The Face on Film

The human face is a privileged arena of expressivity; yet, this book suggests, cinema''s most radical encounters with the face give rise to ambiguity, illegibility--an equivocation between image and language. Braiding theoretical and aesthetic considerations with close analysis of films, Steimatsky interrogates the convergence of archaic powers and modern anxieties in our experience of the face on film.

The human face was said to have been rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures, in which it was often viewed as expressive locus, as figure, and even as essence of the cinema. But how has this modern, technological, mass-circulating medium revealed the face in ways that are also distinct from any other? 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, time-based 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 Au hazard, Balthazar, Antonioni''s Screen Test, Warhol''s filmic portraits of celebrity and anonymity. Such intense encounters, examined in this book, manifest a desire for transparency and plenitude, but--especially in post-classical cinema--also betray a profound ambiguity that haunts the human countenance, confronting interiority as opacity, treading the gap between image and language. The spectacular impact of the cinematic face is uncannily intertwined with a reticence, an ineffability; but is it not for this very reason that--like faces in the world--it still enthralls us?