Lust for Life (1956)

William Phipps: Emile Bernard

Quotes 

• Emile Bernard : What doesn't make you sick, Paul, besides your own work?

  Paul Gauguin : Would you really like to know? That.

  [he points to a wall with a number of Japanese paintings] 

  Paul Gauguin : Look at that. The clarity, the calm. The Japanese paint as simply as we breathe.

• Emile Bernard : Everything you've been doing - what we've all been doing - obsolete, the whole lot of it. Guessing with every brush stroke, pouring rivers of paint into haphazard combinations, but actually everything we're after can be achieved mathamatically.

  Vincent Van Gogh : Oh what are you talking about, Seurat again? You really think a painting can be done by formula?

  Emile Bernard : Can be? Is being done, right here in Paris; through precise, scientific methods.

  [scene fades to Seurat's studio] 

  Seurat : [while working on his famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte]  I don't mix my colors on canvas. I mix them in the eye of the spectator. Once you accept the phenomenon of the duration of life and the human race...

  [interrupted by Van Gogh] 

  Vincent Van Gogh : Excuse me, but this is a summit exterior. Now why do you paint it indoors by gaslight? I mean how can you judge your colors?

  Seurat : Hahaha, by not.

  Emile Bernard : Haha, come on Seurat, put him out of his misery. I've tried, but he's still in vice.

  Seurat : Alright Bernard, come here Mr. Van Gogh.

  [Vincent approaches the painting up close] 

  Seurat : Everyrhing I do is worked out in advance, with mathematical accuracies through precise scientific methods. I know exactly what colors I'm going to use before I pick up my brushes, and my palette is methodically prepared in the order of the spectrum. As you see: blue, blue-violet, violet-red, red, red-orange, orange-yellow, yellow, yellow-green...

  [scene fades out]