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

dramatization of the Sueño de la razón as a learning experience for the artist
himself, a process of overcoming the demons that oppress him. In both the drama
and the film, the full caption of the painting The Sleep of Reason Produces
Monsters thus applies to Goya himself as well as to his country. Likewise, both
Buero’s drama and Saura’s film emphasize the reality status of Goya’s dream
sequence through similar techniques of viewer identification. For example, both
use the so-called “immersion effects” that I have referred to above, by
reproducing only the sounds and noises of Goya’s mind and imagination while
eliminating all real external sounds and voices.
Moreover, both the drama and the film alternate between first and third
person perspective in their respective ekphrastic scenes. Saura’s film does so
especially through the camera techniques of changing the angle and the camera
distance, while Buero’s drama achieves this through the visual and verbal
quotations from the Pinturas negras and the Desastres: On the one hand, the
audience hears only the sounds and voices in Goya’s mind, many of which are
quotes from the Desastres (nothing of what the Royal Volunteers say is actually
heard by the audience!), thus experiencing the whole scene from Goya’s
perspective. On the other hand, the viewer is able to adopt a more distanced third-
person viewpoint through those very quotations, both the visual ones of the
Pinturas negras and the verbal ones of the Desastres, as they function as
indicators of Goya’s disharmony with himself and his work and thus allow the
audience to observe the artist’s process of enlightenment and self-knowledge.
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