Yes I know Chocko took a run by Tim’s Vermeer already but I just wanted to chime in with a couple of quick comments.
As you know Tim’s Vermeer is Teller’s film about his friend Tim’s efforts to make a Vermeer by a method he said Vermeer could have used. It’s a very good film that may shake up the art world.
While I like the film I think it either should have been shorter or just a tad longer. The argument for it being shorter is that Tim effectively proves it could have been done out of the box so that at a certain point the whole exercise is a bit over kill- even to the point where Tim says that were they not making a movie he would have hung it up (though the bit on what was discovered by painting the harpsichord would have been lost.)
For me the film leaves several questions unanswered- chief among them is how many hours a day did Tim paint? That may sound like a stupid question but lighting- the same lighting is important to painters, especially to someone like Vermeer. Change the light and you change the shade of the color ever so slightly. (Monet when he was painting some of his landscapes shifted canvases as the light changed). Another is if Tim is not a painter and never painted before this how did he learn about color and how to alter a paints shade (I have a long list of questions that I started to keep when I saw it but I think those are the biggies)
I should say that I wish they had shown the elephant that Tim started to paint when he was getting loopy on the heater fumes.
Don’t get me wrong this is a good film, actually it’s a very good film, but it’s not great film. I think the problems for me come from Teller and Penn being too close to the film to completely realize that they didn’t explain everything. (And for the record I still have not watched the press conference which Chocko posted, simply because I wanted to take the film on its own terms.
Highly recommended, more so if the DVD comes stocked with additional footage.
No comments:
Post a Comment