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

I have discussed examples of dramatic ekphrasis that apply to literary texts
only, and others that apply to texts as well as films. A third example refers to a
predominantly visual kind of dramatic ekphrasis in films and drama, which can
use a montage of actual images to reflect on the text, scene or dialog, so that the
images take the place of verbal commentary. In film, the montage can be both fast
and slow, and use the images in their entirety or in close-ups.
For example, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou uses a rapid montage of
Picasso paintings to stand in for a torture scene of which the viewer only hears
Ferdinand’s screams and the gangster’s questions. The sequence begins as
Ferdinand enters the gangster’s apartment. On the wall on his left, one of the two
Picasso posters that hang there is visible, Jacqueline aux fleurs (1958) A little
later, as the torture starts, Pierrot is shown between the two Picasso portraits,
Jacqueline aux fleurs on the right and Portrait de Sylvette (1954) on the left. In
the same position, the female protagonist Marianne had stood previously with a
pair of scissors, enlarged with the help of an extreme close-up, which she moved
across the screen as if slicing the two images in half, thus foreshadowing the
violence and agony these images will come to signify.
During the torture, we see Jacqueline first in a close up, then upside-down
in a close-up, followed by a close-up of the Portrait de Sylvette. This montage
uses the images as pictorial signs for agony, 81 yet, there is a curious discrepancy
between the images’ subjects (portraits of young women) and the agony of torture
they are used to signify. As Leutrat has stressed, the close-ups focus on only the
81 Joachim Paech, “Ein-BILD-ungen von Kunst im Spielfilm,” Kunst und Künstler im Film, eds.
Helmut Korte, and Johannes Zahlten (Hameln: Verlag C.W. Niemeyer, 1990) 48.
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