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

portraits into conflict by exploiting film’s potential for visual identity
construction. Film is able to create mise-en-scenes reminiscent of self portraits,
which the viewer is expected to take as true images of the artist, thus drawing on a
tradition of pictorial illusionism hailed as art’s power and superiority over the
verbal arts. For example Leon Battista Alberti in his tract on painting (Della
Pittura, 1435) stated that “painting contains a divine force which not only makes
absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead
seem almost alive.” 199 Both the painter himself and the filmmaker, then, exploit
the status of realistic images as faithful, objective representations of a stable
identity, rather than subjective interpretations of a changing subject. However,
Korda’s film also goes further than the screenplay in underscoring the
fragmentary notion of artistic identity by using ekphrasis of two or even three self
portraits simultaneously. By merging the self portraits in the film’s ekphrases,
Korda acknowledges that no one image can faithfully render an identity, that
personal identity is not as stable as a pictorial representation. Moreover, in so
doing, the film also underscores its ability to go beyond pictorial illusionism by
creating portraits that not only seem as if they were alive, but that are actually
moving and speaking. The film thus does not participate in the traditional
paragone between verbal and visual arts by taking side with the visual, but on the
contrary, enters the competition by setting verbal and visual arts against each
other.
199 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. by John R Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1966) 63.
190