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

ends the nightmare sequence. However, the skeptical, ambivalent interpretation of
the poem and the drama possibly has its roots, as I have indicated in each case, in
the respective political climate (GDR, Francoism) out of which the works grew,
whereas Saura’s film was made in an era of relative artistic freedom.
Finally, all three texts allude to the self-reflexive aspect of Goya’s
aquatint, that is, its reference to the painter’s tools. But whereas Kunert’s poem
uses this reference to reaffirm the writer’s power over that of the painter while
simultaneously undermining that very power, Buero and Saura are more positive.
Buero’s dramatization of the Sueño de la razón is self-referential in that the
sequence functions like a meta-drama, a drama within the drama acted out within
the protagonist’s mind, and a drama about drama, demonstrating the power of this
dramatization to end Goya’s own sleep of reason. Like Kunert’s poem, Saura’s
filmic transformation of Goya’s aquatint ends with an explicit reference to the
painter’s tools and the activity of drawing, but it also includes a self-referential
gesture to the “hybrid nature of the cinematic medium” 153 and its ability to
translate the flat, silent, and static work of art into an embodied, speaking, and
moving picture.
More than poetry and drama, by animating and dramatizing the image,
film embodies it, giving it a shape as well as temporality, and transforming the
painting’s two-dimensionality into the three-dimensional. Moreover, the moving
camera can function as a self-referential device, since it stresses the existence of
the relationship between camera and subject or object, and calls attention to the
153 Brigitte Peucker, “Filmic Tableau Vivant: Vermeer, Intermediality, and the Real,” Rites of
Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP,
2003), 294-314, here 195.
123