The painting on the wall of the restaurant with its barely discernible stickman among purplish markings: perhaps a zooming in allows the curious to see the easel and the stickman. (This is a photograph that was taken from the image of the DVD as it was seen on a TV screen).

Below,  Ardalion’s painting itself and, next, the scenery that is visible to Herman during his arrest (cum Ardalion).

The perspectives are different in the three depictions, as if all three had been made by a different person or from a different angle. Ardalion’s position as a painter and the scene he reproduces from it on a canvas is puzzling, for it seems to belong to Herman’s eyes!

Suggestions are most welcome.

P.S: In my former posting I inquired:

“Is it [Fassbinder’s movie] another “false double” of Nabokov’s novel, at least as it’s seen from a “literary” perspective (the ekphrastic representation of a novel that refers to the motion pictures, to paintings and to mirrors, in a movie that inserts glass partitions, reflections, visual exchanges and painting in the plot, or whatever…) is it an homage or an appropriation?” 

Unfortunately, I forgot to add a very important element to that listing, namely, that Herman’s novel dwells on his certainty about his abilities as a writer while he is in the process of writing an “artistic” rendering and report of a “perfect crime” - and has “only words to play with”( quoting from “Lolita”).  Unlike Humbert and Herman, Fassbinder has mainly images to play with…The verbal domain, in the director’s movie, seems to develop independently from the symbolic message expressed by the pictures. V. Nabokov may also paint with words and apply shifting perspectives to create a landscape, but his project is altogether distinct.