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 inthe 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'sFunny 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 impactof 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?

The Face on Film is a stunning success, and easily among the very best cinema books of the past decade., Noa Steimatsky's intriguing book The Face on Film oscillates between straightforward history of various cinematic tropes of the face and theoretical treatise on modernity and then postmodernity's grasp of the human face. Her study charts the transformation of mythic faces of cinema's past into a complex commercial image and existential unintelligibility within postmodernity. Refreshingly, the book offers a history of performance disguised as high theory and will pique the interest of film and cultural theorists and performers and artists alike., Noa Steimatsky's intricate prose flows like blood through the capillaries of The Face on Film making its subject throb, blush, and sometimes turn pallid. Her study will be one of a handful to last as long as the filmmakers she so precisely, lovingly, longingly treats: Dreyer, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Warhol, Bresson. Without blinking, and without hesitating, Steimatsky confronts and describes-draws and draws out-the experience of the face as well as of film., The Face on Film is a brilliant meditation on the historical importance of the face both inside and outside the cinema and the way questions of its signification and efficacy have been exacerbated in modernity and late modernity. Detailed and elegant readings of films buttress Steimatsky's compelling argument that the opacity or illegibility of the face always accompanies and subtends its legibility. She directly addresses the question of our enduring cultural obsession with this enigmatic yet central site linked to identity, expressivity, singularity and contingency. Vigorous, intelligent and lucid, this work will surely have a strong impact on current debates about aesthetics and ethics., With this powerful book, Noa Steimatsky emerges as one of our profoundest observers of the possibilities of the medium of film. The Face on Film both caresses the surface and probes the profundities of the human face in cinema. Balancing a historical overview, examination of the long critical engagement with cinematic faces, and close analysis of carefully selected films, Steimatsky demonstrates the capacity of the face on film to both reveal and conceal meaning and emotion.

Noa Steimatsky is Visiting Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California—Berkeley.