The Face on Film

The Face on Film
ISBN-10
0199863164
ISBN-13
9780199863167
Category
Performing Arts
Pages
304
Language
English
Published
2017-02-02
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Noa Steimatsky

Description

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 distinctfrom 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 precedentsinforming 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 ofcelebrity 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 betweenimage 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?

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