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

scène is constituted by the above-mentioned filmic irony of using this traditional
image of vanity as site of verbal renunciation of worldly vanities. Thus, by
translating the self portrait into language through the Solomon quote while at the
same time visually representing Rembrandt’s mirror image which questions and
subverts the verbal statement, Korda’s film re-enacts the competition and
antagonism inherent in traditional ekphrasis within its own cinematic medium. In
short, Korda’s film on the one hand uses ekphrasis to demystify the function of art
to create and possibly falsify life, but on the other, he uses visual language to
expose the traditional hierarchy of word over image in ekphrasis, thus setting
verbal and visual language against each other.
CONCLUSION
The screenplay and the film’s treatment of Rembrandt’s self portraits
foreshadow later art historical interpretations of them as deliberate means of
public identity construction at a time when more traditional interpretations of self
portraits as medium of self knowledge and self exploration were predominant. But
the use of ekphrasis in Zuckmayer and Korda exposes not only Rembrandt’s own
creation of his public identity, but also the writer’s and filmmaker’s tools for
creating their own “Rembrandt.” Moreover, Korda takes up and intensifies the
cues from Zuckmayer’s screenplay with regard to the ability of art to reinterpret
life and to construct and redesign the artist’s identity through images. Film has the
unique means of bringing the historical artist, his self portraits, the “self portrait”
created in the film, as well as the art historical interpretations of the real self
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