“I am my paintings,” says Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe in a career-best performance, in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, which follows the artist through his last turmoil(动荡骚乱) and astonishingly prolific years in the late 1880s in the south of France. Watching this film, you can believe it.
Schnabel is, of course, a famous artist as well as a powerful, if powerfully uneven, filmmaker, and what he captures here is what it must have been like to be Van Gogh. It’s an artist’s imagining of what another artist might have felt. He never does break away from the romantic, madness-of-genius cliché(陈词滥调) that has been with so many movies and comments about Van Gogh. Instead, he accepts it because he believes it proves the turmoil that goes into creating great art. Of course, turmoil can also create bad art, but such is Schnabel’s enthusiasm that I bought into the reality even though I think Van Gogh was a great artist despite rather than because of his mental pain.
I have a bit less sympathy for the ways in which the filmmakers got guess and frank mythmaking into the narrative. But the film comes to a great and sorrowing finish when we hear Vincent’s words, “I thought an artist has to teach a way to look at the rest of the world. Not anymore. Now I just think of my relationship with eternity.” One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh’s words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings.
【小题1】Who starred in At Eternity’s Gate?
| A．Vincent van Gogh. | B．Julian Schnabel. |
| C．Willem Dafoe. | D．Robert Gulaczyk. |
【小题2】What do we know about Julian Schnabel?
| A．He tries to break away from the traditional style. |
| B．He is as good an artist as a film maker. |
| C．His film is better than the previous ones. |
| D．He thinks turmoil creates bad art. |
【小题3】What can we know from the last paragraph?
| A．The film ends happily. |
| B．Van Gogh figured out his relationship with eternity. |
| C．What Van Gogh said has a major influence on us. |
| D．The film teaches us a way to look at the rest of the world. |
【小题4】From which is the text probably taken?
| A．An art textbook. | B．An art magazine. |
| C．A movie advertisement. | D．A research paper. |
