Lust for Life

27/04/2025

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Throbbing in Colour

There is a scene in Lust for Life where Vincent (Kirk Douglas) decides to drown a few of his many sorrows in a bar. He walks in, a man behind the door moves out of the way and the film holds to a medium long shot as he sits down. In the same frame, we see the man now seated at a nearby table, a couple quarrelling in the background near the door, and the barman. Within the same shot, the barman goes on to deliver a pint to the man, and we also see a woman alone at a table behind Vincent. With the arguing couple, the man is drunkenly playing the accordion, and she moves to bustle him out the door, while we see Vincent in the foreground, the woman to his left behind him, as the barman comes over asking if she wants more wine. We also see the man in between them further behind. There are four planes of action, with everything clearly in view. It is a wonderful example of film form at work. While Andre Bazin may have been famous for realist as opposed to formalist theories, he would no doubt have admired the specifics of the mise-en-scene as it uses the depth of field Bazin so loved. Yet when Bazin did comment on Lust for Life he remarked that because Minnelli made the film, it led Jean Renoir to abandon his Van Gogh project. “Can [critic Jean] Domarchi claim that a Van Gogh by Renoir would not have brought more prestige to the politique des auteurs than a film by Minnelli? What was needed was a painter’s son, and what we get is a director of filmed ballets!” (NewWaveFilm.com) The suggestion is that instead of the realism Renoir would have brought to the project as one of the filmmakers Bazin most admired for the freedom of his mise en scene, and one augmented by his comprehension of the late 19th-century artistic milieu since he was the son of Auguste, what Bazin sees is choreography and control — and thus closer to formalism than realism.   

       There is some truth to Bazin’s claims if we think about the sort of visual elaboration of the shot that a formalist such as David Bordwell sees in later filmmakers, including Theo Angelopoulos and Hou Hsiao-hsien. As Bordwell says of the Greek filmmaker, in certain shots, “ character movement and camera movement participate in a larger dynamic of opening and filling space out. Tempo that allows us to anticipate how the blocking will develop. Thanks to the long take, the muted action, and dead intervals, Angelopoulos prolongs the process of staging, leaving us plenty of time to recognise that we are forming expectations about where the character or camera will go next.” (Figures traced in Light)  Here we have what might have seemed an insult by Bazin's standards as a compliment by Bordwell towards Angelopoulos. The mise en scene no longer illustrates the nuance of life as Bazin saw films using deep focus to bring out the ambiguity of existence, films so reliant on editing denied, but instead become very deliberate formal strategies. It is a feature we see in neo-formalists like Bela Tarr and Alexander Sokurov, where the form becomes if not paramount, certainly unavoidably present. 

          Minnelli would have been more pragmatic than these other filmmakers, but if he is so admired today for films including An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful, Some Came Running and even the easily mocked Brigadoon, it rests partly on his elaborate use of screen space, in his insistence that the frame is shown in all its width and depth, rather than hacked up by montage. In a later scene, when Vincent is in the south of France and joined by Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), they enter a bar, and the film creates visual texture while minimally editing. As they arrive, a woman in the foreground attends to her emotional friend, the barman stands over them trying to get them to leave, while behind them Van Gogh and Gauguin have entered, and the barman then turns to Gauguin, saying he doesn’t want him causing any trouble. All the while, people cross the frame as the barman moves around the bar, trying to sort out what had been a fracas just before the artists arrived. As things calm down, the camera moves to the right and opens up the space as we overhear a conversation between two soldiers before a woman he knows grabs Vincent’s arm, and he goes over and sits with her as the scene cuts for the first time. 

     The scene is busier than the earlier one we quoted, closer to the freneticism of Renoir than a controlled choreography, but what both sequences make use of is the extended frame. Like a few other Minelli films of the ‘50s, Lust for Life was shot in Cinemascope with a ratio of 235:1. Standard Hollywood productions had previously used a standard ratio of 137:1. With close to double the width, why wouldn’t films use that extra space to avoid cutting? It was one of the features Bazin could see in Cinemascope as he was writing at its birth in 1953. Editing had “undoubtedly become the alpha of cinematic language, the omega being framing, which plastically organises the contents of the image.” (Bazin at Work) Widescreen framing was capable of reversing this overemphasised focus on editing: "it is true that the framing alone can often create within the image a kind of virtual editing” (Bazin at Work). This is often what we see in Lust for Life, evident in the two scenes we have focused upon. But whether this lends itself to greater realism or greater formalism is moot, and Minnelli would be a filmmaker leaning towards the latter. 

