Loving Vincent: Backgrounds in Different Mediums

Loving Vincent presents us with a nuanced form of animation, producing full paintings of live-action footage in the style of the legend Vincent van Gogh. In doing this it blurs the line between two visual art forms that have very different temporal parameters. A painting has a single frame which can be viewed for eternity while a film has countless frames viewed for fractions of a second (in this case 12fps). Although this is fascinating for many reasons I want to focus on one of the changes I noticed the most; the change of the role of the background.

The majority of the film progresses through static shot-reverse-shot dialogue sequences in which you become hugely familiar with the painted faces, which somewhat lack the subtly expressive capabilities and variance (and therefore interest) of a photographed human face. Thus you turn your attention to the image as a whole, instead of merely focusing on the speaker. Through this the background of the image is explored, and due to replicating Van Gogh’s post-impressionist style these vary hugely to the realist backgrounds that usually surround characters. Furthermore we are begged to explore these backgrounds through the endless depth of field (again contrasting from common photographed-film-images), and thus the space that surrounds our characters becomes more interesting and more relevant that analysing the character’s face during dialogue. However this is exactly where the two forms (painting and film) conflict the most.

In a painting as you are given an endless time to survey its surface you can analyse both subject and surroundings freely, as they remain static. Whereas presenting painting in a 12-frames-per-second variant creates endless movement in both the foreground and background, meaning you must choose which you analyse as both will change never to return. This is true to live action also, but as we mentioned these backgrounds present a post-impressionist style far from the real that beg for deeper analysis to truly uncover their moods and meanings. Thus I found myself consistently favouring the background to faces throughout the film surveying the shifting brushstrokes which create a van Goghian world of impressionist shimmering lights. It fascinates me that the blending of the mediums nuanced both what I was seeing while altering how I was seeing it.

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6/13

~Leo