The Face on Film

The human face was said to be rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures, in which it is often viewed as expressive locus, as figure, and even as essence of the cinema. But how has the modern, technological, mass-circulating art revealed the face in ways that are also distinct from any other medium? How has it altered our perception of this quintessential incarnation of the person? The archaic powers of masks and icons, the fashioning of the individual in the humanist portrait, the modernist anxieties of fragmentation and de-figuration--these are among the cultural precedents informing our experience in the movie theatre. Yet the moving image also offers radical new confrontations with the face: Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Donen's Funny Face, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, Bresson's enigmatic Au hasard Balthazar, Antonioni's Screen Test, Warhol's filmic portraits of celebrity and anonymity are among the key works explored in this book. In different ways these intense encounters manifest a desire for transparency and plenitude, but--especially in post-classical cinema--they also betray a profound ambiguity that haunts the human countenance as it wavers between image and language, between what we see and what we know. The spectacular impact of the cinematic face is uncannily bound up with an opacity, a reticence. But is it not for this very reason that, like faces in the world, it still enthralls us?

Auteur

Noa Steimatsky is a film scholar who lives and writes in San Francisco. She teaches at the University of California - Berkeley.

Contenu

Acknowledgments Preface: Face Moving Image A Dispositif An Ur-Image The Face Against the Image Itineraries Chapter One: We Had Faces Then Expressivity in the 1920s Joan of Arc, Inevitably The Face and its Voices Glamour/Anti-Glamour Chapter Two: Roland Barthes Looks at the Stars Toward "Visages et figures" Excursus on the Face in Language Into the Movie Theater Ultra-Face Excursus on the Mask From Cult to Charm: Funny Face Chapter Three: Face-to-Face (with The Wrong Man) What Godard Saw What the Clerk Saw Excursus on Anthropometrics Not a Mirror, Not a Lamp Chapter Four: Pass/Fail: Screen Test, Apparatus, Subject The Antonioni Screen Test Excursus on a Star Portrait Sitting for the Portrait is the Portrait Outer and Inner Space, and the Pathos of Time Fail Better Chapter Five: In Reticence (Bresson) The Epidermal and the Written The Image Against the Face Not an Open Book, but a Door Ajar Postface: The Two-Shot