Taking Vermeer To The Screen

A film is soon to be released about the painter Vermeer. But there’s a problem. “It’s not only the man but his art that is tantalisingly silent: just as no pithy quotes from Vermeer or anecdotes about the time he punched Pieter de Hooch in the face survive, nothing is known about the women in his paintings, or the stories they seem to hint at. And there’s the rub. In fact it makes film-makers of us all as we mentally complete the hints of narrative in his paintings, picturing scenarios, possibilities suggested by his inscrutable glimpses. Vermeer painted more than two centuries before the invention of cinema, but he anticipated the way films make a world and fill it with light.”