Tuesday 25 December 2012

Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (2/2)


BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (2/2)

Thankfully I have rarely suffered from hangovers, so I woke up at 9am, leaving Dorota to sleep it off a bit more and went and bought myself some clothes, seeing as we didn't have our washing machine plumbed in yet back in Warsaw, and I hadn't got around to going to launderette, I had to buy my clothes for the trip ahead. And of course my winter clothes were in the wrong city anyway, so I bought the cheapest hat and gloves that H&M had to offer.  

When we finally assemble all our stuff from the various studios, friends and relatives I'll probably realise we need to re-renovate our place with more storage. My itinerant life has been for three years, prior to that I moved only twice in a decade; Vincent was itinerant his whole adult life. But when he left a place it was often very abruptly, leaving his stuff behind, with a retinue of angry creditors making a return unlikely. For sure there were scores of early Van Gogh drawings and paintings that were left behind, and probably broken up and sold for wood by the creditors he fled from… amazing to think if they had just left it in their attics their children would have become multi-millionaires! This is to add to the Van Goghs destroyed in wars; stolen; and the one- a portrait of Madame Ginoux that Vincent set out from the St Remy Asylum on day release to give to her, but when he was found in the streets of Arles, dazed and confused, he was without the painting. Just imagine unearthing one of these after 125 years!! The nearest I have heard to something like this is the Finnish Department of Foreign Affairs. One of their junior employees in the French embassy was tasked with going out and buying some art, he came back with two Van Goghs, which appalled his conservative superiors, so he got demoted, or fired, or moved, and the two paintings sat in the attic of the Finnish embassy for 30 years, until someone realised they had two insanely valuable paintings rudely stacked among bric a brac. 

 Acceptably clad in clean warm clothes we struck out into the white grey gloom for Holland. Obviously Liege didn't want us to go, either that or I was over estimating my morning lucidity as we managed to re-enter the city twice before finally striking out on a long straight white road instead of the motorway (which was clogged with standstill traffic). The road was virtually empty, dissecting barren white fields. It was a relief to enter a forest, where all the branches bent ominously under piles of fresh wet snow. We passed Neunen, but decided that another standstill motorway was sufficient to deter us from seeing the place where Vincent spent more time than any other during his years as a painter, and the only place he didn't leave abruptly. This was where his ageing father had been sent, to preside over a small protestant community in an overwhelmingly Catholic village. His father and the parsonage were at the centre of the community, but this was disrupted by the arrival of the eldest son, who by now was an avowed atheist; who insisted in dressing in peasant clothes; and who would accost anyone he saw to come and model for him. At this time he worked furiously to master drawing, but also developed as a painter, painting what is heralded as his first masterpiece: The Potato Eaters. While he felt this was a breakthru, and he sent copies of it to many people who he wanted to impress, many of who had abandoned him, and in whose eyes he longed to be redeemed. But no one seemed to see what he saw, his friend van Rappard, put it:

 "Why do you see and treat everything so superficially? How far from true is that coquettish little hand of the woman in the background… And why isn't that man to the right allowed to have a knee, a belly and lungs? Or are they located in his back? And why must his arm be a yard too short? And why must he do without one half of his nose? And why must that woman on the left have some sort of little tobacco-pipe stem with little cube at the end for a nose?"

The friendship was crushed, as many of Vincent's friendships with other artists were, by bitter invective. van Rappard has a point, but as Vincent retorted, he also misses the point. And van Rappard's work is now a footnote in art history, mentioned only for his interaction with Vincent. Rappard was not the only one to scorn The Potato Eaters; his brother Theo rallied an array of criticism from himself, backed up by other artists and dealers in Paris. Wounded, but still belligerent Vincent conceded his figures were crude, but said that it had spirit and a life that would shine through:

 "I should be in despair if my figures were good rather…everything depends on how much life and passion an artist is able to express."

