Portraits of women. And men, who are spellbound by them. The painted portraits—a recurring motif of film noir as well as European postwar cinema—aesthetically stand in a tradition of an outmoded academic style that is bent on striking likeness with the model. They are revenants, omens of absence, metaphors for loss and death, objects of desire and fixation which mesmerize both the viewer in the movie and in front of the screen.