At Eternity's Gate (2018), is a biographic dram film directed by Julian Schnabel. The film is about the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh’s last periods of his life. Film has the mood of depression in general. The way in which the events in the film are transferred draws the audience into the world of Van Gogh. In the film we see the paintings of Van Gogh, which cannot be understood by his contemporaries, the events associated with it, and his turbulent moods. I will discuss the position of artistic production vis-à-vis producing symptoms and how Vincent Van Gogh’s artist life can be read through taking account of his misrecognition by the society.

Van Gogh lives with the money his brother who is an art dealer sent him because no one buy his paintings. During the film, people who see Van Gogh's paintings ask him why he's painting because they don't find pleasing the paintings he made. In one scene, Van Gogh says that he perceives the world as different from other people, and that he does his paintings so that people can see the world as he sees it. Hatt and Clonk (2006) argue about the Lacan’s mirror stage: A‘As an infant, the child has no real sense of its own boundaries, where its body ends and the rest of the world begins...Then, at some stage in its development ... the child sees itself in a mirror and sees a complete image. The child recognizes itself as more than a set of parts and sensations, but as a whole body, a whole being with a boundary separating it from other bodies. However, this is not as straightforward as it may appear, says Lacan, for this is in fact a misrecognition...the child is not a unified whole – not least because we are all split between the conscious and the unconscious In the film, Van Gogh says that when he was angry, he goes out because nature gets him calm. Van Gogh, who often depicts nature in his paintings, says in another scene: when I look at nature, I see more clearly the tie that unites us all. Perhaps he was unconsciously aware of this split and he was suffering. Considering what he said about nature, maybe nature was a place that destroyed this separation. This may be the reason that he loves nature so much and often depicts nature. His desire to reflect the effect of nature on himself in his paintings, is perhaps what made his paintings different from others.

I will discuss the artistic production of Van Gogh through the Freud’s theory ‘art as symptom’. Hatt and Clonk (2006) states that art is a form of sublimation... The artwork is born of the same tension between instinct and civilization, but performs a personal and social function, reconciling them. Indeed, Freud compares the artist to the neurotic, each producing symptoms of their psychic disturbance, each failing to repress fully the contents of their unconscious. But while the neurotic only produces a tic or obsession, the artist produces a work which express and resolves the internal battle. Van Gogh had some psychological problems. The first one is the collecting of the Arles's people, and the other with their own will; he was admitted to a mental hospital twice. In one scene, he talks about some things which are frightens him. When he paints, he doesn't feel them. In another scene, similarly he says that he has to paint and he paints to stop thinking. So, art resolves his mental problems. Yet he thinks that painting gift deplores on his discomfort, and sometimes he hates the idea of improvement. He is ready to live with his illness for his art which is drug for his pain. He says: when I paint, I stop thinking and I feel that I’m a part of everything outside and inside of me. Being part of something is much more than a compromise with that thing. Van Gogh’s art does not only reconcile him with his instincts and civilization; it makes him feel like he is part of everything.

I will talk about two similar scenes in the film. The first one is in the hospital room between Van Gogh and his brother. His brother came to visit Van Gogh, who was attacked. He became very emotional when he saw his brother and asked for it to lie down. He lay on breast of her brother, just like a baby in her mother's lap. He showed symptom of regression. Fenster (2010) pstates that a curious phenomenon resides in the treatment of regressed patients. In the unconscious, sometimes insistent, desire to be a baby, there is more an impulse towards death than one towards life. The second scene is between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Gauguin notified Van Gogh about his leaving. Van Gogh was stunned by this news, ran out by shouting. He also asked Gauguin not to leave. Van Gogh's ear cutting was also the result of this incident. This scene also can be explained with the regression. According to Fenster (2010), the problem as a severe split between two parts of the personality at odds with each other: a healthy, but largely silenced baby trying to grow and a traumatized baby who wants desperately to retreat inside the mother, and to harbor itself in this inside space forever. What interferes with the impulse towards growth is a belief that any change brings catastrophic separation and abandonment. Even simple separations for Van Gogh have produced devastating consequences. Regressed patients often have early trauma in their histories and do not easily accept the reality of an analytic relationship. Exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of separateness...” (Fenster, 2010) Van Gogh cuts off his ear and wants to send it to Gaugin, this situation shows the effect of seperation on Van Gogh.

I discussed Van Gogh’s artist life through the topics which are mirror image, art as symptom and regression. I also argued about the motivation of van Gogh's art and the effects of his art on himself. At Eternity's Gate movie has more scenes to explore. I tried to explore scenes that I chose according to Freud and Lacan’s theories.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fenster, S. (2010). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Regression and the angel of death. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91(3), 643-644.

Hatt, Michael, & Klonk, Charlotte, Art history: A critical introduction to its methods, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, Pgs. 174-187.