For many, Pialat’s finest moment was yet to come. Van Gogh (1991), an extraordinary biopic which successfully avoids both the tortured genius clichés and the costume drama frills, is really about an intense vision of life for which the painter himself is the medium. The canvases are on the screen, not in the studio, and life, like the farmer in Breughel’s Fall of Icarus, goes on oblivious to the genius’s suicide.

Maurice Pialat 1925-2003