The Face on Film 9780199863150, 0199863156

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THE FACE ON FILM

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THE FACE ON FILM Noa Steimatsky

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​i n-​P ublication Data Names: Steimatsky, Noa, author. Title: The face on film / Noa Steimatsky. Description: New York: Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017654 (print) | LCCN 2016029951 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199863143 (cloth) | ISBN 9780199863167 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780199863150 (updf) Subjects: LCSH: Face in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.F27 S74 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.F27 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017654 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  vii Preface: Face Moving Image  1 A Dispositif  2 An Ur-​Image  5 The Face Against the Image  12 Itineraries  22 1. We Had Faces Then  27 Expressivity in the 1920s  28 Joan of Arc, Inevitably  52 The Face and its Voices  67 Glamour/​A nti-​Glamour  70 2. Roland Barthes Looks at the Stars  81 Toward “Visages et figures”  82 Excursus on the Face in Language  85 Into the Movie Theater  98 Ultra-​Face 

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Excursus on the Mask  110 From Cult to Charm: Funny Face  127

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3. Face-​to-​Face (with The Wrong Man)  143 What Godard Saw  143 What the Clerk Saw  153 Excursus on Anthropometrics  163 Not a Mirror, Not a Lamp  171 4. Pass/​Fail: Screen Test, Apparatus, Subject  180 The Antonioni Screen Test  182 Excursus on a Star Portrait  199 Sitting for the Portrait is the Portrait  203 Outer and Inner Space, and the Pathos of Time  212 Fail Better  222 5. In Reticence (Bresson)  228 The Epidermal and the Written  235 The Image Against the Face  249 Not an Open Book, but a Door Ajar  257 Postface: The Two-​Shot  266

Index of Names and Titles  273

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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y research on the face in the cinema was first launched with the support of a Getty Research Grant, and thanks to the hospitality of the Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library. It was then further sustained by faculty research grants at Yale University and at the University of Chicago, where a subvention fund made possible the wealth of illustrations. The book proposal was enthusiastically received by Shannon McLachlan at Oxford University Press, and the manuscript then evolved under the sharp eye of Brendan O’Neill, and wrapped up under the gracious guidance of Norm Hirschy, with terrific help from Stephen Bradley, Nicholas Hunt, and staff at the Press. I am grateful for their attentiveness to so much detail, for their patience, and all the wherewithal. I very much hope that those friends and colleagues who witnessed the inception of this project, who have accompanied me through its various pleasures and digressions—​which are all of a piece—​w ill now find it aged without staleness. It might not have survived without the keen conversation of Dudley Andrew, Robert Bird, James Chandler, Tom Gunning, David Jacobson, Christine Mehring, Daniel Morgan, Katie Trumpener, and Christopher Wood. In several graduate seminars surrounding this topic at Yale, Chicago, and Stanford, the spirited and challenging curiosity of students informed some of the critical turns of my work. Many others have been generous with all manner of personal and professional support, invitations to discuss different parts of the project, and vital intellectual input. Among them are Lauren Berlant, Lawrence Besserman, Alberto Boschi, Scott Bukatman, Jacopo Chessa, Stefano Chiodi, Thomas Crow, Chloe Connely, Angela Dalle Vacche, the late Carlo di Carlo, Edward Dimendberg, Mary Ann Doane, Xinyu Dong, Moshe Elhanati, Itamar Francez, Paul Fry, Julia Gibbs, the late Miriam Hansen, Judy Hoffman, David Joselit, James Lastra, Pavle Levi, Susanne Lüdemann, Rochona Majumdar, Ivone Margulies, Joe McElhaney, Françoise Meltzer, Paul Mendes-​Flohr, Charles Musser, Alexander Nemerov, the late Gilberto Perez, Mira Perlov, Brigitte Peucker, Veronica Pravadelli, Leonardo Quaresima, John David Rhodes, Na’ama Rokem, Yaron Shavit, P. Adams Sitney, Antonio Somaini, Jacqueline Stewart, Drake Stutesman, Yuri Tsivian, Ralph Ubl, Rebecca West, and Jennifer Wild. The films that I love the most are those that train and refine our perception, and deliver it back to the world. I hope that this is also what my work has taught me: how to not overlook the obvious, how to attend to what is closest to me (closer than a movie screen), how to not impose

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my attention but to grant it freely and lightly—​probably, I am still learning these arts of daily life from Paolo Barlera and from our children Nadja and Aram. The Face on Film is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Tamar Gotlieb-​Steimatsky—​ generations of sadness hid in the open of her laughter, even through her dying days. And in sweet memory of Nadav Shavit (1999–​2010).

