The common thread of many title in our this year’s Vincent van Gogh -series, the dialogue between the past and the future (meaning the present for the people who happen to live in it) appears perhaps at its most basic in this work by documentary filmmaker couple Christoph Hübner and Gabriele Voss, which is based on the famous letters (appearing in several other films in the series) by van Gogh to his brother, the arts dealer Theo. From the over 600 surviving letters (the replies do not survive) the filmmakers selected a little over twenty, all out of the artist’s lesser known or at least lesser mythologized earlier years from 1878 (when he worked as a missionary in the Belgian mining town of Borinage) to 1885 (when he left for Paris). Their simple and brilliant idea is to base the structure of their film entirely on these letters and travel with their camera – a little over a 100 years later – through the landscapes where van Gogh was dwelling while writing them. The letters on the soundtrack and the views on the camera create a historical double exposure that makes one wonder: to what extent do things ever really change? (HT Nuotio)
Language: German, subtitles: English