Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie Review

Told in as few strokes as possible.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 29, 2010

Visually impressive? Yes. Immersive? Absolutely. In-depth? Rarely. IMAX films, typically restrained to 40 minutes so that science centers and museums can maximize the number of showings in a day, simply don’t have the time to delve deeply into their larger-than-life subjects. In academic terms, you might think of your average IMAX documentary not as an all-encompassing post-grad course, but as a 101 intro-to-whatever undergrad class, designed to encourage interest in the topic. (Ideally, for museum management, you’ll walk out of the theater and straight into the gift shop, where you’ll find all manner of more comprehensive tie-in books.) Van Gogh: Brush with Genius, then, is aptly titled. This is a mere brush with the prolific and mentally troubled post-impressionist, a brief sketch of his life.

Vincent van Gogh

The biographical aspects of the documentary are unfortunately handled in the hokiest way imaginable. Rather than having art historians or other experts chime in on Van Gogh’s life and output, director François Bertrand has the painter himself, voiced by Jacques Gamblin, adorn the film with a cheesy from-beyond-the-grave narration. This leads to all kinds of ill-informed conjecture and would-be self-psychoanalysis, like when the spectral VG sadly ruminates, “I noticed that women find me much more interesting since I died. I think I scared them off when I was alive. I was too nervous and tormented.” I get it—the attempt is to bring history to life, so to speak—but the effect is unsubtle, too cutesy, and poorly scripted.

Nonetheless, Van Gogh’s ghost does give us a concise, if excessively tidy, overview of his life. We learn of his early influences— complementary color theory, Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts —and follow him to the south of France, where he spent the last few months of his life churning out two, sometimes three paintings a day before shooting himself in the chest. We’re inundated with facts and bits of trivia throughout— which sometimes sound odd coming from Van Gogh, speaking about himself—but Brush with Genius glosses over the more troubling aspects of the painter’s life. Absinthe is given only a passing mention, his spat with fellow painter Paul Gauguin is only barely addressed, and the full facts of the infamous ear-cutting incident are withheld. To be fair, though, given that IMAX movies are usually family friendly affairs, this isn’t entirely unexpected.

And besides, the documentary is more intent on exploring the lasting influence of Van Gogh’s art than the sordid details of his tabloid-worthy life. To this end, the film also follows two contemporary individuals affected by the painter’s work. Occasionally, in meta, movie-within-a-movie interludes, we cut to Peter Knapp, a documentarian filming the present-day locations of Van Gogh’s landscapes. We then fade between the real-life subjects and the paintings, noting the contrast between tame reality and the artist’s intense hues and skewed perspectives. We also see Ellen, a researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, as she pours over sketches and correspondences between Vincent and his brother Theo, a well-known art dealer at the time. One of the film’s corniest moments has Van Gogh getting irate at Ellen when she starts to read a section of a letter that the painter had tried to scratch out with pencil.

Of course, the real allure here is the high resolution 70mm IMAX image, which gives us an unprecedented close-up look at Van Gogh’s paintings, letting us make out the texture and vivid color of each swirling stroke of his brush. I’m sure some of the awe of seeing the film on a 5-story-tall screen is lost in the transition to Blu-ray, but if you’ve got a large enough television, you’ll be appreciably wowed. Bertrand and his director of photography, Vincent Mathias, were allowed access to over 40 of the ear-flaying Dutchman’s most famous works, and seeing them here truly is like seeing them for the first time. There were a few times when I even pressed pause on my remote, just to give myself a few more moments to absorb all of the large-format detail. Even if you’ve seen the paintings in person—at a distance, under the watchful gaze of museum security—you’ve never seen them like this.

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As I hinted at above, Van Gogh: Brush with Genius looks gorgeous on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that revels in depth, color, and clarity. The large-format image is simply stunning. Van Gogh's paintings are reproduced here with an insane amount of detail—you really can see the outline of each brush stroke and the dappled bas-relief texture of the oil paint. Obviously, color is immensely important when you're talking about Van Gogh as well, and the hues are nuanced and satisfyingly dense without seeming boosted or exaggerated. Basically, the image looks like you're standing mere inches away from the painting under white, perfectly balanced light. The picture is just as impressive when we're looking at shots of the French countryside or a researcher in the basement of the Van Gogh Museum—detail is abundant and there's the sense of depth and dimensionality that you only get with IMAX. It's hard to dredge up any shortcomings. There are a few white specks on the print and you'll notice some occasional flickering in brightness levels, but that's about it. Grain is thin and natural, black levels are deep, and there are no rampant compression issues. Like most IMAX Blu- ray releases, this one is a winner in the PQ department.

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The disc includes not one, but four lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround tracks, in English, French, Japanese, and Spanish. The mix isn't particularly aggressive, or even immersive—the rear channels are only quietly used for ambience and music—but the blend of narration, sound effects, and Armand Amar's lush, sometimes Amelie-esque score is perfect for the film. The music has a nice, weighty presence, with rounded lows and defined high-end clarity, and you'll hear crickets chirping and wind blowing in the rears, along with the occasional effect, like the crisp shh-shh- shh of a pencil sketching on paper. Jacques Gamblin's narration is clear and balanced within the mix, but some viewers may have trouble with his substantially thick accent and, unfortunately, there are no subtitle options whatsoever.

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The bulk of the bonus material is made up of the succinctly named Behind the Scenes featurette (1080p, 19:28), which features interviews with the director François Bertrand and DP Vincent Mathias discussing the challenges of bringing Van Gogh's paintings to the big big screen, and footage of the two filming inside the basement vault of the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh's Art (1080p, 4:15) is a slideshow of the works featured in the film—you can choose to play it once or have it loop indefinitely—and finally, the disc includes 13 trailers for IMAX films available on DVD and/or Blu-ray.

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius is not the go-to documentary if you're looking for an insightful, comprehensive film about the Dutch painter's life, but if you want to gape and awe at some of his paintings in glorious high definition for 40 minutes, you've come to the right place. Like most of Image Entertainment's IMAX output, the picture quality of the 70mm transfer here is superb. Also, if there are any Blu-ray equipped art classrooms out there— Can I get a show of hands? Anyone?—I can see this IMAX release as a fun lesson for middle school-aged kids.