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED “Pass/​Fail: the Antonioni Screen Test.” Framework Journal of Cinema and Media 55, no. 2 (2014). * Italian version: “Promossa/​bocciata: Il provino.” Michelangelo Antonioni: Prospettive, culture, politiche, spazi, edited by Alberto Boschi and Francesco Di Chiara. Milan: Il Castoro, 2015. “Of the Face: In Reticence.” Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls? edited by Angela Dalle Vacche. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. “Incoherent Spasms and the Dignity of Signs.” Opening Bazin, edited by Dudley Andrew. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. * French version, “Spasmes incohérents et dignité des signes: le Bresson de Bazin.” Ouvrir Bazin, edited by Hervé Joubert-​L aurencin and Dudley Andrew. Montreuil, Fr.: Editions de l’œil, 2014. “What the Clerk Saw: Face to Face with The Wrong Man.” Framework Journal of Cinema and Media 48, no. 2 (2007). * Italian version “Quel che vide l’impiegata: faccia a faccia con The Wrong Man.” Dentro l’analisi: soggetto, senso, emozioni, edited by Giulia Carluccio and Federica Villa. Turin: Kaplan, 2008. “Ages of the Face: Barthes, Godard, Warhol.” The Ages of Cinema: Criteria and Models for the Construction of Historical Periods, edited by Enrico Biasin, Roy Menarini, and Federico Zecca. Udine, It.: Forum, 2008.

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viii     Acknowledgments

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THE FACE ON FILM

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P R E FAC E

FACE MOVING IMAGE

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he human face is already, itself, a moving image. It stands out in the visual field; continually evolving, it alters with time; it ages, as we do. It is sometimes said that the face was rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures. But how has the technological and paradigmatically modern art of the time-​based image, in its various forms, mediated this unique entity—​this visual incarnation of the person with all its affective resonances, and with its mythical charge? How has the human face evolved as such a privileged locus, as a measure—​even as essence—​of the cinema, and how, in turn, has the cinema changed our experience of faces in the world? The face is a power:  it is compelling, and it confronts; it imposes and orients the gaze; it alters the world within its purview. It can lend itself freely, promiscuously, to the movie camera, but it is also vulnerable. The face’s intimacy, and its aura, are commonly assaulted and exploited by the camera’s probing. At times it is, therefore, most memorable when withdrawn, when it resists, when it is sensed as a barrier. It remains inexhaustible, if not ineffable. Between these many perspectives the arena of inquiry stretches wide—​a nd it is crowded. The face is ubiquitous: its charge seems so obvious that it is often taken for granted. Perhaps because it is itself a medium—​some would now say “interface”—​of subjectivity, the face is sometimes looked through—​or overlooked. Yet what we see in it, and what we think we see, will affect us, and what we do not see cannot be dismissed either—​for it, too, partakes in the experience of the face, within the movie theater and without. Even if not named as such, the face is operative in a great deal of film criticism and theory, and it reasserts itself with the tides of cinematic practice. When we note the iconic and expressive powers of the close-​up, when we study the reaction shot and the shot–​reverse shot among the basic articulations of film language, the human face is front and center. But just then it might risk dissolving in the service of narrative action and communication, to be locked into some psychological reduction, or else to be altogether abstracted in the optical-​psychic geometry of the gaze. At the same time, no achievement of the avant-​garde—​constructivist, cubist, pop, or post-​humanist—​w ill make us view the face, at the end of the day, as mere form, or as a text like any other. Yet speculation on how and what exactly it expresses is mostly up for grabs. It is, in fact, a challenge to describe, with deliberation, the human countenance—​it is not something we do routinely. One wants to attend to its visual, physical, corporeal aspect, yet one cannot see it as an object or as body

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part like any other, nor just as “identity-​construct.” Does one consult the physician, the psychotherapist, the art historian’s view? In a sense, we are all experts: we are sensitized to faces from birth, we differentiate expressions, we read and respond to them well enough, and we also sense when faces are closed off to us—​we recognize what we cannot read. The cinema, like many visual arts, might train our attention and refine our perception of faces, but it also teaches that we mostly cannot master or exhaust the facial image altogether. Somewhere between its visual-​sensory apotheosis, its psychic and ethical appeal, and the vast metaphysical horizons, the experience of the human face is strong, and it is elusive.

