movie does celebrate his genius, it also strives to transform the painter from an unreachable superhuman to a man. His brilliant abilities are often matched only by his (sometimes pathetic) need for affection and companionship. Lust for Life takes a larger-than-life figure and brings him down to earth. He's not just van Gogh; he's Vincent, too.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on movies about artists!

10 Movies You Should See About Artists:

• #10 - Andrei Rublev
• #8 - Goya's Ghosts
• #7 - Pollock
• #6 - Basquiat
• #5 - Girl with a Pearl Earring
• #4 - The Agony and the Ecstasy