One of the more unusual documentaries to appear in recent
years, “Tim’s Vermeer” demonstrates the continuing appeal of the nonfiction form
even in this age of blockbusters, comic-book flicks, and computer-generated
images. As the title indicates, the film deals with
the great 17th Century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, the subject of the lovely
2003 picture, “The Girl with a Pearl Earring.” This film examines the possible
methods that enabled the artist to create his remarkable paintings, with their
unique underlying brightness, their intense colors, and their extraordinary
attention to detail, attempting to explain the qualities that distinguish his
work from that of other artists of his time and place.
Beginning with the people behind its production, the movie
provides a number of surprises. Directed by Teller, the silent member of the
brilliant magicians Penn and Teller, and narrated by Penn Jillette,
a generally obnoxious blowhard, it introduces Tim Jenison, who announces to the
camera that he is not an artist but nevertheless intends to paint a Vermeer — a
bold statement.
A wealthy and most successful inventor in the computer field, and an old friend of Jillette,
Jenison bases his ambition on a book by the famous English artist David Hockney, who claims that Vermeer painted his pictures using
the technology of his day, mostly in the form of the camera obscura.
The film shows some of the history of that relatively simple device and
Jenison’s attempts to duplicate what he imagines were Vermeer’s methods. His
efforts turn into a demanding, fascinating, even obsessive labor of love, which
provides the emotional subtext of the movie.
Jenison visits Holland to see the Vermeer museum, the house
where he lived and painted, the landscapes of Delft and Amsterdam, and learns
to read Dutch to study some of the works about the master. On a couple of
occasions, he journeys to England to consult with Hockney
and an Oxford scholar named Colin Blakemore, and even persuades the folks at
Buckingham Palace to allow him to study an original Vermeer painting, now the
property of Queen Elizabeth.
Back in San Antonio, Texas, where Jenison lives, he rents a
warehouse with the proper northern exposure and, amazingly, sets about the
construction of an exact duplicate of the room in the painting he proposes to
copy, “The Music Lesson.” He builds the furniture himself, purchases a viola da
gamba and a virginal, the instruments in the
painting, copies the windows, the ceiling beams, the floor tiles, enlists
models to assume the positions of the young female pupil and her music teacher,
assembling all the elements — a stunning achievement in itself.
With everything in place, using the camera obscura and a mirror, he captures the images of the figures
and objects reflected on his canvas, and in effect
painstakingly fills them in with his authentic paints and brushes, a
task that requires an exhausting amount of effort. The whole tedious project,
carefully filmed through all its stages, takes more than five years from
beginning to end; when he finishes, Jenison believes he has actually painted
“The Music Lesson,” and both Hockney and Blakemore
concur.
“Tim’s Vermeer” exploits one of the most successful and
entertaining practices of American film, its ability to show process, the
step-by-step actions of doing work and making something — digging an irrigation
ditch, tarring a road, erecting a barn, carving a baseball bat — and endowing
that activity with a fascination all its own. Jenison’s remarkable journey
through the many stages of his ambitious quest consists almost entirely of a
series of carefully planned, artfully managed tasks, all of them terrifically
cinematic. Beyond all that, Jenison himself serves as an appropriate hero of
his own dream, an ordinary guy with enormous talent, pots of dough, and the
willingness to pursue a quixotic adventure of the spirit.
The movie provides an engrossing lesson in history, art history,
and art itself; like Hockney’s book, its conclusions
surely invite controversy and debate. Although nobody in the film wants, or
perhaps bothers, to utter the point, Jenison’s work and his conclusions may
ultimately reduce — if that’s the right word — Johannes Vermeer from a great
artist to a great technologist, from an unusually accomplished painter to a
remarkably skilled, patient, and meticulous draftsman.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2014.