        This is partly based on the film’s use of colour. At one moment in the film, Van Gogh’s artist uncle is looking through the young man's black and white sketches and says, “tell me something, have you ever worked in colour.” Minnelli certainly had, even if only recently films had used colour over black and white.  “By the mid-1950s, more than half of Hollywood films were being shot in color, and the decade’s top ten highest-grossing films boasted “Color by Technicolor.” (Technicolor.Com) But Minnelli had been working in colour when it was still rare, in Meet Me in St Louis, The Pirate, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon and Brigadoon. True, these were musicals and adventure films, and more inclined to be filmed in colour over noirs and courtroom dramas, police procedurals and realist narratives. Nevertheless, Minnelli understood colour film, and partly why he didn’t work with it obliviously in Lust for Life. “Minnelli…thought that Eastmancolor/Technicolor didn’t have the ‘subdued tones that would be needed in a film about Van Gogh’. The colour palette, he said, ‘was straight from the candy box” as he reckoned it was a “mixture of blues, reds and yellows that resembled neither life nor art’. (HeadPress.com) At Minnelli’s insistence, MGM bought the last remaining 300,000 feet of Ansco Color, colour stock he had used before for example on Brigadoon, and used it to capture the different tones he sought through the film: the darker and subdued colours for northern Europe; brighter colours for Paris; richer hues for the South of France, all aided by location shooting. (In contrast to the studio shot Brigadoon.)   

      The idea of colour lending itself to realism or formalism can be as contested as the long take is to the same question. Some early formalists insisted that film needed to distinguish itself from reality and since life is in colour, film art should be in monochrome. Rudolf Arnheim was probably the most famous proponent of this view: “what will the colour film have to offer when it reaches technical perfection? We know what we shall lose artistically by abandoning the black-and-white film. Will colour ever allow us to achieve a similar compositional precision, a similar independence of ‘reality’?” (Film as Art) In Minnelli’s comment about Technicolor he wasn’t impervious to arguments against colour film, but this wasn’t to reject it; he wanted to understand its possibilities, even if others thought he should have settled for what was readily to hand instead of searching out increasingly obsolete stock. David Thomson reckoned, “one can’t help but long for Technicolor as the system that applied to Van Gogh best. The colours need to throb like wounds.” (Have You Seen…?) Minnelli wanted the realism of location to be met with colour that would capture the shift in Van Gogh’s own work, but Thomson asks for the post-impressionist richness found in many of his paintings. While the film is bold in colour next to most contemporary films, it can seem less subdued in its use of it in comparison to Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause or Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind made around the same time. It would be an exaggeration to say that Minnelli would likely agree with John Berger’s claim on Van Gogh that “I can think of no other European painter whose work expresses such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them…” (Portraits) But it as if there were three problems Minnelli needed to address: respecting reality, insisting on the breadth of cinematic colour, and viewing the artists’s paintings as works he needed to acknowledge yet be wary of mimicking. Titles at the beginning of the film tell of the various institutions Minnelli needs to thank as it will go on to show later examples of Van Gogh’s work, including The Bedroom in Arles, Church at Avers, The Town Hall at Avers and The Starry Night, sometimes cutting from the painting to its filmic reenactment, as when the bedroom in Arles becomes the very room Vincent is staying in, or after showing us Van Gogh’s The Town Hall at Avers, giving us the actual building. Minnelli is no realist, but he asked himself how he could best represent Van Gogh on screen. If he were a realist, he might have shown Arles as Robert Hughes describes it when writing about the artist. “Arles in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic  — at least to a Parisian eye — as North Africa.”(Nothing if Not Critical).

        Van Gogh has often been lucky in film: Paul Cox’s Vincent, Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh and Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo are all intelligent accounts of the artist by significant filmmakers. Next to them, Minnelli’s might appear kitsch. In replicating the work, he risks turning cinema into a diminished form of the art it insists on bringing before our eyes. Many filmmakers who use painting well (David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni) do so by absorbing artists' work into their films without reproducing given paintings. Antonioni’s images sometimes resemble Rothko’s and Lynch’s Edward Hopper’s — but they usually do so because the filmmaker has been thinking of framing and colour without directly offering homage. In this sense, Minnelli somehow manages to escape the inferiority of film next to painting that such homaging can generate — and none more so than a recent invocation of Van Gogh’s work, the effortful but unilluminating Loving Vincent. This is an animated account of chiefly the last period of Van Gogh’s life, but feels suffocated by its determination to find in animation a respect that turns out to be burdensome. 

