QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Every artist’s biopic tries to bring the artist to life. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Albert Oehlen’s Yellow starts ordinarily enough, panning across a summery meadow to Vincent van Gogh (Ben Becker) standing at his canvas and painting what he sees (but we do not) in bold, broad, chaotic strokes, even as some joker (also unseen) takes a potshot at his water jar. This is what might be called the conventional view of van Gogh, a man outstanding – but also isolated – in his field. frantically and fancifully capturing nature via radical and eventually highly influential aesthetics that would help usher in the Fauvist and expressionist movements in modern art. The gunshot represents the disrespect and disdain, if not utter disregard, with which he was treated as an artist in his own lifetime (his paintings may now command many millions of dollars, but he himself was only ever able to sell a single one) – while it also alludes to the way that he would die by his own hand.

Combining voiceover text from van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo with imagery of the painter at work and at play, we see a compulsive artist struggling to determine not just what his art, so unappreciated and unrecognised, was for, but also who he himself was. As we observe him adding layer upon layer of wild streaks and unnatural colours to a self-portrait, we also cannot help notice how little Becker, clean shaven and portly, physically resembles the gaunt, bearded figure on the canvas – and yet Becker, like van Gogh himself, is not engaging in literal imitation, but rather seeking something more abstractly essential about his subject. The film itself takes a similar approach to biography, evoking van Gogh through impressionistic sketches rather than offering anything like a linear account of his life, and givng the merest hinting nods towards the notorious incident in which he severed his own ear. Of course, writer and director Oehlen is himself no stranger to self-portraits, both as an artist in his own right who has painted many himself, and as a filmmaker whose previous feature Bad Painter (2023) had Udo Kier in the lead rôle playing Oehler himself. So if Yellow is the portrait of the artist – both of van Gogh and indeed of any artist – then it is just as much about the artist Oehler working through his own thoughts and feelings on his calling.

Much as van Gogh speaks of collecting uniforms so that he can dress his models to look like genuine working people, Yellow itself is populated by Becker and others cosplaying as real people from a previous age. The artifice of the exercise is emphasised by the way that Hirschbiegel and Oehlen gradually let the masks and costumes slip. When van Gogh’s arm is bared, the filmmakers let us see Becker’s tattoo emblazoned, entirely anachronistically, with the text “Bruno Ganz R.I.P.” As the film goes on, Becker will play his part less in dressed sets, and more in an undressed post-millennial world of cars and exit lights and electric guitars. The steam-powered traction engine may have existed in the 1880s, but the one that van Gogh is shown pursuing on foot down a country road, sketching even as he runs, is unquestionably a tractor from our own age.

Van Gogh was, after all, ahead of his times, chasing at the heels of the future that belonged to his influence, so that it does not feel entirely out of place to hear him citing the words of Werner Herzog (and expressly attributing them to their source, born over 50 years after van Gogh’s death), or appearing at the end seated in a modern art gallery, dressed in multi-coloured bath robe (with a Django Unchained T-shirt underneath), as he delivers to camera a candid confessional describing his failed suicide attempt and his subsequent recovery from the trauma that both led to it and defined much of his life.

The real van Gogh did not in fact survive, at least for long, his suicide attempt – but even though the artist died in 1890, in a sense he has never been more alive or had greater cultural recognition (including in films like this one), which is why there can be real meaning in his final claim that his ‘journey’ as ‘an artist and a person’ is ‘still ongoing’. This rather experimental take on van Gogh has indeed brought its subject back to life.

Yellow just premiered in the Rebels With a Cause Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.