 On Sunday we would get to see this at the Van Gogh Museum but first we had to find out what was at the Hague. I was still getting stick for being stubborn and making us go to the Hague when there was only one van Gogh there. We arrived in the Hague to find the Maritshaus museum …. closed for renovation!!! What is going on - the van Gogh Museum, the Rijks Museum Maritshaus, all at the same time? What is so special about 2013 that they all need to be re-vamped for, or maybe the staff just want to party before the end of the world? Anyway precious museum time was being lost: did you know that museums in Holland close at 5pm (!?) as someone who has mainly visited art museums in London and New York this seemed seriously anti-social, and for the whole trip we felt like we were breaking land speed records to make it in time for closing. So onto Gementemuseum, with a time limit of 30 minutes. We went straight to see the three Rembrandts. One of his early works, that made him famous, 'Anatomy lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp', was flanked by two paintings from three decades later, towards the end of his career, 'Homer' and 'Two Negroes'. To be honest I wouldn't have given Anatomy Lesson a second glance if Dorota hadn't told me it was so famous, but even with my walking painting encyclopedia next to me, I had trouble studying it… when the other two are just so fascinating - the lighting in these and the way it is painted is impressionistic, counter to the realism of the earlier work, both early and late work have amazing lighting, but the later ones are dark, mysterious: something you can get lost in. There was no time to dwell on anything else; we scoured the rooms in search of the sole Hague van Gogh. Embarrassingly we both walked right past it, and had to have it pointed out to us: 'Garden At Arles', 1888.

 My heart sank; I had siphoned time away from museums with 100's of van Goghs for this.... It seemed a bit of a mess, not one of his great paintings, not one of the great Arles landscapes. I walked away from the picture, and turned to give it one last look… and from a distance it looked totally different. I was standing on the right of it facing it, at 10 metres away, and the painting… came alive. The path drew me in, the perspective was deep and intriguing, the staccato multicoloured brush strokes that seemed unnecessary up close cohered to give you the feeling of an over-flowing garden shimmering under intense summer sunshine. It brought a smile to my face. One thing I couldn't bear to, or afford to buy, was new winter boots, as I bought a very nice pair last year, so I had been walking around for the whole trip with my feet soaking in my summer trainers, and here- looking at this- I felt like I could walk down the path and be enveloped by cicadas and Mediterranean heat.

 As I am writing this, I am looking again at the painting on line: http://www.googleartproject.com/collection/gemeentemuseum/artwork/garden-at-arles-vincent-van-gogh/432790/ and it is just not the same painting. Here it is in high resolution courtesy of the Google Art project, but for this painting, well it seems almost pointless in reproduction. And that is the thought that I took away from the Hague. I have been looking at all his paintings in books, by necessity, and in books you miss the texture and you miss the depth/perspective in his work. This trip started with a reminder of the lengths that we went to achieve depth and perspective in our last films, winning the top prize for use of depth in film, and here I was struck by the unexpected and transformative depth in the first Van Gogh's painting that we had seen on this trip. I would be sure to be looking out for this on the rest of the trip. 
 A minute past our curfew, we raced back to our illegally parked car and drove furiously to Rotterdam under a glorious heavy orange sun, calling ahead to the museum to check they wouldn't close on us. When we arrived half an hour before closing they kindly decided not to charge us, and directed us to the van Gogh's. After my depth revelation we looked at the decidedly flat, portrait of Armand Roulin. And I was rather disappointed that it was the three quarter profile Armand, rather than the head on one of him in his yellow suit that we use in the Concept trailer. I am also influenced by the fact that I love our Amand Roulin character in the film; he will be the narrator for our film sequence that we are planning to use for Kickstarter- 'The Ear'. So I left Dorota to studying it carefully and moved on to the next ones. 

They had poplars near Nuenen, a painting I liked very much, mainly because I thought it was dramatically useful for the film. 

(source: wikipedia.org)
 It is from 1885, and I wondered from when in 1885, whether it was after his father's death in March of that year. Centre of the picture is the church spire in black silhouette, and under it in the foreground two women in black, and of to the side of them a man in peasant blue overalls, Vincent's default clothing at the time, who is holding some unidentifiable white stick in his hand. And it is an avenue of poplars, a tree that signifies loneliness, artisticness, and lacking in confidence... Could it be symoblising that he has lost his way in the wake of his father's death, and the black figure is mother and sister who turned their back on him, and all is dominated by the dead pastor, in the form of the silhouetted spire at the heart of the picture? Maybe the unidentified white is a blind man stick- symbolising Vincent's blindness. I have to check the date of the painting, and also whether I can find any references in his letters to the paintings, or to poplars, and check when the white cane first started to be used. Whether I am finding symbolism that isn't there, this painting has great dramatic potential for Vincent's departure from Nuenen in the film; and the fact is that most of Vincent's subjects were highly symbolic and much related back to his family, his mother's love of nature, and his father's religious teaching. 

