Tim's Vermeer

Synopsis: Texas inventor, Tim Jenison, sets out on an eight year quest to discover how 17th century Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer might have used technology to enable him to paint so photo-realistically 150 years before photography was invented. Along the way he visits Vermeer’s home in Delft, Holland, David Hockney on the North coast of Yorkshire, and Buckingham Palace for a private viewing of Vermeer’s The Music Lesson held in Queen Elizabeth’s collection.

Tim Jenison is an inventor and a computer graphics creator, professions which seem to have reaped him a lot of money and left him with quite a lot of spare time.  He’s also an old friend of illusionist entertainer Penn Jillette who produced and narrated this film, directed by his partner, Teller, about Tim’s obsession with Vermeer (whose life and work has previously been explored on film in 2003’s Girl With A Pearl Earring).

Jenison’s obsession is focused on an idea that came to him in the bath, about how a variation on the old camera obscura might explain how Vermeer could have achieved such extraordinary pictorial realism. To use Penn and Teller’s vernacular; Jenison claims that he did with mirrors. I won’t go into the technical detail of this. That’s what the film’s for. But the idea and how Jenison explores it is quite fascinating. To prove his theory, though, he must perfectly recreate the room depicted in Vermeer’s painting, The Music Lesson.  That doesn’t just mean the room itself. It means every object and person in the room, and the external light source that provided the illumination. And to add to the level of difficulty, Jenison is determined to personally realize as much of it as he can; a task that takes him 213 days.

Part of Jenison’s inspiration for this potential folly comes from two books; "Secret Knowledge" by British artist, David Hockney and "Vermeer’s Camera" by Professor Philip Steadman both of whom appear in the film. In addition to recognising the genius of Jenison’s hypothesis, they contribute to a very interesting debate over whether, if Jenison is right, it means that Vermeer ‘cheated’. It reveals something of a desire for artists to be savant-like in their ability to use imagination to capture the real world on their canvasses and a suspicion of the employment of any kind of technology in that process. Neither Jenison nor Hockney nor Steadman subscribe to that idea. Their admiration is for the ingenuity that leads to the finished artwork. As Jenison asks at one point, why do art and technology need to be seen as oppositional?

But the film is not without its drawbacks. Despite its short running time, there a several sequences that feel overlong or tangential to the central idea. In particular, once Jenison starts to paint his Vermeer, we spend a lot of camera time languishing over close ups of paint brushes on canvas. When Jenison makes a joke about watching paint dry it’s hard not to feel that there are moments in this film where we’re doing just that.

Nevertheless, there is delight in watching Jenison pursue his idea and his dry wit and laconic personality carry us through the less interesting moments. And you have to love a guy who when he lays hands on a 17th century viola da gamba can’t resist playing "Smoke On The Water".

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