Understanding the lyrics and Van Gogh's Life.

Starry, Starry Night Lyrics

Don McLean

Expressing Van Gogh's inspiration for the painting. However, one line says : "Look out on a summer's day." which is a false statement as Van Gogh was in an asylum at Saint-Remy, and was not able to paint picture from an actual view point, it is strictly from his mind.	Starry, starry night. Paint your palette blue and grey, Look out on a summer's day, With eyes that know the darkness in my soul. Shadows on the hills, Sketch the trees and the daffodils, Catch the breeze and the winter chills, In colors on the snowy linen land.
These are references to other Van Gogh paintings. Flaming Flowers: The Sunflower Series Swirling Clouds: Starry Night Field of Amber Grain: Wheat Field with Crows Weathered Faces: The Potato Eaters	Starry, starry night. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze, Swirling clouds in violet haze, Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue. Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain, Weathered faces lined in pain, Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.
This is Van Gogh's tragic Death. Even though he loved painting, his paintings could never love him back. Van Gogh attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest, which ultimately led to his death two days later.	For they could not love you, But still your love was true. And when no hope was left in sight On that starry, starry night, You took your life, as lovers often do. But I could have told you, Vincent, This world was never meant for one As beautiful as you.
Van Gogh's artistic legacy is contained within his paintings, drawings and writings. They are everlasting and will never "forget" the style that created them. They are Van Gogh's eyes that watch the world. This is all metaphorically speaking though.	Starry, starry night. Portraits hung in empty halls, Frameless head on nameless walls, With eyes that watch the world and can't forget. Like the strangers that you've met, The ragged men in the ragged clothes, The silver thorn of bloody rose, Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.
Finally we come to the conclusion of realizing Van Gogh's eternal struggle with insanity.	Now I think I know what you tried to say to me, How you suffered for your sanity, How you tried to set them free. They would not listen, they're not listening still. Perhaps they never will...

http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starrynightlyrics.html

THE SCREAM

The Scream

An agonized figure wails against a blood red Oslofjord skyline in Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893), National Gallery, Oslo.The Scream (Skrik, 1893) is a seminal expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Regarded by many as his most important work, it is said by some to symbolize modern man taken by an attack of existential angst. The landscape in the background is Oslofjord, viewed from the hill of Ekeberg. The Norwegian word skrik is usually translated as "scream", but is cognate with the English shriek. Occasionally, the painting has been called The Cry.

Munch executed four versions of the painting, of which the most famous are a tempera on cardboard version (measuring 83.5 x 66 cm) formerly in the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (shown below), and an oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (measuring 91 x 73.5 cm) in the National Gallery (shown to right), also in Oslo. A third version is also owned by the Munch Museum, and a fourth is owned by Petter Olsen. Munch later also translated the picture into a lithograph (shown below), so the image could be reproduced in reviews all over the world. However, one version is currently missing from the Munch Museum, having been stolen by art thieves in August 2004.

Sources of inspiration
Munch wrote, concerning the image:

"I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

This has led some commentators to propose that the person in the painting is not screaming, but reacting with despair to the scream passing through nature.

The scene is from a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. At the time of painting the work Munch's manic depressive sister Laura Cathrine was interned in the mental hospital at the foot of Ekeberg.

In 2003, astronomers claimed to have identified the time that the painting depicted. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 caused unusually intense sunsets throughout Europe in the winter of 1883-4, which Munch captured in his picture.

In 1978, the renowned Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was probably inspired by a Peruvian mummy which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This mummy, which was crouching in fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Munch's friend Paul Gauguin: it stood model for the central figure in his painting Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles) and for the old woman at the left in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. More recently, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting.

Role in popular culture

Robert Fishbone's inflatable ScreamIn the late 20th century, The Scream acquired iconic status in popular culture. In 1983-1984, pop artist Andy Warhol made a series of silk prints of works by Munch, including The Scream. The idea was to desacralize the painting by devaluating its originality and making it into a mass-reproducible object. However, as remarked above, Munch had already begun that process himself, by making a lithograph of the work for reproduction.

Characteristic of post-modern art is Erró's ironic and irreverent treatment of Munch's masterpiece in his acrylic paintings The Second Scream (1967) and Ding Dong (1979).

Munch translated The Scream into lithograph in 1895 so that it could be reproduced all over the world.The work's reproduction on all kinds of items, from tee shirts to coffee mugs, bears witness to its iconic status as well as to its complete desacralization in the eyes of today's public. In that respect, it is comparable to other iconic works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The Scream is an emotionally very potent work, and the banalization of the image in popular culture can be interpreted as an attempt to defuse the feeling of unease it inevitabily provokes in the viewer, though some would say that this interpretation is overcomplication, and that the makers of merchandise are simply trying to make money off a well known image.

An American muralist, Robert Fishbone, discovered a gap in the market when in 1991 he started selling inflatable dolls of the central figure in the painting. His St. Louis-based company, On The Wall Productions, has sold hundreds of thousands of them. Critics have observed that by taking the figure out of its context (the landscape), Fishbone has destroyed the unity of Munch's work, thereby neutralizing its expressive force.

As one of very few works of modern art that are instantly recognizable even to people who know very little about art, The Scream has been used in advertising, in cartoons and on television. In one of her talk shows, Dame Edna Everage appeared in a Scream-patterned dress. The work has also fascinated film makers. Ghostface, the psychotic murderer in Wes Craven's Scream horror movies, wears a Halloween mask inspired by the central figure in the painting. Child actor Macaulay Culkin's pose in front of the mirror, in Home Alone by Chris Columbus, also refers ironically to Munch's work.

