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

point of view. Yet, during the same scene, Goya’s perception is mirrored when
the audience hears Agustin’s voice as muffled as Goya in his sudden attack of
deafness and with his hands over his ears.
The montages in the second and third ekphrastic scenes (the dramatic
ekphrases) also waver between viewer proximity and distance to the protagonist.
In the second scene, when Goya’s room is invaded by strange creatures from
several of his paintings which surround him as he lies on the floor, the camera is
at times above Goya in a wide-angle frame, but also shows frequent close-ups of
the beasts from the low angle position of the supine Goya. Adopting the
protagonist’s perspective, the camera shows these figures from a stable point of
view, passing into and out of the artist’s range of vision in apparently circular
motion around him, becoming blurrier as they leave his field of perception.
Toward the end, the montage becomes faster and includes other visions of the
hallucinating Goya, such as a brief shot of the life model for the Naked Maja,
Cayetana, and a quick montage of further blurry visions of her and unidentifiable
forms and shapes. The camera thus invites the viewer to see and experience the
end of the scene from Goya’s perspective.
Likewise, during the Inquisition interview sequence, the montage
establishes both distance and viewer proximity to Goya. It begins and ends with
an external perspective when the viewer watches Goya from an external
observer’s standpoint, which at the very end is a wide-angle distance shot. But in
between, the quick-changing images of demons and witches and the fast, nervous
handclapping, make the viewer experience Goya’s nervousness and dizzying
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