An infinity mirror of recognition between viewer, creator, character. Life lived on the margins, life painted in the margins by a true cinematic naturalist painter. To achieve the effort to formalize reality without suffering at the hands of one’s own artifice, without hypocrisy, without consenting to the pictorial miserablism or commitment to meagerness that future filmmakers would substitute for minimalism (samwrm said it seemed a vast swathe of French cinema in the half-century since had re-domesticated Pialat’s cinema, and I couldn’t help but think of Joe Swanberg calling him a primary influence). To make films out of a great contradiction; a mastery over the sense of life within the frame, a mastery which, more than any other filmmaker, appears to erase the confinement and mechanism of the frame itself in terms of borders, stricture, defined endpoints, causal definition, categorical essentialism. Pialat is all curve, shape and line, all laughs, punches, sneers, smiles, frowns, postures – what Kent Jones called a “continuity of gesture” unparalleled. These gestures confer the reality of character to the characters only and disallow the lie of “theme” and “text” outside of their individuation as organisms (this is not to say there is no politics, or spirituality, or philosophy to his work, only that each character’s individuality is accorded the same level of respect on each front, which in itself becomes a politic, a spiritualism, and a philosophical notion in itself). It’s this, combined with disjunctive editing which turns the act of ellipsis into a rebellion against the demands of narrative artificiality, and with an openness toward improvisation within the apparatus of the long-take, that makes the films appear as only strings of moments in a life. First landing as experientally true, and then landing as the ache of memory (also non-causal, also elliptical) – this, I believe, is why I very much like Pialat as I watch it, but only towards its end, when the avalanche of life-lived-in-between-drama accrues, do I realize it’s exactly what I want a film to do. Live.

So we get Van Gogh the man, the dying man, the failure with talent, the man of 1890, not the idea. With his prostitutes and liquor and benefactors and village idiots and tiny one-room lodgings; not his reputation, not his dramas, and not his vision of the world (because we’re seeing it; the effect of Pialat’s style on a biography of a painter is to reveal what he sees as a creative without editorializing to tell us what he sees). Pialat certainly felt a kinship, notoriously hard on his art as he was, hard to be around and work with as he was. We get a scene quoting Renoir’s French Cancan, complete with Offenbach, and its fervent defense of theatrical tradition, of its exploitation and sexualization and commercialization, as represented by its long-take finale of legs kicking into the air, only here refitted for a brothel. First the revelers take part in a martial parade-dance, with frozen faces that Pialat rest on without cutting, as if to sculpt their own implacable reality within their historical moment (this long-take seems to me the essence of Bazinian, a total surrender to the ontology in the frame). Then, mirroring the Cancan, a dance-of-abandon and community that also reminds us of Cimino and Ford (both of whom were on my mind throughout – all that soft dalliance between clean geometrical lines and the curves of bodies framed by light). Taken together they are a fervent defense, like Renoirs, but of making art on those aforementioned margins, of living to create or love or fuck the next thing, of treating all people with dignity – sure, the rebellious self-destruction of the artist is a lie, but. But. But by the virtue of that informal erasure of the merciless falsity of dramatic impetus, by virtue of rendering the in-frame gestures as close to lived-life as possible through an impossible combination of rigor and openness which suggest not improvisation within a frame, but the ontology of a frame and that of life totally cohabitating (so the image is not representation, but is its own life lived within the filming)...by that process, Van Gogh’s selfishness is found worthy. Pialat’s commitment to his own approach is found worthy. The prostitutes are found worthy. 1890 is found worthy. The cinema is found worthy.

Pialat is found worthy because he finds Van Gogh worthy, and he finds the latter because in his cinema every last one of our compulsions is holy. Naturalism turned pagan. Beautiful animals whose actions are found graceful by their nature as actions alone (is he the least judgmental filmmaker in history? It doesn’t seem hyperbolic at all.) A handful of moments of affection, a few tosses in the hay, a smile and a frown, and then we’re gone. Marguerite says, before the cut-to-black, that Van Gogh was her friend. A good friend loves you for who you are. Pialat loves us for who we are.