A DISPOSITIF The cinema’s particular burdens of representation, its modes of address, the articulations of film language, its appeal to identification, its expressive range—​to a great extent, all pivot about the face. Drawing, surely, on actual perceptual and social experience—​our face-​to-​face encounter with others—​but also bound up in a vast visual culture and grand traditions in the arts, the cinema has assimilated and perpetuated the facial image, and has also altered it. The cinema makes use of the face to communicate, to link persons with objects and vistas, to make narrative and discursive worlds cohere, to bind image and thought. But the cinema is, perhaps, also used by the face, as by a power that film language, and the critical languages that attend to it, cannot always control or contain—​for the face is often felt to exceed its actual formal coordinates, to signal that it is more than “just an image,” and thereby to confound formal and analytic tools. If the cinema perpetuates, dramatizes, enriches, and sometimes gorges our anthropomorphic and animistic desires, it is certainly inspired in this by the inexhaustible promise of its human faces to condense and open up clues—​true or false—​of an inner life, of subjectivity.1 Where modernism and its avant-​gardes might have dispensed with the human figure, the cinema has thus offered substantial compensations and has also given rise to radical encounters with the face. Indeed, the moving image has itself been said to assume, on occasion, a power of “faciality” that it also distributes and bestows upon other objects. What is this “faciality,” “facingness,” or the “return of the gaze”—​terms I draw quite loosely at this point from Gilles Deleuze, Michael Fried, and Walter Benjamin, respectively—​a nd how shall we account for the facifying, personifying, prosopopaeic operations of the cinema? Personification must be, in part, a function of the spectator-​subject’s projection, yet not every image can excite it or sustain it. At times, the image 1  The continuities between our basic capacity—​i nnate or acquired—​to interpret facial expressions, and the codes developed in the cinema toward the understanding of character and of dramatic exchanges, are addressed by Ed S. Tan, “Three Views of Facial Expression and Its Understanding in Cinema,” Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations, eds. Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 107–​27. In “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 239–​55, Plantinga elaborates further on the capacity of the cinematic face not only to signify and communicate information but also to elicit empathy in the “affective congruence” between a complex of elements and the manipulation of duration and attention. In Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), James Naremore offers a nuanced account of the stakes of facial expression, open to a variety of challenging examples in the interplay of aesthetic orders, visual and narrative complexity, ambiguity, and experimentation across diverse historical contexts.

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might even seem intent on draining the world of a countenance, on objectifying and petrifying it. But even such a devastating Medusa-​l ike gaze is not altogether disenchanting. In roundabout ways, it can still stir our subjectivity, awakening archaic desires and modern anxieties. One returns, then, to the mythical and psychic powers of the facial image and finds them distributed in the cinema’s everyday modernity: it must be in this way that the cinema still intensifies our perception and attunes our look at those around us. The rather general statement that opens this Preface should convey my feeling that we cannot, and should not, separate the experience of the cinematic face from our encounter with faces in the world—​whether those familiar to us, close and intimate faces, or distant and anonymous “faces in the crowd.” The broad and yet intricate notion of image is itself of a piece with the matter at hand. While the cinema is not made up exclusively of images, questions of the image are integral to this discussion of the face: what is an image when it moves; when it carries narrative situations and dramatic encounters; when it emerges, speaks, passes, withdraws—​when it is consumed by time? Provisionally, and except where qualified by a particular reference or context, the notion of image should therefore be understood in this book in an expanded, hybrid, and even loose sense. This broad perspective is especially important to remember when frame enlargements are used for illustration: I usually mean to address more than an isolated frame, and often even something more than the plastic, formal composition of a shot, which would still be an extension of photographic or pictorial considerations. Formal properties—​f rom mise-​en-​ scène and scale to depth and blocking, to framing and re-​f raming, to the effects of lighting and lenses, to attitudes like frontality and profile—​t hese and more emerge at different points.2 But it is also the duration and pacing of sequences and sub-​sequences, whether dynamic or relatively static; the interruption and “molding” of the moving image by editing or, say, by retarding movement; the sometimes equivocal relationship of image to narrative; the inflection of sound and voice; the effects of screening and the situation of spectatorhip—​a ll these, evolving in time,​ inform our discussion of the moving image. In an “impure” medium—​to invoke André Bazin’s thought-​provoking epithet for the cinema—​t he image is always open to interference, to generative, inventive redefinition and expansion. This hybridity is, after all, one of the cinema’s great contributions to the history and thought of the image. This book endeavors to think through the facial image, which means that it does not posit its object at arm’s length but assimilates it as a dispositif. It follows in this a long tradition of thought on the cinema that posits the face as a paradigmatic perceptual “disposition”—​a flexible configuration of attitudes, relations, and discourses, comprising the very consciousness of the medium, that guide and frame the critical attitude. Dispositif is, in fact, the term by which Leonardo Quaresima accounts for Béla Balázs’s distinctive notion of physiognomy, to underscore its productiveness not simply as object confronting the camera, but as a perceptual-​aesthetic category qua theoretical lens, differentiated from and irreducible to that other major operative category of cinematic thought: montage. 3 Each of these categories 2  One recalls that, traditionally, the human face in the cinema is also used as measure of the shot and as scale indicator: the face as a whole = close-up; face + upper chest = medium close-up; from the waist up = medium shot, etc. Talking about the close-up with respect to non-​body objects, or parts thereof, is basically an extrapolation. 3  See Leonardo Quaresima’s superb introduction to the Italian translation of Béla Balázs, L’uomo visibile, trans. Sara Terpin, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Turin: Lindau, 2008).



