Ebert Fest 2013: Day 2: To Music and Vincent

Day 2 was busy. Four films on the docket, one of which (Bernie) was one of my favorite films of last year. Definitely in my Top 5. I was thrilled to get a chance to see it on the big screen in a packed movie house. I have written before about my feelings about Jack Black as an actor, and I wrote that piece before his masterful turn in Bernie. He can do anything. He is one of my favorite actors working today. If he had been coming up in the 1970s, he would have had a couple of Oscar noms by now. But c’est la vie. At least he is here with us now, at least he continues to do what he wants to do: his instincts do not lead him astray. And Tenacious D’s new album is awesome, and the song “Low Hanging Fruit” has become an instant favorite of mine. He’s phenomenal.

I was also thrilled that I was finally going to get a chance to see Patrick Wang’s film In the Family. It was released in 2011, initially, but barely. It played at festivals, and it is rare to find a bad review of it. In fact, the reviews really re-define what a “positive review” means. I mean, people were referring to it as a “masterpiece”. It was out in New York briefly, and then disappeared. Then I read Marilyn Ferdinand’s review, and thought again: I MUST see this film, like, NOW, and Marilyn informed me in the comments that it would be having another brief run in New York. Hooray! Unfortunately, its short second run coincided with Hurricane Sandy and its catastrophic aftermath, where going into Manhattan was pretty much out of the question for a good 8 days. So I missed it again. But here it was, at Ebert Fest. I was very excited.

Tamás Vásáry, Roger Glanville-Hicks, Henriett Tunyogi, Paul Cox, “To Music”

But first up, was a short film called To Music, which led perfectly into the first feature of the day, Paul Cox’s 1987 film Vincent. I love the story behind the filming of To Music almost as much as I loved the film itself (and it was wonderful). Sophie Kohn and Feike Santbergen are the co-directors, two young filmmakers, who saw an opportunity and grabbed it. In the QA following the film, Sophie Kohn (daughter of Nate Kohn, Ebert Fest festival director), who has known Paul Cox all her life, described him as her “crazy uncle”. Paul Cox, in his introduction to To Music in the Festival program (he also appears in the film as a priest), writes:

We were in the South of France with Sophie Kohn and Feike Santbergen. Both are keen filmmakers. They came for a little holiday after the madness of the Cannes Film Festival. When they heard that maestro Tamás Vásáry, a world-renowned pianist, and his dancer wife Henriett Tunyogi were coming for the weekend, they could not sit idle any longer. “Talent must not be wasted,” a film must be made! A camera and lights came from Holland, a tripod from nearby Avignon and a dolly was constructed out of pipes, nuts and bolts, bought in a township nearby. Feike and Sophie frantically started to write their screenplay.

How marvelous. Both Sophie and Feike describe the experience as entirely spontaneous, a burst of creativity and madness, based on the fact that these extraordinary people were all in the same beautiful house at the same time. The screenplay they came up with is gorgeous, about the healing power of music. A woman (Henriett Tunyogi) takes care of an elderly man. A priest (Paul Cox) visits. A drunk man (Roger Glanville-Hicks) huddles in the attic. Isolated from one another, it is when a man (Tamás Vásáry) visits the woman, and sits down to play at the piano (Franz Schubert’s “To Music”) that connection is possible. The drunk man emerges from the attic and joins in with the piano player on the lute (Glanville-Hicks is a maestro on the lute). And the woman is seen in the final shots of the film, dancing by herself outdoors, with a beautiful deep sunset filling the sky behind her. Simple, funny at times, gorgeously shot, and clear in its motives and its passion, To Music was a profound contemplative piece on the power of music, and what music can provide. Very moving.

Sophie Kohn

Nate Kohn, David Poland, Feike Santbergen, Sophie Kohn

Following To Music was Paul Cox’s Vincent, a documentary (although not a traditional one) about Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh, of course, wrote hundreds of letters to his brother Theo, letters that are rightly famous. They certainly act as a corrective to the common image of Vincent van Gogh as some weird madman who would cut off his own ear, etc. etc. This was a deeply thoughtful man, obsessed with things like the color yellow, and colors in general, who wanted his paintings to be more than portraits. He wanted the paintings to say to the world and to future generations: This artist felt things deeply. He wanted to help us to see.

Roger Ebert loved the film (one of the Ebert Fests was dedicated to Paul Cox, as this past one was dedicated to Haskell Wexler), and wrote in his review:

What Paul Cox has done in “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh” – the best film about a painter I have ever seen – is to take his camera to some of the places Van Gogh painted and to re-create some of the others in his imagination. This is not, however, one of those idiotic “art appreciation” films in which we see the windmill and then we see the painting of the windmill; Cox knows too much about art to be that simplistic. Instead, he adopts the role of a disciple of the painter, a man who wants to stand in the same places and see the same things as a simple act of love toward Van Gogh’s work.

When Chaz introduced the film, she said that Vincent van Gogh’s letters had deep meaning for Roger Ebert, and that there were times when she would watch the film, listening to John Hurt’s voiceover (which is all taken from van Gogh’s letters to Theo), and she said that she felt like Roger was speaking to her. There are the same concerns with integrity and honesty in art, the same wish that people could be kind to one another, could try and see one another. Cox’s film is a meditation on the art of van Gogh. Paul Cox travels to the places van Gogh went, and scans the landscape. There are repeated shots of birds taking flight over the fields and trees. As van Gogh describes the richness of the soil between the trees in the forest, Cox films such a soil. We see the paintings, too, but often in gigantic closeup. We can see the glops of paint left by van Gogh’s brush, we see the details of the sunflowers, before drawing back to see the painting in its entirety. John Hurt’s voiceover is emotional and passionate, bringing those extraordinary letters to stark life. The letters are often quite funny, and sometimes tragically sad, but the majority of them are a workman’s letters. Van Gogh talks about his struggles to capture a certain kind of light, a certain shade of blue, he discusses the things he wants to do, he wants to capture the deep silver of the olive trees, and wonders if he can pull it off. He wants to capture peasant life. Miners, and potato farmers, and washing women. Cox utilizes re-enactments (a big no-no in the documentary world – well, unless you’re watching the Investigation Discovery channel), and in some cases the people in the re-enactments end up taking their places in what will eventually be Van Gogh’s painting of them.

Inclusion of Ebert’s favorite films (not necessarily current ones) is what makes Ebert Fest a true festival. Other festivals act as promotional opportunities and advertising opportunities for hot new films, but to show a contemplative film on Vincent van Gogh just because Ebert loved it is what makes this festival unique.

Also! To see the film not in a tiny arthouse with a small audience but in a 1,500-seat magnificent theatre, with not one empty seat, was quite an experience. That was true across the board. I had some pretty profound moments during the festival when I would suddenly, for a second, stop paying attention to the film, and become aware of my surroundings, the enormous theatre, the quiet massive crowd, sitting in the darkness. I was moved to tears, at times, by the sense all around me, of people, listening, thinking, watching, feeling.

Next up? In the Family and Bernie.