      In Lust for Life, Minnelli is respectful but also benefits from a tension the film displays between realism and formalism, the density of its mise en scene and its interest in the colourist frame. If formalists were often concerned with how cinema fits in with the rest of the arts, realists were also interested in how film can capture life like no other art before it. We wouldn’t want to make too much of this realism when set against for example, Maurice Pialat’s far more observational Van Gogh, and partly why if we must acknowledge realist/formalist distinctions, Lust for Life is a formalist work. When Bazin proposed this would have been a film better directed by Renoir rather than Minnelli, this was the realist speaking, someone who could see in Jean Renoir’s father Pierre Auguste a figure in the impressionist movement that, in David Piper’s words,  could take from Realism a commitment to “painting the world as they saw it — the world immediately around them, the modern world.” Albeit these were aided by instinct in some cases, scientific principles in others, and “the objects that comprise the visible world and the spiritedness and interrelationship of these objects.” But Piper also notes that Renoir believed that “it is in the museum that one learns to paint.” (The Illustrated History of Art) 

      By analogy, one might believe that Minnelli wouldn’t especially disagree with him if we see that for many, the studio is where one learns to film. Most of An American in Paris was shot in the MGM studios in California, and Brigadoon too, when Minnelli couldn’t find locations in Scotland that matched his vision of what a Scottish village should look like. One may see realism in Minnelli’s pursuit of colour accuracy and which he believes captures Van Gogh’s work and also the locations he painted in. One might see it too in the director’s blocking and lens length as he allows us to view events in the foreground, middle ground and background simultaneously. But all these elements lend themselves so much more to formalist procedures over realist demands. Minnelli himself proposed that “people don’t realise that the décor, what they hold and the surroundings, tell an awful lot about the character. That’s what I’m concerned with, the character.” (Henry Sheehan). Yet few watching Minnelli’s colour films, like Meet Me in St Louis, An American in Paris, Brigadoon, Gigi and Lust for Life, whether shot using locations or mainly studio backlots, will be well aware that Minnelli is chiefly remembered for the brilliance of his colour and the quality of his decor.                 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Lust for Life

Throbbing in Colour

There is a scene in Lust for Life where Vincent (Kirk Douglas) decides to drown a few of his many sorrows in a bar. He walks in, a man behind the door moves out of the way and the film holds to a medium long shot as he sits down. In the same frame, we see the man now seated at a nearby table, a couple quarrelling in the background near the door, and the barman. Within the same shot, the barman goes on to deliver a pint to the man, and we also see a woman alone at a table behind Vincent. With the arguing couple, the man is drunkenly playing the accordion, and she moves to bustle him out the door, while we see Vincent in the foreground, the woman to his left behind him, as the barman comes over asking if she wants more wine. We also see the man in between them further behind. There are four planes of action, with everything clearly in view. It is a wonderful example of film form at work. While Andre Bazin may have been famous for realist as opposed to formalist theories, he would no doubt have admired the specifics of the mise-en-scene as it uses the depth of field Bazin so loved. Yet when Bazin did comment on Lust for Life he remarked that because Minnelli made the film, it led Jean Renoir to abandon his Van Gogh project. “Can [critic Jean] Domarchi claim that a Van Gogh by Renoir would not have brought more prestige to the politique des auteurs than a film by Minnelli? What was needed was a painter’s son, and what we get is a director of filmed ballets!” (NewWaveFilm.com) The suggestion is that instead of the realism Renoir would have brought to the project as one of the filmmakers Bazin most admired for the freedom of his mise en scene, and one augmented by his comprehension of the late 19th-century artistic milieu since he was the son of Auguste, what Bazin sees is choreography and control — and thus closer to formalism than realism.   

       There is some truth to Bazin’s claims if we think about the sort of visual elaboration of the shot that a formalist such as David Bordwell sees in later filmmakers, including Theo Angelopoulos and Hou Hsiao-hsien. As Bordwell says of the Greek filmmaker, in certain shots, “ character movement and camera movement participate in a larger dynamic of opening and filling space out. Tempo that allows us to anticipate how the blocking will develop. Thanks to the long take, the muted action, and dead intervals, Angelopoulos prolongs the process of staging, leaving us plenty of time to recognise that we are forming expectations about where the character or camera will go next.” (Figures traced in Light)  Here we have what might have seemed an insult by Bazin's standards as a compliment by Bordwell towards Angelopoulos. The mise en scene no longer illustrates the nuance of life as Bazin saw films using deep focus to bring out the ambiguity of existence, films so reliant on editing denied, but instead become very deliberate formal strategies. It is a feature we see in neo-formalists like Bela Tarr and Alexander Sokurov, where the form becomes if not paramount, certainly unavoidably present. 