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has its ways of implicating the spectator in the image, of seeing the cinematic medium and consciousness as inextricable. They describe basic paradigms in film practice and theory, first formulated in the 1920s—​paradigms that are not exhaustive, nor quite mutually exclusive, yet sometimes too sharply opposed. Learning from these early incarnations, I trace the facial dispositif through key instances of post-​war, post-​classical cinema whose technological, historical, and socio-​c ultural conditions have changed with time. The “post-​” prefix seems to call for a retrospective-​comparative look: indeed, the latter phase is sometimes characterized through narratives of decline, loss, and disenchantment juxtaposed with visions of an earlier plenitude. It will become apparent that I take the myths of the face—​early, late, and belated—​seriously: ​I read most of my texts sympathetically, and tend to avoid a detached critical stance that presumes to stand outside (or above) its objects of inquiry. Some of my key terms are developed out of these myths of the cinematic imagination, and as part of tracing an itinerary, launched in Chapter One, through those moments of film history and theory when the facial dispositif was paramount. What I have learned from these earlier attitudes informs my dispute with interpretative models based on surface–​depth, manifest–​latent, form–​content oppositions, and helps me challenge assumptions on the accessibility of the image to diametrical categories and conceptual language. What is at stake, then, in assuming the face as dispositif, is not only a type of object nor a discrete metaphor, but a complex of figural functions and relations, open to expansion and, indeed, transfiguration. The face is, then, both a compelling iconographic and discursive nexus and a way of seeing, a critical lens, a mode of thought. But how to write it? Not only film studies but also art-​h istorical and literary discourses, aesthetics, anthropology, and related disciplines offer models: I have learned from these while also striving to develop my own terms in response to the films themselves. Description—​t he sort that also attends to the experience of encounter, not just to the object in isolation—​is my preferred vehicle of discovery. Like drawing, description can intensify perception and direct attention while steering clear of polemics and of “applying” theories wholesale. Without shying from ambiguities, in which questions of the face abound, I mostly let example and description deepen the argument and carry it through a variety of juxtapositions—​not strictly diametrical (as in “compare and contrast”) but rather figural–​poetic in their range of relations and consistency. Where strict formal analysis, the coding operations of iconography and conceptual abstractions falter, ekphrasis, informed by more flexible figural thought, should allow a shadowing of the visual through the verbal: to trace metamorphic shifts, cultural connotations, imbrications, tensions, not to collapse them. My approach surely also evidences the struggle of critical language as such to account for the experience of the moving image, to allow for leaps that one must risk to rise to the object at hand, to meet the figural complexity of the face, whose meanings never really settle. The facial image lends itself, then, to poetic, especially synecdochal systems that dynamize the relation of part and whole, singularity and substitution, circulation, conjunction, projection—​inward to self, or soul; outward to the transcendent, to the divine, to the other. For even as the face is so present and concrete in its address, it also makes the highest claims. Jean-​ Luc Nancy’s discussion of “The Image—​t he Distinct” is surely modeled on what is experienced, paradigmatically, in the facial image:

