The Painting

An animated short film created using the legendary Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen, The Painting journeys back centuries to revisit the destiny of Queen Mariana of Austria through her 1652 portrait by Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Married at 14 to her uncle Philip IV of Spain, who was 30 years her senior, she carried the heavy burden of producing a male heir. Mariana was only 18 years old in the Velázquez portrait, but her eyes already betray a sense of sadness and solitude. The Habsburgs’ reluctance to marry outside the family meant that the five children born of this union were marked by 16 generations of inbreeding; they either died in infancy or were unfit to rule, ultimately ending the Spanish Habsburg dynasty.

Fascinated by the portrait and the historical dramas it encapsulates, renowned animation filmmaker Michèle Lemieux plays with light and shadow to bring an imaginary world beyond time to life. The film opens in a museum, lifting Mariana out of the Spanish court to reveal a mysterious, fragile and intemporal figure.

The artistic heir to one of only two active Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreens in the world, Lemieux demonstrates incredible skill and precision, but also wonderful creative freedom in recreating the Velázquez portrait. She was guided both by a reflection on the brutality of institutionalized incest and by the dreamlike musings to which the pinscreen lends itself. The effects of light and colour work hand in hand to animate eyes, distort faces and dissolve the very fabric of the painting. Small details blossom into a universe teeming with life—roots, organs, birds, storms—but tinged with death. The shifting light reveals troubling similarities, and indeed Velázquez painted Mariana’s face directly over an unfinished portrait of her uncle/husband. As if by magic, the shadow play created by hundreds of thousands of pins both forges the shackles of patriarchy and then melts them, freeing the captives.

Its powerful images heightened further by an evocative soundscape, The Painting is a poem of a film, simultaneously physical and intangible, painful and tender, heavenly and deeply human. Michèle Lemieux has created a monumental experimental work, one that goes beyond mere historical biography or animated painting to contemplate its own (im)materiality and the power of art to capture the soul—or to soothe it.