Tim's
Vemeer
Film
Review
3/17/14
Robleh
Wais
This
is an excellent film. Made by the famous
skeptical duo of Penn and Teller, it delivers a new
perspective on how the Dutch 17th century painter, Johannes Vermeer
created his dazzling realistic oil paintings.
Teller directed the film, Penn Jillette plays
host and narrates. What interests me
about this film is the multiple metaphysical issues it embodies. Penn, as the well-known skeptic doesn't
directly address these issues as I will, but they are hinted at throughout the
film.
Before
we jump into the metaphysics let's review the film, its subject, Tim Jenison
and some elements of cinematic structure.
Tim Jenison is by his own description an inventor with a brilliant
career in video graphic design mainly through computer graphics for television
and movies. He has been creating what we
would call special effects for several decades.
The initial section of Tim's
Vemeer, sketches out his illustrious achievements in this area and his early
life story.It is succinctly narrated by
Penn. Thus we see right away, this film
will be a cross between documentary and narrative expository storytelling. Since the film is about Jenison's attempt to
replicate Vermeer's The Music Lesson
(TML), the film focuses on how he did it.
Here it seems to be a bit of promotional plugging for Jenison, but
that's excusable. Tim has a knack for creating just about anything he needs to
accomplish whatever he desires. That piece
of cinematic direction was a bit over the top.
The choppy scene cuts depicting him building the original setting for TML utilizing 4 or 5 different craftsman disciplines, in
which he claims to have no knowledge, well one begins to think Timmy is a technological
Superman, huh?But as I said this is a minor
distraction in the film.
What
is eye opening is what Jenison has discovered.
He realized that Vermeer must have used a technique called Camera Obscura,
CO, which is Latin for Dark Room,
along with a simple mirror, that reflects the CO image to be painted. A
little explanation is needed. CO is a box or room with a hole containing
a convex lens that lets light flow into its interior and is projected onto a
wall in the box or room reversed at a 180 angle. The light carries the image of an object
outside the device into the box, and the convex lens in the hole turns the
image upside down. The convex lens
preserves all the dimension of the original image. This is akin to what optical telescopes do
with the light from distant stars. Convex
lenses can sharpen or blur the images that pass through it depending on the
focal length. This length is the distance
from the object to the point that the light is focused and then reflected on
the surface. But, what Jenison used was
a concave lens that instead of focusing the light coming through it, it
actually refracts the light to an image in the mirror. A concave lens has a focal length that will
always create an image that is virtual
(i.e. the image in the mirror, not the real object) and upright regardless of
the focal length. This is what Jenison
did with his mirror. With this process
done the image in the CO can be
traced to create a highly accurate drawing of the original object outside the
device.
It's
like painting by numbers, remember that thing in 1960s? It's more complex than this sounds. Since the concave mirror will replicate what
is in the inverted image with a focal length from the source (concave lens
itself) every color, texture and nuance is brought into sharp focus. He just has to match those features: color,
texture, and detail. He just paints on
paper in the area of the mirror what he sees. Here is where the film stresses that Tim
Jenison is NO painter.He is just
following what he sees in the mirror down to the smallest detail.He is kind of painting-by-the-numbers like those sets you could buy back in the
1960s. If there was ever a film that
needed 3D projection this is one. I
wanted to see exactly how this man, looking into a mirror and following what he
sees in the mirror could paint on paper what he perceives. We watch as he recreates from a picture of
his father-in-law a likeness that is photographic. The effect of his first painting is
spell-binding.
And
now we can consider the metaphysics. Is
Tim Jenison a painter? The objection
that art critics and aficionados will raise is already clear to most of
us. An artist creates new images from
his mind, he doesn't copy or mechanically replicate what he sees with a sophisticated
method. An artist must have an afflatus,
a creative spirit if you will. Software
could do what Jenison did, right? I
disagree. Tim Jenison had
intentionality. He wanted to create a
replica of one of Vermeer's most applauded works. Yes he used an intricate methodology to do
it. Yet, at every step of the way, he was consciously striving to make this
work. A piece of software could have
done this with human help. But, would the
software have been able to correct errors based on knowledge of what it was
doing? Moreso, would a software program
have even able to recognized it was error?
It is clear that Jenison was not engaged in painting mechanically, but
creating a painting in the way that Vermeer did. In this sense Jenison, though he denied it,
IS a painter and an artist! Stated
another way, what Jenison did is indistinguishable from what Vermeer did and
thus both are artists. This is a
profound statement believe it or not.To
be an artist or in this case a painter you have to have the intentionality of
creating a work of art. But, then we
could make the charge that a smartly programmed computer could be an artist.
No, that isn't true. A computer would
create art from a pre-defined program without any intent.
The
next big metaphysical question is this: If Jenison meticulously recreates TML through a method, hasn't he really
just photographed it? Penn points out this
fact in the film. This too is true. If the painting created would replicate what
a camera by digital patterning would do, it is a photograph. A photographic painting to coin a
phrase. To illustrate the point let's
look at algebraic geometry. Say you have
a circle P that is defined by being at every point d a distance r from its
center O.This is the definition of a circle in algebra. Now take this circle and translate it by distance
L from its center point O.
Then recreate it. L with points d that differs by distance L
from the original points d and r is r
for circle P. Now isn't circle P identical to circle P
but just different by the distance L? It is indistinguishable from the original
circle P. This is just what Jenison did
with his copy of TML. The more intriguing question would be are they
the same thing? We won't dig that deep
however. It brings up of the philosophic
principle of the Law of Indiscernibles. A law the states that if two things can't be
determined to be different, they are the same thing.
It
was mesmerizing to watch Jenison create this work over of a period about 6
months. He consulted famous British
artists and worked on it in a grueling regularity that made me want to try
it. A film I expected to be bored by,
inspired me. Take the time to see it!
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