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

sequence begins as the camera pulls back from an extreme close-up of the black
and white stripes of the painter’s back, slowly revealing the entire scene. The
mise-en-scene mirrors Vermeer’s painting almost exactly, except that the model is
a woman from another Vermeer painting, The Girl with a Red Hat (ca. 1666-67)
who is here naked but still wearing her red hat. Throughout the zoom, several
snaps are heard and flashes seen as if the scene was being photographed, thus
further emphasizing the staging of the scene. Moreover, at the end of the zoom
out, the woman gets angry and moves out of her pose, throwing down the book
she held in front of her naked body, and thereby ending the tableau. The slow
camera zoom, the flashes, and the model’s movement that ends the scene “clearly
mark […] this tableau vivant sequence as cinematic” (Peucker, “Filmic Tableau”
300).
Dramatic ekphrasis
As can be seen from the above examples, interpretive ekphrasis is not only
more complex, but also often involves a higher degree of textual or filmic self-
reflexivity. Such examples of self-reflexivity are even more likely to occur in the
fourth category I propose, the dramatic ekphrasis. In this type of ekphrasis the
images are dramatized and theatricalized to the extent that they take on a life of
their own. Thus, this category is the most visual of all four, and has a high degree
of enargeia. In other words, texts and films have the ability to evoke or produce
the actual visual images alluded to in the minds of the readers or viewers while at
the same time animating and changing them, thereby producing further, perhaps
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