The Face on Film [Paperback]

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 asessenceof 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 theperson? 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'sPassion of Joan of Arc, Donen'sFunny Face, Hitchcock'sThe Wrong Man, Bresson's enigmaticAu hasard Balthazar, Antonioni'sScreen 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?

Acknowledgments

Preface: Face Moving Image
ADispositif
AnUr-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 Theaterlc§