1885 was a key year for Vincent. On the one hand he was super prolific, and had the breakthru of the Potato Eaters, on the other hand his relations with his family deteriorated disastrously, and the sudden death of his father made things worse, as his mother and sisters in part blamed him for the death of his father. Vincent had terrible and violent rows with his aged father, and to a lesser extent with his mother and sisters. He desperately wanted their love, as you can see from his letters when they are apart, but in these two years he railed against the views and authority of his ageing father- openly drinking, whoring, declaring his atheism, trying to tear down his father's world view- even as his father was bemusedly trying to understand and accept his son's chosen vocation, one that produced no money, just sucked it out of the family at an alarming rate. After his death he was hounded out of home by his sister and mother, and… would never return home or see them again. Once again he was leaving a place under a cloud, but not just any place, he was leaving the family that he so wanted to be loved by, for good. But... he was leaving as a painter; the die was cast. 

The one painting where there can be no doubt of its symbolic meaning, painted just after his father's death, is Still life with a Bible. This would be a treat for the following day. 

Having lost myself in thoughts on Poplars near Nuenen, we then used the final minutes to scout around the gallery. I was struck by the work of the Hague School, especially a large painting by Anton Mauve, the star of the Hague school, who was an uncle to Vincent by marriage, and who can be credited as the man who persuaded Vincent to paint. Until his apprenticeship to Mauve, Vincent was completely set on being an illustrator. Inevitably they had a seismic falling out, but Van Gogh always thereafter sought Mauve's approval, which was never forthcoming. When Mauve died Vincent sent him 'Peach tree in blossom' to his widow, and Mauve's granddaughter, three decades later, sold this for a hundred times more than the highest selling of her grandfather's paintings. I only knew Mauve through his role in Vincent's story, I had never seen his work, so I was surprised to be very struck by his paintings. While he might have been chained to the dealer system, his paintings were often pre-sold by Tersteeg (Vincent's nemesis), who harried him for as many paintings as possible, churning them out for the American market, he is someone with sensitivity and passion for his work. The Hague school duly visited, we had 30 seconds to admire Pieter Bruegel's the tower of Babel. Too short, a great affecting image whether on a postcard or on the Internet; it was a complete treat to see the actual painting, even for under a minute. Not for the first or last time on the trip we were escorted from the premises!!!

(source: wikipedia.org)

 by Hugh Welchman



Monday 17 December 2012

Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (1/2)


BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (1/2)

 

The idea was to have a trip to shake things up, get us out of our internimable renovation. Go and accept an award, and hopefully have a night celebrating past films, and then go and see a lot of Vincent paintings in the flesh to inspire us for the present film. 
A day into our trip it was clear we had fallen out of our traveller mentality. In 2010/11 I was on a trip virtually every, week, we lived out of suitcases, at one point I had meetings in India, China, Los Angeles, New York and London on consequtive days… well this time we set out from Warsaw to Liege at 9pm without checking the weather, or really comprehending the distance. We were greeted blizzards, sleet, hale and driving rain. 21 hours later (with 6 hours stop-over for sleep) we arrived in moody Liege. On the way Dorota read to me about Vincent's time in Wallonia, west of Liege in the Borinage- the 'black country', where he had the blackest of times.

