Artemisia

The main differences that I took from the two readings were not only the opinions of the authors, but the way in which they went about examining the film. Garrard went examined the film in a much more critical manner, while Vidal simply examined how the film was done, not as much criticizing it.

Garrard took a heavily feminist opinion in analyzing the portrayal of Artemisia. She states how sexualized the film made her in both her physical appearance and character’s actions. Garrard points her out as the subordinate female in which she is objectified as the sexual object under control of men. Garrard see this as taking away from the truth and empowerment of Artemisia’s life. Being extremely critical of Merlet’s choices in the making of the film, Garrard goes into a heavy criticism of the lack of fact in the film’s narrative and how this up-plays these factors of the objectified sexual female. Garrard seems most angry about the portrayal of the trial, in which we have true accurate accounts to base the story from, yet the film strayed heavily in skewing how the audience will view Artemisia’s story. The film does an excellent job at creating the “love story”, while leaving out these facts and making it seem as though Tassi did not rape her.

Vidal focuses more upon the film in the essence of the narrative biopic struggle in general and not so much making a particular criticism of the film’s choices. Rather than being critical of the film, Vidal simply tells the reader what it is that these specific choices have offered for the viewer. Vidal focuses a lot on the action and aesthetics of the film in relation to how Artemisia’s story has played throughout history. What I loved about this article was the focus in on differences of film based on what type of film it wanted to be, for me this brought into consideration also the audience a film, and the choices put into such a struggle.

I continue to answer the second question with the two opinions I held onto before. It all depends on who the audience is and what exactly is being distorted. However with this “Artemisia” has made me take another one of my considerations into more thought and maybe even hold it even more strongly than before – the audience needs to be aware of that which is being distorted. This is where it gets the most tough. How is it that we are able to make the audience aware? And where is the baseline story to go off of in which to decipher that which is being distorted? This is all of importance to me in accordance with “Artemisia” especially because I went into the film having heard so many different versions of the artist’s story, only to come out of it even more confused. As a viewer I sat there just wanting to know what the truth was. At one point I even thought, well does it matter what the truth exactly is as long as a story comes across and I am able to take something from it? And then came a most obvious answer – well of course it matters, for the sake of the artist. This especially evident in Artemisia’s story because of the pain and suffering she had to go through for her life to simply become a silly love story? It is unfair to her, or an artist, to be remembered as something other than who they actually were.