The Art of a Non-Commonplace

Possibly the Van Gogh cliché, along with war, peace and love, feminism, financial crashes, Jesus —not meant to offend— and inexorable death, is one of the most commonplaces of the last century, to the point of nausea. Nevertheless, a remarkable pair of film directors took the impressionist painting style of the Dutch master and made a film beyond the story of the earless fellow, creating a deep and tumultuous movie: The Peasants (Chłopi in its original language), based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Władysław Reymont.

Why again a film? Well, this is not just any film. Every scene was first shot on camera and then painted by more than one hundred artists —I was not one of them, of course.

The film is composed of 40,000 paintings, using six paintings per second of footage. The painting process required 1,350 liters —300 gallons— of paint; that's almost a Guinness record, but who cares.

The anecdote alone would make it extraordinary, yet the film itself is a masterpiece, because it involved, in one way or another, nearly every artistic discipline. If you haven't seen it, you should know where my affirmation comes from.

My point is that not every visual masterpiece needs a white wall, a banana, and a piece of gaffer tape. Real work and genius require more than being a snake charmer or a shamanic charlatan.

Once in a while, all The Fine Arts dance holding hands in perfect and darkest harmony.

The Art of a Non-Commonplace