Vincent from 23 to 27 was falling rapidly. Spoon fed a position when he was 16 at his childless Uncle's art dealership, and whom Vincent had been strategically named after, it was expected of Vincent that he would in time succeed his Uncle… but, by 23 he had, despite his famous name and connection, been demoted repeatedly until he found himself tucked away on the periphery of the firm, in a storehouse in London. He increasingly lost himself in evangelical religion, and decided to dedicate himself to religion. A couple of other career dead ends later, his family supported him to became a pastor like his father and grandfather, but Vincent didn't have the aptitude for the rigorous academic training it required. So again he slipped down the options of religious academia, and all that he could find was a post as an evangelical preacher in the mining district of the Borinage in Southern Belgium, an area that had the worst mines in Europe. Vincent had no talent for preaching, his sermons were convoluted and overlong, and barely comprehensible in his accented French. He was ostricised by the tightly knit mining community, which drove him to express his devotion symbolically, giving away all the church's possessions to the poor, sleeping in a barn, and eventually walking around in winter naked, having given away his clothes. Neither the miners nor his church appreciated this and he was locked out of his parish. So at 27 he suffered the indignity of having his father come and retrieve him and take him home, exactly 10 years after he set off in his dapper suit to follow in his Uncle Vincent's footsteps and become a great Art dealer.

It was here in the despondant depth's of depression that he started drawing. His mother and sisters dabbled in drawing in a purely recreational way, and they encouraged this in him, as a way to distract him from his black slumber…. and it started to work. Out of the blackness Vincent started to see a flicker of a future as a draftsman, an illustrator. Vincent was prone to herculean obsessive work. And where religion had resided, art took root… and he would draw through the night each night every night. The first drawings were …. awful, here is one of the few surviving drawings from this time, but he thought with single minded dedication he could conquer drawing, he could find through art a way to expressive this thing…

 (source: wikipaintings.org)

... to express 'it'… the truth and beauty that he had always felt he was able to feel and see in the world, and wanted to express to the world. If he couldn't do it through words as a preacher, then he would do it through images as an artist.

And with that chapter concluded we arrived in Liege, got booted and suited and headed to the Liege 3D Film Festival award ceremony.  The ceremony was much glitzier than I had expected. Set in the recently rennovated and luscious Liege Opera House,  and a whole array of awards sparkled under the lights. I knew we were picking up three awards, half way through the ceremony Little Postman won the award for Best 3D Animation. I winced when they called my name instead of Dorota's, as Dorota, having travelled around to many events with me was looking forward to having her moment at this one. We both went on stage I was handed the mic, and stated that as the director Dorota should really talk on behalf of the film. I handed her the mic, and then immediately wished I hadn't… We were at Europe's, if not the world's, premiere 3D festival, and she opened with "I wanted to make this film in 2D, as I don't really care for 3D…"


However I didn't need to be nervous, she went on to make a charming speech. She stated that it was only because her producer (me), who is also her husband (still me), told her to do it in 3D, and as she always does what her husband tells her (that was made up), that she made it that way, but she was very glad that she had, as the technology opened new artistic possibilities. She raised more laughter and applause than any other speaker of the night. She sparkled in the attention and I felt glad we had trekked across all of Europe to pick up the prize. I was told we were getting 3 prizes, but I thought there must have been some mistake as the night went on and there were only two awards left on stage. But to my surprise, the last two awards, the most prestigious, Best Stereography (Best 3D) and Best Film went to Magic Piano. Dorota came up with me, and we continued the double act speech.

Ceremony over, attention turned to partying. Things started tame in the exquisite ball-room at the Opera house, from there a whole group of the awardees were taken to a shiny club by the organisers.

(source: crowneplazaliege.be)

We were tired after the 20 hour drive, and were in two minds as whether to stay, but then someone made the one-way decision of multiple bottles of Vodka and red-bull… it'd been a while since I had ventured near this drink, as last time I had a night on it I felt wired for 3 days, but I'd been living off caffine to get across Europe anyhow, so… why not? We plunged into a night of dancing and drinking, that spilled on into a seedy club when the shiny one closed. We were hustled in through a hoarde of street drunks that hung out on the margins of a night, rather like the patrons of Vincent's night bar. In the bustle a young man got cut below his eye by the wing of one of the awards I was carrying. I bought the guy a drink and apologised for the accident. For the rest of the night he was always hanging at the margins of the group. At each place we all left our awards behind the bar for safety, but the last place turned out not to be very safe. When we left at 4am two awards were missing… both the Magic Piano awards. Dorota's was there, all the other people's prizes were there, it was just the Magic Piano awards. Our hosts got into a heated exchange with the bar owners, shirts were ripped, tempers were frayed. It was a sleezy last refuge, and I thought the young man that had been hovering in the corner of my view was probably the culprit. It was just the kind of place Vincent in his drinking insomniac phase would have ended up:

"It’s what they call a night cafĂ© here (they’re quite common here), that stay open all night. This way the night prowlers can find a refuge when they don’t have the price of a lodging, or if they’re too drunk to be admitted."

