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

transmedializes them in ways more appropriate for the cinematic medium.
Likewise, the presentation of Rembrandt as public speaker can be seen as a
transformation of an important aspect of Rembrandt’s works, many of which
depict moments of speech or dialogue. And this interpretation of Rembrandt as
painter of speaking, of language, is in fact a feature common to the film and the
play.
In short, Zuckmayer’s screenplay and Korda’s film can be considered as
two early, creative, criticisms of Rembrandt’s social identity. By analyzing the
transmedialization of the self-portraits into the text and the film, I will show how
Zuckmayer and Korda expose Rembrandt’s public identity construction and
reveal the gaps between painted image and historical or personal identity. Both
the writer and the filmmaker use ekphrasis to emphasize their independence from
the visual artist and to highlight their own construction of “Rembrandt” (in the
sense of Mieke Bal) by creating verbal and visual self portraits of the artist, which
are reminiscent of, but depart from Rembrandt’s own. 184 By deliberately using the
self portraits to shape and create their own portrait of “Rembrandt,” Zuckmayer
and Korda participate in the mythmaking of and around the artist, while at the
same time using interpretive ekphrasis to expose that mythmaking and to reveal
both his and their own tools for creating and shaping Rembrandt’s public identity.
But while both the text and the film thus compete with the artist’s visual crafting
of his public identity, the film, unlike the text, is also able to comment on that
184 Modifying Mieke Bal’s usage of quotation marks around Rembrandt’s name, I will use
“Rembrandt” in quotation marks if I refer to Zuckamayer and Korda’s cinematic and textual
reconstruction of him, but without quotation marks if I refer to the historical figure Rembrandt.
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