The Face on Film

Noa Steimatsky

Interlaces historical and theoretical considerations with close analysis of both popular and experimental films to investigate some of cinema's most powerful confrontations with the face
The face on film is explored in relation to other arts and media, archaic and modern — masks, icons, pictorial portraits, mug shots, glamour and advertising images — and in relation to our experience of faces in the world
Reflects on the convergence of archaic desires and modern anxieties in the cinema's encounter with the human face, and how it binds questions of aesthetics and ethics

The Face on Film

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 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?

The Face on Film

Noa Steimatsky

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
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
Towards 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 the 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

The Face on Film

Noa Steimatsky

Author Information

Noa Steimatsky, Visiting Associate Professor of Italian Studies, University of California—Berkeley, USA

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

The Face on Film

Noa Steimatsky

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Limina Prize 2017 for Best International Film Studies Book 2018 Honorary Mention from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

"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." - Dudley Andrew, Yale University

"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." - Mary Ann Doane, University of California Berkeley

"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." - Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

"Despite its grand title, The Face on Film is no bubbly celebration of the beautiful countenances that comprise the history of big-screen glitz and glamor. Rather, UC Berkeley professor Noa Steimatsky investigates the ontological repercussions of capturing the human face via motion picture photography, and does so by surveying canonical film theory and criticism ... In order to reap the rewards of Steimatskys analyses, then, readers must exercise patience ... And they will be rewarded ... her observations [are] insightful, well-argued, and poetically expressed. Especially wonderful is the chapter on the multitudes contained in Warhols deceptively, eerily minimalist portraits of Edie Sedgwick." - Michael Joshua Rowin, Film Comment

The Face on Film

Noa Steimatsky

From Our Blog

Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2017 annual conference wrap-up

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2017 annual conference. OUP's Media Studies team had a great time in Chicago, attending conference sessions and meeting with authors and conference goers alike.

Posted on April 22, 2017

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