Page - 78 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

78 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 ity and almost austerity of the composition, it’s hard to tell exactly what the painting is about” (NG 90). Wiseman’s films share the ambiguity, regularity and austerity of Vermeer’s work, but I wouldn’t characterise Wiseman’s films as cre- ating “a barrier between our world and this ideal world”. Rather, they invite the viewer into the “ideal world” (for lack of a better term) through evoking, as a fugitive awareness, an “unknown that remains unknown”, that exists alongside the compulsion to explain, a compulsion for bridge building over the unknown that may also erect barriers to the enigmatic. The effort to explain paintings (by art historians, curators, restorers, the gallery director, gallery staff, etc.) is repeatedly observed in National Gallery (2014) but does not form a narrative arc of the film. The play of known (or effort to know) and unknown is visual- ly evoked through paintings shot with and without frames, with and without someone offering a narrative explanation. Wiseman’s filmic style of wordless looking at an image intensifies the pressure of an encounter with a stranger, be it animal, monstrous creature or human, in the National Gallery paintings. The “ideal world” in Wiseman’s films is a responsiveness of more-than-reciprocity to a person or animal in its weakness: in film terms, its aural and visual presence. Similar to what the art historian calls Vermeer’s “balance between realism and abstraction”, which keeps ambiguity in play, Wiseman’s films create a ten- sion between what he refers to as the “literal and the abstract”.38 Nowhere is the tension of “literal and abstract” more teasingly felt in all its energetic demands and joy (and endless repeatability) than in National Gallery (2014). I interpret Wiseman’s “literal” to mean all that we experience at the level of in- choate sensation or the “speechlessness” of lyric (Zwicky) or “is-ness” (Meister Eckhart) or “infraperception” (William Connolly).39 In other words, the “literal” creates the visceral shock of parable. All we can do is multiply analogies: such inchoate expressiveness cannot be resolved into any final, definite explana- tion (or social action), try as we might, and we do try! As Crossan observes, we cannot live in parable alone; we need the explanation of myth and story. What Wiseman calls the “abstract”, I regard as our dogged efforts to explain, system- atise and narrate elusive experiences, in other words, the consolations of myth or narrative. In visual terms, these explanations are like frames we put around things, the choice to tell the story in a certain way (Wiseman’s term, “reality fictions”),40 which a painting must do in an instant. Vermeer’s Woman Stand- ing at a Virginal has many frames within the frame of the painting, implying the hospitality of art to see the world in many different ways and also its invitation to many possible readings. A man talking to a group at the gallery observes, “in 38 Hamacher/Wiseman 2015. 39 Lilburn/Zwicky 2010, 145; Eckhart 1981, 187; Connolly 2002, 27. 40 Atkins 1976, 82.