ABSTRACT
There are films about painters, films that feature paintings in the plot, and there are films about particular paintings. In the first category, the centenary has given us several van Gogh movies (directed by Paul Cox, Robert Altman, Maurice Pialat), and in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio we had the anti-myth to the myth of the creative genius tormented by his Art. In all of them, what remains, one way or another, is the “agony and the ecstasy,” whether embodied by Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth, or Nigel Terry.