AVATAR

Avatar (2009)

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman | Dec 30, 2009

Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

Details Release Date: Dec 18, 2009; Rated: PG-13; Length: 162 Minutes; Genres: Animation, Sci-fi; With: Sam Worthington

SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMEONE BLUE
Zoë Saldana plays a Na'vi warrior princess in Avatar

Twelve years ago, with the haunting and magnificent soap-opera disaster movie Titanic, James Cameron proved not just that he was king of the world of big-spectacle filmmakers, but that he was a popular artist for the ages. Bowling the audience over with effects-driven awe was only half the story; what Titanic demonstrated is that in a truly great film, your heart will go on the journey as well. In Avatar, his 3-D alien-jungle virtual-reality action-adventure epic, Cameron has the effects-driven visual awe part down, but this time he gives the heart short shrift. The result is less a movie for the ages than a quintessential movie of its time: dazzling and immersive, a ravishing techno-dream for the senses, but one that's likely to leave audiences simultaneously amazed and unmoved. Then again, for a great many moviegoers these days, that may be enough.

As every fantasy geek in the universe knows by now, Avatar is set on Pandora, a human colony outpost light-years from Earth. There, a consortium of corporate and military forces are attempting to mine a rare mineral in order to solve a devastating energy crisis. To achieve its ends, the consortium seeks to gain the cooperation of Pandora's native population, the Na'vi, a tribe of tall, proud blue-skinned forest dwellers as lithe as gazelles. To win their trust, the humans have created the Avatar Program, in which a human ''driver'' climbs into what looks like a sensory-deprivation tank and has his or her consciousness fused with that of an avatar, a genetically engineered Na'vi specimen created from a mixture of human and Na'vi DNA.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a Marine hero who has lost the use of his legs, is recruited to be the latest avatar pilgrim. Rejuvenated as a handsome Na'vi with long braided ponytail, the giant yellow eyes of a mountain lion, and a zebra-striped torso so long and lean and chiseled he looks like Michelangelo's David after a marathon abs workout, Jake is exhilarated by his new state. (He can walk again! Not to mention run and leap with super-human agility.) And maybe that's why the Na'vi, led by Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), the tribal leader's daughter who rescues him in the forest, take a liking to Jake, adopting him as an apprentice warrior.

As Jake learns to shoot bows and arrows, to tame and fly creatures that resemble psychedelic griffins, and to fend off the scary beasties of the forest — they include a snarling mega-dog and one that's like a giant beetle crossed with a stegosaurus — Cameron hits his stride as a filmmaker of transporting and visionary fairy-tale-spectacle flair. Pandora itself is a grand and tactile forest landscape, a fusion of the ancient and the new, with monstrous looming flora, branches and giant vines twisted into perilous walkways, and mountains that float in the air, all of it lit by a kind of primeval-purplish, nearly underwater glow. At times, Pandora looks like what I imagined years ago when I read The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson's version, at least to my eyes, is a more earthbound, less otherworldly place than J.R.R. Tolkien described). The originality of this jungle is that it seems vertiginously suspended, with sky above and chasms below. The best way to describe Cameron's use of 3-D is that there's hardly a shot in the movie that invites you to notice it. There's no jutting gimmickry, no spears in the audience's faces. Rather, the whole world is heightened, popping, bolder than life. Then again, that's what great fantasy films, from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars, have always achieved. I’m not sure if the 3-D of Avatar is really much more than a gilded-lily enhancement.

It's the story, and the characters, that could have used another dimension or two. At first, the Na'vi, including Jake, impress us with their fluid, prancing movements and the individuality of their facial features. (When Sigourney Weaver, as Jake's feistiest overseer, shows up in avatar form, she looks mischievously like Sigourney Weaver.) But the more the movie goes on, the less expressive those faces come to seem, because there's no subtext to them. Something about that blue skin is too smoothly virtual, with too much of a robotic digital sheen. The faces lack idiosyncrasy, and after a while it's hard not to notice that that's what the characters are lacking too. Worthington, both as the ''real'' Jake and his avatar, is eager, bright-eyed, and wholesomely defiant, and Zoë Saldana's warrior princess Neytiri is...well, eager, bright-eyed, and wholesomely defiant, and also sexy in an idealized anime way.

The movie, which sprawls on for two and a half hours, comes down to this: Jake trains to be a warrior; his commanders move in to mine the jungle, even if that means destroying the splendid Na'vi habitat; and Jake, having formed an alliance with his newly adopted tribe, goes native and helps to lead them in a war against the ruthless corporate invaders. There are obvious layers of allegory. The Pandora woods is a lot like the Amazon rainforest (the movie stops in its tracks for a heavy ecological speech or two), and the attempt to get the Na'vi to ''cooperate'' carries overtones of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except that in Avatar, it's never completely clear what the consortium, led by a vicious military roughneck (Stephen Lang), hopes to gain through its diplomatic Avatar Program. It looks as if they were just planning to bulldoze the land anyway, and so Jake's infiltration of the Na'vi is really an enormous red herring.

Cameron is such a skilled nuts-and-bolts filmmaker that the story he tells is never less than serviceable; it has none of the nattering clutter of one of the latter-day Star Wars films. But it's never more than serviceable either. What it's in the service of is the creation of a relentless ''Oh, wow!'' acid-trip videogame joyride. The climactic battle sequence in Avatar is a stupendously orchestrated clash of color and movement, of machine-gun droids and Na'vi warriors flying their primitive griffin steeds down canyon walls. The sequence imprints itself onto your mind's eye. As spectacle, Avatar is indelible — a true rush — but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.