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

example, in the film Girl with a Pearl Earring, in which the depictive ekphrases
point to the unresolved gender tensions in Vermeer’s work
While these two categories can be called cerebral in their effect on the
audience, as they ask the audience to rethink their interpretation of the work of
art, the interpretive and dramatic categories can be considered affective, because
they seduce the audience to their point of view. In these two categories, ekphrasis
is more subtle and requires more audience participation. More than in the first two
categories, ekphrasis here depends primarily on its recognition by the audience
and thus on the audience’s familiarity with the works of art in question. However,
the filmic discourse in interpretive and dramatic ekphrasis appropriates the art
works to such a degree that it does not raise awareness of its status as ekphrasis,
that is, as cinematic discourse about art. On the contrary, the paintings in these
categories become part of the filmic discourse to such an extent that they become
players an plot elements, thereby losing their status as paintings, which they still
retain in the attributive or depictive category because they are treated there as
works of art. André Bazin has criticized this type of films in his essay “Painting
and Cinema” by claiming that the filmic frame is centrifugal while the picture
frame is centripetal. Thus, in Bazin’s words, “if we show a section of a painting
on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and limits and is
presented to imagination as without any boundaries. […] [T]he painting thus takes
on the spatial properties of cinema […]” (166). While paintings in the attributive
and depictive categories are not taken out of their frame, and thus retain their own
spatial properties, the interpretive and dramatic categories de-polarize the space of
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