Animating Vision: Visual Adaptation in Girl with a Pearl Earring

Representing fictional events in and around Johannes Vermeer's studio, the 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring, directed by Peter Webber, demonstrates the capacities of cinema for fusing temporal narrative with spatial representation. An adaptation of a popular novel of the same title, the film adapts both narrative's devices of structuring meaning and painting's devices of visual representation. In the film, genre painting's tendency to depict pictures-within-pictures receives special currency enabled by the plot's focus on the production of pictures.¹ The film's penultimate scene demonstrates the intersection of narrative and visual representation in a way that underscores film's debt to its mother arts. Yet the act of cinematic adaptation also uncovers the potentials that lie dormant in representational painting and reveals the latter as an anticipation of the cinema.

The scene takes place after the plot's dramatic events have reached their end. Griet, the adolescent daughter of a Delft tile painter who lost his eyesight, and thus his livelihood, in an accident, is taken up as a maid in Vermeer's busy household. Navigating between the demanding supervision of the family cook, the animosity of Vermeer's wife, Catharina Bolnes, and the inexplicable viciousness of their daughter, Cornelia, Griet gains Vermeer's silent favor as she witnesses and even assists in the slow production of some of his famous paintings. Griet's position shifts again from clandestine assistant to model when Vermeer's lascivious patron, Pieter van Ruijven, takes a special interest in her and demands that she sit with him for Vermeer's next commission. Although van Ruijven hopes to use the modeling sessions to seduce Griet, as he has done on a previous occasion with another maid, he is forced to settle for an image of her sitting alone. Orchestrated by Maria Thins, Vermeer's shrewd, business-oriented mother-in-law, the project proceeds secretively in order to enable Vermeer to avoid the jealous objection of his wife. The plot reaches its climax when an outraged Catharina demands to see the finished painting, in which Griet is depicted wearing Catharina's pearl earring. Vermeer is quick to protect his work from his wife's rage, but he remains silent and impassive as Catharina dismisses the young woman who served as its inspiration. The novel extends this plotline to a more conclusive resolution in which Griet, whose impoverished family depends on her wages, accepts a marriage proposal from her social peer, the butcher's son, thus securing her and her family's financial future.

The events of the narrative portray Griet, the girl with the pearl earring, as a strong and thoughtful woman whose common sense reins in her furtive passions. She is aware of the forces working against her—poverty, lack of education, low social status, femininity—and finally succeeds in reaching the highest level of autonomy within her limited possibilities.

Through this plotline, the author constructs a character and a personality for the image that has fascinated so many observers.² The sum total of the narrative suggests an ekphrastic substitute for the image, in the sense provided by James Heffernan's suggestion that ekphrasis "releases the narrative impulse that graphic art typically checks, and it enables the silent figures of graphic art to speak" (304). The textual mode of narrative amounts here to a verbal description of the girl with the pearl earring. The novel, which proceeds through Griet's first-person narration, performs an extended act of ekphrasis, for Griet's words and self-reported actions come to portray the person behind the portrait. The filmic adaptation, on the other hand, substitutes for the verbal first-person narration a loose visual one: Griet is silent throughout most of the film, but she is present in almost every scene. The viewer sees what she sees, though not necessarily from her optical point of view.³

In both novel and film we find comments regarding the success and failure of the ekphrastic act seen in reverse, that is, of the painting as a representation of the character. The novel exhibits a...