Kansas City Star: Van Gogh film on big screen is itself a true work of art
October 7, 2009 – 12:51 pmThe Kansas City Star offers their extremely positive review of Van Gogh: Brush With Genius currently playing at the Union Station City Extreme Screen:
On the huge IMAX screen, brush strokes are magnified in a way that allows a viewer to understand how the artist achieved his splendid effects of light and depth.
And the narration, in English by an art researcher, by the film-maker and by a French-accented speaker representing the voice of Van Gogh himself, lets one experience the journey of a man struggling with emotional demons as he expresses on canvas his passion for color, for form and for life itself.
We have been more than once, my family and I, to Auvers-sur-Oise, the village a bit north of Paris where Van Gogh spent the last two months of his life and painted the last 200 of his 900 works. It was there, overcome by despair in a wheat field above the town where he often painted, that he shot himself.
We have visited the little Auberge Ravoux, the inn where he lodged, and to which he stumbled back down to die. And we have stood at his humble grave, beside that of his brother, Theo, in the village cemetery.
To see “Brush With Genius” is to be transported back to Auvers, and to understand more clearly the price of torment he paid for the priceless legacy of work he left behind.





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