Further on the film The Eyes of Van Gogh.

This is from Alexander Barnett's NOTES. He is the screenwriter and director of the film.

"Many people today who adulate Vincent make him into a Christ-like martyr. He was neither and would have detested the notion. He is depicted as the ultimate "communal" artist. This is nonsense. He was in fact the ultimate "individualist" who was never able to work well with others, or to be bound by any sort of cooperative rules.

His desire to work with others came from loneliness more than anything else. Another myth is that he sacrificed his life (again, the martyr syndrome) for humanity. No. He gave his life to his work. He did indeed have an obsessive desire to educate and inspire people. But he strove to do so through his work, which superseded everything else.

The most significant and revelatory things about van Gogh are not that he cut off his earlobe or that he suffered attacks of madness or that he committed suicide, but rather that he lived life to the fullest, realized his artistic potential as much as humanly possible, fought magnificently against the attacks and all forms of adversity, never willingly giving in to them.

Most important, he created a superb body of work that will live as long as the human race survives. The theme of his life, and the theme of my film The Eyes of Van Gogh, is Vincent's quest to achieve immortality through his work."

There is a new review for the film The Eyes of Van Gogh

There is a new review for the film The Eyes of Van Gogh at FlickFilosopher.com: The Eyes of Van Gogh (review)

Here it is for those who don't want to follow the link.

Countless filmmakers are making a go of it without the involvement in any way of the corporate studios: not for financing, not for production, not for distribution. Here’s one of those superindie films.

Few ultra-low-budget films take on such an ambitious story, or tell it in such an ambitious way: writer-director-star Alexander Barnett dares to try to get into the head of painter Vincent Van Gogh during the year he voluntary spent in an insane asylum... dares to get inside his head and stay there.

The artist’s madness -- if it is madness, and not merely a revolt against narrow societal norms -- expresses itself through dreams and hallucinations that expose his deepest fears and insecurities, the results of maltreatment as a child and failures as a lover and as a man unable even to support himself, and the result is so surrealistic that it challenges the conventions of filmic storytelling we’ve been trained to accept as inescapable givens by Hollywood movies.

This isn’t an easy film to watch -- a little bit of tightening in the pacing and editing probably wouldn’t go amiss -- but it’s wonderful to see independent filmmakers taking tough risks and mostly succeeding. [buy from the official site/buy at Amazon

A new film about Vincent van Gogh

I would like to alert everyone to an incredible film I saw called The Eyes of Van Gogh directed by Alexander Barnett. You can find details at http://www.theeyesofvangogh.com or look for the title at http://www.IMDb.com, which is a film database. Please let me know what you think of the scene where the people of Arles surround the Yellow House to terrorize him.

South Carolina Makes a Mockery of Informed Consent

Monday, March 26, 2007

There is nothing that impacts an individual's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more than the question of childbearing. To my mind, that protects a woman's right to choose as protected by the Constitution. Here, Sigrid Fry-Revere of the Cato Institute's Cato@Liberty blog pens a perfect argument.South Carolina Makes a Mockery of Informed Consent


Yesterday the South Carolina House passed a bill mandating that women seeking abortions sign a sworn statement that they have seen an ultrasound of their fetus before having the abortion.

Rep. Greg Delleney, the sponsor of the bill and a Republican from Chester, said “I’m just trying to save lives and protect people from regret and inform women with the most accurate non-judgmental information that can be provided.” This is an amendment to the existing South Carolina informed consent law that requires doctors to give women information about fetal development and alternatives to abortion.


Informed consent is probably the most important principle of modern medicine. Its purpose is to enable autonomous decision making. The South Carolina ultrasound law does everything but empower the patient. Offering a woman the option of an ultrasound as part of the informed consent process or doing one that is medically necessary is understandable, but forcing her to watch one as a prerequisite to having an abortion is an abuse of the informed consent process. The scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex’s eyes are forcefully held open as he is shown images intended to recondition his social behavior comes to mind.


I believe abortion is morally wrong, but I also believe that the law correctly recognized in the conflict between mother and fetus, that a woman’s rights take precedence over those of her fetus. A human being’s rights under the law increase with maturity. That has been the tradition under Anglo-American law as well as world wide for most of history. To suggest that a fetus has the same rights as a mature adult individual borders on the perverse. In balancing the rights of fetuses with those of their mothers, women’s rights must always take priority otherwise the law is treating women as second to the fetuses they are carrying – that is, treating women first and foremost as communally owned vessels for bringing forth life and only second as autonomous individuals.


For those, like myself, who believe abortion is fraught with moral difficulties, the correct course of action is to teach, communicate, and discuss with our daughters, our female neighbors and our friends. We must help them come to the right conclusion based on good clear reasoning and the strength of our convictions. To force someone to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth unwillingly is not far from slavery, no matter what the rationale. Pregnancy and birth are the most dangerous things most women will ever do in their lives. Not to give them the choice to escape those dangers, let alone plan their lives, is to treat them with the greatest disrespect.


There is no question that decisions about abortion are horrendously difficult, but just because a decision is difficult doesn’t mean women aren’t fit to make them, or as is required by the South Carolina law, that women must be forced “for their own good” or “for the good of their fetuses” to undergo an unnecessary procedure and view images, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, that they don’t wish to see. Life is fraught with difficult decisions, many of them involving life and death. Men make decisions about how to protect their families and their way of life – unfortunately sometimes those decisions involve going to war and killing innocents. Women, like men, make decisions about what is best for their families and their way of life — unfortunately sometimes such decisions involve abortions.


What a perversion of the concept of informed consent, let alone an unconscionable intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, to impose a medically unnecessary procedure on women seeking abortions. Fetuses are potential children, not full grown adults, and women are full grown adults, not children. It is time we start treating each with the respect and dignity they deserve.


posted by Sigrid Fry-Revere on 03.22.07 @ 3:54 pm

Posted by Rebellion at 12:50 PM 1 comments