I recently rewatched the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring. The movie is based on a novel, so it's entirely fictional.
From what I gather, the figure in the famous painting currently known by the same name is something of a mystery. This left room for a novelist to use the painting as inspiration for making up a wholly fictional character named Griet and wholly fictional story about her and her relationship to the artist, Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer is a contemporary of Rembrandt and both were artists from the Dutch Golden Age, a period I have had a fondness for since I took some art history type college class in my teens. I fell in love with the self-portraits by Rembrandt and I love the fact that this period shows a lot of non-religious subjects and a lot of scenes of everyday life.
The Dutch Republic was quite prosperous so there was an emergence of something akin to a modern middle class. Such scenes are often a celebration of the materialism of the era where ordinary people had nice things.
I like it in part for the same reason I like Mid Century Modern architecture and furnishings: They both seem to capture a time when people had a high quality of life because there was enough to go around and this was new enough that it hadn't yet morphed into North American Affluenza where people are just drowning in material possessions often while unable to make ends meet.
These days, even homeless people in the US often have storage rooms full of crap and they pay for storage while standing in line at soup kitchens. So I long for a time when the kind of modest and healthy materialism captured in these kinds of paintings was some kind of cultural norm somewhere.
In spite of blurbs that claim Griet's beauty inspires "obsession," the film really shows two things:
So when you see a film like this one, you can generally assume that the exploration of the girl's life is almost entirely a projection of modern struggles for identity and independence and likely has little to do with reality for the era. It's somewhat safer to make up something like this about a different era or a fictional setting or what not than to grapple with such questions in a more head-on way about our own current realities.
As a woman still trying to sort my life out and crawl out from under the weight of personal and global history, I really enjoyed this film and will likely watch it again someday.
From what I gather, the figure in the famous painting currently known by the same name is something of a mystery. This left room for a novelist to use the painting as inspiration for making up a wholly fictional character named Griet and wholly fictional story about her and her relationship to the artist, Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer is a contemporary of Rembrandt and both were artists from the Dutch Golden Age, a period I have had a fondness for since I took some art history type college class in my teens. I fell in love with the self-portraits by Rembrandt and I love the fact that this period shows a lot of non-religious subjects and a lot of scenes of everyday life.
The Dutch Republic was quite prosperous so there was an emergence of something akin to a modern middle class. Such scenes are often a celebration of the materialism of the era where ordinary people had nice things.
I like it in part for the same reason I like Mid Century Modern architecture and furnishings: They both seem to capture a time when people had a high quality of life because there was enough to go around and this was new enough that it hadn't yet morphed into North American Affluenza where people are just drowning in material possessions often while unable to make ends meet.
These days, even homeless people in the US often have storage rooms full of crap and they pay for storage while standing in line at soup kitchens. So I long for a time when the kind of modest and healthy materialism captured in these kinds of paintings was some kind of cultural norm somewhere.
In spite of blurbs that claim Griet's beauty inspires "obsession," the film really shows two things:
- It is a portrait of Griet's life rather than being primarily about some man.
- The sexual or emotional tension between Griet and Vermeer is primarily based on intellect and shared interests, not on her looks.
So when you see a film like this one, you can generally assume that the exploration of the girl's life is almost entirely a projection of modern struggles for identity and independence and likely has little to do with reality for the era. It's somewhat safer to make up something like this about a different era or a fictional setting or what not than to grapple with such questions in a more head-on way about our own current realities.
As a woman still trying to sort my life out and crawl out from under the weight of personal and global history, I really enjoyed this film and will likely watch it again someday.