Portrait of Jennie (1948)

The essence of art, love, loss and change - the themes dealt with in William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie are HUGE. The frame is a kind of 'ghost story' but a very allegoric one. The main character, Eben, is a poor and struggling artist. On a misty evening in Central park he meets a little girl. A ghost, it turns out. We gradually learn the story of the girl. Every now and then, the artist encounters the girl and every time, she has grown much older. The two fall in love and the artist sets out the draw her portrait. So what is this girl, Jennie? She's rendered as the fantasy of a very lonely man. The clichés about the poor but noble artist are there, but there is also something else, something a bit more unsettling. The film is immersed in Eben's private dreams, and these dreams are presented vividly. Instead of psychologizing too much, Dieterle enters the story through Eben's self-understanding. His creative power are entirely dependent on the presence of this Jennie. This of course begs the question: what does the director try to say about artistic inspiration, what kind of elusive muse is Jennie? Eben is obsessive, he clings to the possibility of a new encounter and he goes deeper and deeper into this 'love affair'. On some level, he knows Jennie does not exist but this has no force for him, it is of no avail to what is important for him. One could say that the film explores a total collapsing of the separation between art and life. Inspiration is inspiration - the nature of this source is not interesting, only its power is. Even though I was not hugely impressed with this movie, it goes rather far in its portrayal of a certain idea about the relation between art and reality, namely the idea that art creates its own realm, its own space. Someone pointed out the kinship between Portrait of Jennie and Ferrara's gruesome Driller killer. The tone of these two movies are very different but the way reality is suspended is quite similar. What for me made the film tedious to watch was its bombastic use of music and its equally bombastic storytelling. The morbid look on Eben's face, however, is something I will remember this film for.