Under The Starry Night

Loving Vincent, the world’s first fully painted feature film, is not just a tribute to the master artist, Vincent Van Gogh, but a telling narrative that goes beyond ‘making’ a film to actually ‘designing’ one, too

- Krystin Arneson

The trailer for Loving Vincent is a silent one but for the jarring interruption of a breaking glass bottle – and so its 59 seconds quickly draw you in to focus on the visual. The uncanny feeling of familiarity places you in the setting as scenes shift and change: you’ve seen these skies before in Starry Night, these fields in namesake Vincent van gogh’s pastoral paintings. but the ever-present flicker of the oil-painted animation brings a frozen medium to life – and, in turn, resurrects the artist who revolutionised it and inspired the film to re-examine his life and his death. Art teachers always say paintings tell a story; but here, it’s as if one lined up van gogh’s paintings side by side, waved a wand, and somehow extracted a narrative thread linking all of them. A week before his death, Vincent van gogh wrote to his brother, ‘We cannot speak other than by our paintings’. The sentence rings true here with this homage to one of visual art’s most famous talents.

The film’s medium removes viewers from the traditional one-way, didactic nature of cinema to engage in a dialogue with the artist via his chosen medium: oil painting. For the sake of the film’s purposes, this amounted to 62,450 paintings, or 12 per second, created by a team of 85 artists at the film’s studios in Poland and greece. An extra step was involved in the creation of this cinematic feat: The film, directed by Dorota kobiela and hugh Welchman (who are now married, partly as a by-product of working on this project), was shot first as a live-action movie in london and Wroclaw against either a set designed to look like a van gogh painting or against a green screen. And it has star credentials, featuring actors such as Saoirse ronan (Brooklyn, Atonement), Chris o’Dowd (Bridesmaids), Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones) and theatre veteran Robert Gulaczyk in his first film role as van gogh himself.