Lust for Life (film) in the US and Canada and $1,100,000 elsewhere resulting in a loss of $2,072,000. MGM produced a short film "Van Gogh: Darkness Into Light", narrated by Dore Schary and showing the European locations used for the filming, to promote "Lust for Life". In the film, a 75-year-old woman from Auvers-sur-Oise (not Jeanne Calment, who lived in Arles several hundred kilometers to the south), who claims to have known Van Gogh when she was a young girl, meets star Kirk Douglas, and comments on how much he looks like the painter. This short promotional film is shown on Turner Classic Movies
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh more about his techniques, his use of color, and his theories. Van Gogh was an avid reader, and his letters reflect his literary pursuits as well as a uniquely authentic literary style. His writing style in the letters reflects the literature he read and valued: Balzac, historians such as Michelet, and naturalists such as Zola, Voltaire and Flaubert. Additionally he read novels written by George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Keats' poetry, reading mostly at night when the light was too poor for painting. Gauguin told him "that he read too much". Van Gogh scholar Jan Hulsker wrote of van