At Eternity's Gate

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate (2018) is the painter-turned-director's portrait of Vincent van Gogh, premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where Willem Dafoe won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. Schnabel — himself a celebrated visual artist before he made Basquiat and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — approaches the over-told life of van Gogh not as biography but as an attempt to film the act of seeing itself. The France–UK–US co-production was co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and the editor Louise Kugelberg.

Dafoe, then in his early sixties, plays van Gogh through the artist's final years in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, with Rupert Friend as his brother Theo, Oscar Isaac as Gauguin and Mads Mikkelsen as a sceptical priest. Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme shoots much of the film handheld and from van Gogh's own point of view, the lower half of the frame sometimes blurred, the camera lurching through wheat fields and light. The effect is less a costume drama than a sensory immersion in a particular way of looking at the world.

Reviews praised Dafoe's wholly committed performance, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and Schnabel's refusal of conventional biopic shape divided critics in productive ways. The film stands as one of the more formally daring artist portraits of recent cinema, and a companion piece to the catalogue's other van Gogh works.