Cynthia Freeland

This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image’s power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential “air” (to use Roland Barthes’ term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography’s alleged ‘realism’ and ‘transparency,’ it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture’s two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.

The laboratory creation scene in Branagh’s film is brilliant….Even more frenzied and overwrought than Whale’s, Branagh’s creation scene is filmed with dozens of quick cuts, each shot full of movement across the frame. Victor races along his attic hall, cape flying before he discards it to appear bare-chested and vigorous. While pulleys move, bottles clank, and blue volts of electricity rise in glass Tesla tubes, the naked body on the gurney is raised into a copper vat. Electric eels dispense their powerful shocks, a brown sac-like bellows "breathes" air or heat, and finally Victor stares close-up at the Creature’s eyes. The eyes are seen through a porthole in the vat: this, our first glimpse of the monster occurs nearly an hour into the film. "Live, live, live, live...." Victor chants, then "YES!" (much in the old Colin Clive mode) as it opens its eyes briefly. Nothing more occurs, though, and Victor walks away in despair; but, like us, he is brought suddenly to attention by a sharp and surprising snap of the monster’s fingers, which we also see close-up through a porthole (in a clear allusion to the Karloff monster’s birth scene). The next sequence drives home the fact that this is a real birth scene, as the vat is smashed open (the "water breaks") and Victor lifts out his huge new "baby," smacking its chest to clear its lungs. We watch an extended scene of birth struggle while Victor works to "deliver" his huge, naked, and hairless "baby" by lifting it out of the slime. Giving birth is not only very hard labor here; it’s messy, too.