          Minnelli would have been more pragmatic than these other filmmakers, but if he is so admired today for films including An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful, Some Came Running and even the easily mocked Brigadoon, it rests partly on his elaborate use of screen space, in his insistence that the frame is shown in all its width and depth, rather than hacked up by montage. In a later scene, when Vincent is in the south of France and joined by Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), they enter a bar, and the film creates visual texture while minimally editing. As they arrive, a woman in the foreground attends to her emotional friend, the barman stands over them trying to get them to leave, while behind them Van Gogh and Gauguin have entered, and the barman then turns to Gauguin, saying he doesn’t want him causing any trouble. All the while, people cross the frame as the barman moves around the bar, trying to sort out what had been a fracas just before the artists arrived. As things calm down, the camera moves to the right and opens up the space as we overhear a conversation between two soldiers before a woman he knows grabs Vincent’s arm, and he goes over and sits with her as the scene cuts for the first time. 

     The scene is busier than the earlier one we quoted, closer to the freneticism of Renoir than a controlled choreography, but what both sequences make use of is the extended frame. Like a few other Minelli films of the ‘50s, Lust for Life was shot in Cinemascope with a ratio of 235:1. Standard Hollywood productions had previously used a standard ratio of 137:1. With close to double the width, why wouldn’t films use that extra space to avoid cutting? It was one of the features Bazin could see in Cinemascope as he was writing at its birth in 1953. Editing had “undoubtedly become the alpha of cinematic language, the omega being framing, which plastically organises the contents of the image.” (Bazin at Work) Widescreen framing was capable of reversing this overemphasised focus on editing: "it is true that the framing alone can often create within the image a kind of virtual editing” (Bazin at Work). This is often what we see in Lust for Life, evident in the two scenes we have focused upon. But whether this lends itself to greater realism or greater formalism is moot, and Minnelli would be a filmmaker leaning towards the latter. 

        This is partly based on the film’s use of colour. At one moment in the film, Van Gogh’s artist uncle is looking through the young man's black and white sketches and says, “tell me something, have you ever worked in colour.” Minnelli certainly had, even if only recently films had used colour over black and white.  “By the mid-1950s, more than half of Hollywood films were being shot in color, and the decade’s top ten highest-grossing films boasted “Color by Technicolor.” (Technicolor.Com) But Minnelli had been working in colour when it was still rare, in Meet Me in St Louis, The Pirate, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon and Brigadoon. True, these were musicals and adventure films, and more inclined to be filmed in colour over noirs and courtroom dramas, police procedurals and realist narratives. Nevertheless, Minnelli understood colour film, and partly why he didn’t work with it obliviously in Lust for Life. “Minnelli…thought that Eastmancolor/Technicolor didn’t have the ‘subdued tones that would be needed in a film about Van Gogh’. The colour palette, he said, ‘was straight from the candy box” as he reckoned it was a “mixture of blues, reds and yellows that resembled neither life nor art’. (HeadPress.com) At Minnelli’s insistence, MGM bought the last remaining 300,000 feet of Ansco Color, colour stock he had used before for example on Brigadoon, and used it to capture the different tones he sought through the film: the darker and subdued colours for northern Europe; brighter colours for Paris; richer hues for the South of France, all aided by location shooting. (In contrast to the studio shot Brigadoon.)   

