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

left and right). They are thus devices by which the viewers (painter, filmmaker, or
filmic audience) can distance themselves from the original art work and instead
contemplate its image. In Chevalier’s novel, Vermeer explains his reason for
using the camera obscura to Griet thus: “I use it to help me to see in a different
way – to see more of what is there” (Chevalier 60). Similarly, although filmic
ekphrasis does not reverse the image, it does put it in a new context and medium.
What the camera obscura does by reversing the image, film can do by animating
and enacting it. Furthermore, both the camera obscura and the film must be
projected in a dark room in order to bring out the image sharply. As Amos Vogel
has noted,
[t]he film experience requires total darkness; the viewer must not be
distracted from the bright rectangle from which huge shapes impinge on
him. Unlike the low-pressure television experience (during which the
viewer remains aware of room environment and other people, aided by
appropriately named ‘breaks’), the film experience is total, isolating,
hallucinatory. 217
Vermeer and Griet contemplating the image in the darkness under his robe
thus parallel the movie theater audience. In both cases, the viewers are isolated
from and unaware of the rest of the room, and exclusively focus on the image.
Likewise, the darkness of a movie theater as well as of this camera obscura
experience, instead of isolating unites the two, unites them like lovers in a movie
theater, protected by the intimacy of darkness. Moreover, this scene re-inscribes
the gender hierarchies when Vermeer looks at Griet looking at the image. Unlike
in the novel, then, Griet in the film is vulnerable and subject to the male gaze.
217 Amos Vogel, Film as Subversive Art (New York Random House, 1974) 9.
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