BRUSH WITH OSCAR SERRA'S ARTISTRY IN 'PEARL EARRING' YIELDS CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINATION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

If cinema is the art of painting with light, then surely a film as focused on painting as ``Girl With a Pearl Earring'' required a special kind of lighting artist.

This fictional account of how Johannes Vermeer's title masterpiece came to be had such a craftsman in Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Eduardo Serra. The 60-year-old Portuguese-French lensman has carved out a small niche of art-inspired works within his impressive overall resume: ``Unbreakable,'' ``What Dreams May Come'' and ``The Wings of the Dove,'' for which he received his first Oscar nomination, combine with ``Pearl'' to make up an impressive and eclectic list of artwork-informed pictures.

``I like to surround myself with references,'' Serra said by phone from his Paris home. ``For this one, I got information about the market of painting in 17th-century Holland and the Camera Obscura. On 'Unbreakable,' it was not painting, it was comic books and sculpture, and for a couple of shots it was even the photographer Weegee. In 'Wings of the Dove,' we definitely took some things from several Venetian painters.

``I studied the history of art and archaeology and all of that,'' Serra continued. ``So that's something that's inside of me.''

The Dutch masters of Vermeer's time have a place in the heart of every cinematographer. Their ability to capture the qualities of light on canvas was revolutionary and has not been surpassed since. There's even a filming technique called Rembrandt lighting.

But Serra feels that the much-less-prolific Vermeer had an even purer sense of the stuff than the industrious Rembrandt did.

``Vermeer is more about light by itself than anything else,'' he said. ``Rembrandt, most of the time, is about the relationship between light and how faces react to it. With Vermeer, the composition seems there just to support the light; it, not the face, is the main character in his paintings.''

``Girl With a Pearl Earring'' - the painting - is a bit of an exception to that rule. It's a portrait of a young woman - infused, some say, with a mystery and formal excellence on par with the ``Mona Lisa.'' In the film, based on Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel, the model is a teenage maid, Griet (Scarlett Johansson), working in the Delft home of the inscrutable perfectionist (Colin Firth), his jealous wife and their many children.

No less a perfectionist, Serra is modest when asked how he reproduced some of the most admired effects in all of art history.

``The priority on choosing the mood and the light and all that was following the dramatic line of the story,'' Serra said of his work. ``We were not trying to emulate one painting after another; there was movement that we tried to make look - and smell - like real life.

``The only times when we tried to make it look like a painting were when we had to quote specific paintings,'' he added. ``I didn't change anything from the way that I normally work. When you have windows, I like to bring light in from the windows, and that's exactly what I, and Vermeer, did. It wasn't tricky technically; we just had to be quite accurate in the positioning of things and people in the compositions.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

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(1 -- 2) Eduardo Serra

Oscar-nominated cinematographer for ``Girl With a Pearl Earring,'' starring Scarlett Johnasson