      The idea of colour lending itself to realism or formalism can be as contested as the long take is to the same question. Some early formalists insisted that film needed to distinguish itself from reality and since life is in colour, film art should be in monochrome. Rudolf Arnheim was probably the most famous proponent of this view: “what will the colour film have to offer when it reaches technical perfection? We know what we shall lose artistically by abandoning the black-and-white film. Will colour ever allow us to achieve a similar compositional precision, a similar independence of ‘reality’?” (Film as Art) In Minnelli’s comment about Technicolor he wasn’t impervious to arguments against colour film, but this wasn’t to reject it; he wanted to understand its possibilities, even if others thought he should have settled for what was readily to hand instead of searching out increasingly obsolete stock. David Thomson reckoned, “one can’t help but long for Technicolor as the system that applied to Van Gogh best. The colours need to throb like wounds.” (Have You Seen…?) Minnelli wanted the realism of location to be met with colour that would capture the shift in Van Gogh’s own work, but Thomson asks for the post-impressionist richness found in many of his paintings. While the film is bold in colour next to most contemporary films, it can seem less subdued in its use of it in comparison to Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause or Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind made around the same time. It would be an exaggeration to say that Minnelli would likely agree with John Berger’s claim on Van Gogh that “I can think of no other European painter whose work expresses such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them…” (Portraits) But it as if there were three problems Minnelli needed to address: respecting reality, insisting on the breadth of cinematic colour, and viewing the artists’s paintings as works he needed to acknowledge yet be wary of mimicking. Titles at the beginning of the film tell of the various institutions Minnelli needs to thank as it will go on to show later examples of Van Gogh’s work, including The Bedroom in Arles, Church at Avers, The Town Hall at Avers and The Starry Night, sometimes cutting from the painting to its filmic reenactment, as when the bedroom in Arles becomes the very room Vincent is staying in, or after showing us Van Gogh’s The Town Hall at Avers, giving us the actual building. Minnelli is no realist, but he asked himself how he could best represent Van Gogh on screen. If he were a realist, he might have shown Arles as Robert Hughes describes it when writing about the artist. “Arles in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic  — at least to a Parisian eye — as North Africa.”(Nothing if Not Critical).

        Van Gogh has often been lucky in film: Paul Cox’s Vincent, Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh and Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo are all intelligent accounts of the artist by significant filmmakers. Next to them, Minnelli’s might appear kitsch. In replicating the work, he risks turning cinema into a diminished form of the art it insists on bringing before our eyes. Many filmmakers who use painting well (David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni) do so by absorbing artists' work into their films without reproducing given paintings. Antonioni’s images sometimes resemble Rothko’s and Lynch’s Edward Hopper’s — but they usually do so because the filmmaker has been thinking of framing and colour without directly offering homage. In this sense, Minnelli somehow manages to escape the inferiority of film next to painting that such homaging can generate — and none more so than a recent invocation of Van Gogh’s work, the effortful but unilluminating Loving Vincent. This is an animated account of chiefly the last period of Van Gogh’s life, but feels suffocated by its determination to find in animation a respect that turns out to be burdensome. 

      In Lust for Life, Minnelli is respectful but also benefits from a tension the film displays between realism and formalism, the density of its mise en scene and its interest in the colourist frame. If formalists were often concerned with how cinema fits in with the rest of the arts, realists were also interested in how film can capture life like no other art before it. We wouldn’t want to make too much of this realism when set against for example, Maurice Pialat’s far more observational Van Gogh, and partly why if we must acknowledge realist/formalist distinctions, Lust for Life is a formalist work. When Bazin proposed this would have been a film better directed by Renoir rather than Minnelli, this was the realist speaking, someone who could see in Jean Renoir’s father Pierre Auguste a figure in the impressionist movement that, in David Piper’s words,  could take from Realism a commitment to “painting the world as they saw it — the world immediately around them, the modern world.” Albeit these were aided by instinct in some cases, scientific principles in others, and “the objects that comprise the visible world and the spiritedness and interrelationship of these objects.” But Piper also notes that Renoir believed that “it is in the museum that one learns to paint.” (The Illustrated History of Art) 

      By analogy, one might believe that Minnelli wouldn’t especially disagree with him if we see that for many, the studio is where one learns to film. Most of An American in Paris was shot in the MGM studios in California, and Brigadoon too, when Minnelli couldn’t find locations in Scotland that matched his vision of what a Scottish village should look like. One may see realism in Minnelli’s pursuit of colour accuracy and which he believes captures Van Gogh’s work and also the locations he painted in. One might see it too in the director’s blocking and lens length as he allows us to view events in the foreground, middle ground and background simultaneously. But all these elements lend themselves so much more to formalist procedures over realist demands. Minnelli himself proposed that “people don’t realise that the décor, what they hold and the surroundings, tell an awful lot about the character. That’s what I’m concerned with, the character.” (Henry Sheehan). Yet few watching Minnelli’s colour films, like Meet Me in St Louis, An American in Paris, Brigadoon, Gigi and Lust for Life, whether shot using locations or mainly studio backlots, will be well aware that Minnelli is chiefly remembered for the brilliance of his colour and the quality of his decor.                 


© Tony McKibbin