I tried to get everyone to step back, but with that much red-bull and with the young bar staff as drunk or high on some drug or other, it took time to fizzle out. I reassured our hosts that this theft in no way coloured our night. It was a very special night, full of excitement and glamour, appropriately descending into the seedy backstreets of Liege, but instead of us observing the "little hooligans and night prowlers" as Vincent did in one of his truly amazing paintings, The Night Cafe, we were the ones being closely observed by the night prowlers and little hooligans. So….


...we headed to bed at 4am in possession of one instead of three exceedingly heavy golden winged statues, and with 6 hours before we had to set out for Van Gogh museum.


 by Hugh Welchman



Wednesday 12 December 2012

Loving Vincent's diary - 1st week


BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 1st week


This week was the first week that we took the first concrete steps towards the new (and final) draft. The warsaw office/flat rennovation has been eating away at our time, finishing a flat that has to be an office for us and our colleagues, welcoming to clients, and a place to live shares some attributes with writing: 
- you find that a little thing that you are sure will be done in a few minutes sucks away at a day;
- you get carried away on an idea that ends with you exhausted having re-arranged everything at 8 in the morning;
- you find there is a little corner that gets you unstuck and threatens to unravel everything, and;
- the thing that you cherish just doesn't fit, and has to be thrown out.

But this week the balance shifted and Vincent re-entered our lives: on the night of our 2nd wedding Anniversary. After a day of rennovation work we went out for a late meal around 10pm and a frivilous meal turned serious at the digestif stage when we started to go through photos of our first two years of marriage: we discussed our hopes and fears for the future, and it turned out anxiety about the final draft of the script loomed large… so we decided to do something about it there and then: and started reading through Vincent's letters; and then watched a film on Caravaggio; and finally at around 5am started to brainstorm new approaches to the film, acting out a new opening sequence.

In the days after our main preoccupation was to see if there was a character in his life that could take on the investigative role in the film, provide some frame narration, and also looking at upping the mystery without jettisoning the link to our research. Basically lots of discussion and several new pages written, but no decisive breakthru. We did write a concept for our Kickstarter Video, so we will shoot a dummy run of that the next time we are in the Gdansk studio.

Still... by week end the idea of the week was the one that came at 5am on our wedding anniversary night, that seems to be the only one destined to make it into the film! So… by Friday we were drained of ideas and frustrated. The very next email that arrived gave us the news that our films Magic Piano and Little Postman had both won prizes at the Liege 3D Film Festival and would we be able to come next week and accept the awards. Dorota has never picked up in person any of the 5 first prizes that Little Postman has won, and I have never picked up any of the 5 that Magic Piano has won, and I had been looking for an excuse to go to Holland anyhow. So I looked on the map- 10 hours drive to Liege, and from there one hour on to the Borinage, the place Vincent was a preacher to the miners, and then 2 hours up to the museums in Holland. I decided this is what we needed - to get out of this flat, pick up the prizes and then go an immerse ourselves in Vincent paintings for a weekend. We were sitting at the coffee table by our new book shelf researching all the Dutch museums that have Van Goghs. We looked at the route this would take us, and decided it was too full on. So I remarked "Do you think the paintings in the Hague are worth bothering about", at which point our Vincent books, 12 out of several hundred, clattered onto the floor just behind us… all the other books were unmoved. We looked at each other bemused, and decided that obviously someone disagreed that the Hague paintings weren't worth bothering about, and put the Hague back into our itinerary. Had Vincent entered our lives in more ways than one?

Here is a picture of the books on our perfectly level shelves! What will we find in the Hague?

 by Hugh Welchman