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

are talked about in a familiar tone. However, these two different procedures
achieve the same goal: both emphasize the universal and familiar of the depicted
situations. Moreover, Goya’s etchings invite such a narrative treatment since most
of his titles already imply a narrative situation. Exploiting this underlying
narrativity, Cela invents his own “caprichos” parting from the characters or the
general moral of Goya’s, but concretizing and individualizing them.
While the above-cited examples of dramatic ekphrasis apply to literary
texts only, both texts and films can represent images in the form of an extended
montage of a tableau vivant. Dramatizing an image throughout a longer episode
or several shots, the text or film uses the image as a comment on the episode or
sequence while simultaneously reflecting on the pictorial image. In film, this is
can be done in a slow or rapid montage, moving camera, and shifts between wide
angle and close-ups or detail shots.
For example, Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)
animates and dramatizes Vermeer’s The Music Lesson (A Lady at the Virginals
with a Gentleman; c. 1662-65) by introducing movement and sound. The surgeon
and artist van Meegeren (incidentally also the name of a famous Vermeer forger
in the early to mid 20 th century) forces his patient Alba to play the piano
(virginal), thereby bringing the painting to life. The scene begins with a montage
of close-ups of Vermeer women that serves to “underscore van Meegeren’s
obsession with a characteristic yellow bodice worn by women in four of
Vermeer’s paintings” (Peucker, “Filmic” 299). The following recreation of
Vermeer’s painting differs in several important respects from the original. First,
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