Convergences & Pillows of Air
Pillows of Air
Beginning in the November 2013 issue of The Believer, Weschler launched a new series, "Pillows of Air," which we will be posting here after each issue leaves the newsstand.
Tim’s Vermeer - Vermeer’s Music Lesson - Marker’s La Jetée
From The Believer, March/April 2014
This being the film issue and all, I thought I’d try my hand at a piece about arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time—great-grandfather, at any rate, to all the rest of them—that being, of course, Johannes Vermeer of Delft.
The animating occasion for this meditation: the recent release of Tim’s Vermeer, the magician-skeptics Penn and Teller’s documentary film about their Texas-based inventor friend Tim Jenison and his remarkable experimental investigations into precisely how the seventeenth-century Dutch master might have been able to render all those astonishing paintings. And I should say at the outset that Jenison, for his part, comes off as a wonderfully ingenious and thoroughly congenial fellow. And who knows? He may even be right.