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Learning To Be Looked At: The Portrait Of [The Artist As A] Young Woman In Agnès Merlet’S Artemisia, Sheila Ffolliott

Quidditas

Agnès Merlet's 1997 film Artemisia opens with a full-screen, tight close-up of an eye, under a sepia veiling effect that prevents its appearing overly clinical. The image provides an effective introduction to issues this film about a seventeenth-century woman-artist explores. We might expect a film about a visual artist to concern that person’s eye. We also expect film, itself a visual medium, to fascinate the eye of the spectator. But rather than simply confirm such expectations, this filmic eye unsettles. First, because of the extremity of the close-up, we see only part of the eye. Then, although it stares directly …