Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

works and have accused film of not being true to the painting, of fragmenting it. 1
As I will show in this chapter as I outline the historical evolution of ekphrasis and
current research on film-painting relationships, similar issues are at play in the
relationships between literary texts and paintings, and films and paintings, but this
connection has so far not been explored. This dissertation investigates that
missing dimension.
Whereas heretofore theorists have used ekphrasis to talk about the visual
arts in poetry and prose, they have not identified the relationship between film and
painting, or the triad of painting, novel and film, as similarly informed by an
“ekphrastic ambition” 2 and the ways in which the resultant sender/receiver
relationships reshape the reader or viewer perceptions of the artworks depicted.
These relationships alter the social power and impact of the depicted art for the
reader or viewer. In the chapters that follow I compare the verbal and visual
characteristics of film and literary genres that depict art. By applying my
expanded definition of ekphrasis as an interpretive tool, I demonstrate how
different genres in either modality influence the way the reader or viewer
reconstructs the implications of a work of art. In my conclusion I will suggest
why, in the age of information and media influence, it becomes increasingly
important to think beyond the traditional boundaries between visual and verbal
1 André Bazin takes up this criticism and argues against it in his “Painting and Cinema,” What is
Cinema? Trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1967), esp. 164-6.
2 Murray Krieger uses this term to describe the desire of the literary arts to “overcome the
arbitrariness of the verbal sign by aping the natural sign of the visual arts.” Ekphrasis: The Illusion
of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 14.
2