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

etween social classes and as the collision between male and female gazes
anchored in their different social identities.
Similarly, as the change of the title suggests, Brent Shield’s film Brush
with Fate (2003) emphasizes the “fateful” identity of the painting and its socio-
political dimension by changing the chronology of the scenes and by providing a
frame narrative. 206 Thus, the Nazi father of the present owner Cornelia, rather
than she herself, becomes the author of the main ekphrastic description of the
painting. Moreover, the frame story sets Richard’s male voice of reason (Thomas
Gibson) against Cornelia’s female emotionality (played by Glenn Close). In short,
in both films, the women’s role is changed from seeing subject to objects of the
male gaze and logos, thereby also reducing or questioning their ekphrastic
agency. 207
In these novels and films, then, ekphrasis is tied, in very different ways, to
issues of gender and class. Whereas in the two novels, interpretive ekphrases by
the female protagonists predominate, the majority of the ekphrases in the films are
depictive and from a male perspective. By changing the type and perspective of
ekphrasis, the filmmakers revert back to the male-oriented tradition of ekphrasis
which the female authors have successfully sought to challenge and correct in
their novels. However, both the novels and the films are in fact focusing on and
206 Brush with Fate, dir. Brent Shields, perf. Glenn Close, Thomas Gibson, and Ellen Burstyn,
DVD, Hallmark Hall of Fame, 2003.
207 Feminist film critics such as Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane have shown how film has
denied the female spectator the ability to identify with the screen image as it “has historically
articulated its stories through a conflation of its central axis of seeing/being seen with the
opposition male/female.” See Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,
Psychoanalysis. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 165. See also Laura Mulvey, Visual
and Other Pleasures (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1989).
195