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The intimate is expressed in it: but this expression must be understood in the most literal sense. It is not the translation of a state of the soul: it is the soul itself that presses and pushes on the image; or rather the image is this pressure, this animation and emotion.4

Like Nancy’s notion of the image as the distinct, figure—​a semantic variant of face—​is distinguished against a ground: visual shape, image, and effigy reciprocate in this concept with discursive and poetic form. Erich Auerbach shows the Latin figura to have a more concrete, embodied, more dynamic and transformative bearing than forma, noting that “throughout Ovid figura is mobile, changeable, multiform, and deceptive”—​a ll metamorphic attributes that are, it seems to me, quite apt for the cinema. Figura thus also evolves as an opening of the particular image—​by allusion, by comparison, or indeed by prefiguration—​to time and to history. 5 The dynamic transmutation of meaning in Auerbach’s figura—​predicated on a back and forth, retroactive and projective movement between specific events or concrete images, the consciousness of evolving historical relations, and the recognition of the incompleteness of the task, its fulfillment always-​yet-​to-​come—​i nforms my way of thinking through the facial image: as dispositif.

AN UR-​I MAGE For its supreme visuality and its intimation of an interior life, for its singularity and its variability, for its claim of identity but also for its reticence, and for its mystery—​t he human face is a paradigm. An alpha and omega of images, it evolves and demarcates our consciousness, from our mother’s face—​t he earliest that, ideally, focalizes into our view to center and organize

4  Jean-​Luc Nancy, “The Image—​the Distinct,” The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 6–​7. 5  I elaborate on the play of face, visage, and figure in Chapter Two. On etymologies and variant uses of the term, see Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–​76; I quote from p. 23. A collection of conference papers surrounding the notion of figure was edited by Jacques Aumont, L’invention de la figure humaine: Le cinéma, l’humain et l’inhumain (Paris: Cinemathèque française, 1995), see especially Philippe Dubois’s contribution, “Les face-​à-​face du corps et de l’image,” 179–​90. Among recent discussions of the figural in cinematic thought, see D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), which develops the theoretical possibilities of the figural as a way of surpassing the Enlightenment legacy of opposing the verbal and the visual. Rodowick sees the value of the figural underscored in the age of cinema and especially digital media that are, themselves, hybrid through and through, undermining altogether the differentiation of media. It will become apparent that my own appeal to the figural throughout this book, traversing verbal and visual domains, emphasizes the productive interference of image and language as radicalized with respect to the face. Nicole Brenez’s work in, for instance, De la figure en general et du corps en particulier (Brussels: De Boeck, 1988), has inspired a movement toward figural film criticism, whereby formal-​stylistic and historical insight build on a comparative study of paradigmatic figures in the broad sense, navigating between corporeal or plastic forms and structures of feeling. Roughly contemporary is Igal Bursztyn’s insightful book, Panim ke-​sdeh krav (Face as Battlefield; Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990). Subtitled Film-​history of the Israeli face, and informed by broader film-​historical engagements with the human face, Bursztyn (himself a filmmaker) reads Israeli cinema through this paradigmatic figure, using it also to reflect on Israeli culture more generally.



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the world around it—​to the death’s head that waits upon our own countenance in the mirror, and upon the faces of other mortals we love. The face sustains the gaze; it compels our attention and animates our responsiveness, our recognition. Absorptive and projective, its unique conjunction of centered unity and complexity is matched by a commanding visibility in the face’s superior position on the body, while its register of motion is the most nuanced—​even the slightest change can be intensely expressive—​a nd is epitomized in the eyes’ singular texture and reflectiveness. The face situates four of the five senses: with the ears as parenthetical markers of sort, and the organs of breath and speech—​a nd of the kiss—​f ront and center. In a way, these sensory loci—​absorbing and permeating the world, extending perception, directing consciousness—​appear to bridge the sensual and the intellectual, body and soul. A confounding spin of the morphological and the metaphysical, of the visible and the invisible, of object and subject informs the contemplation of the human face and is refracted, to a greater or lesser degree, by affirmation or by negation, in its image. The face is naked: it expresses, it is open, it opens. But it is also a mask: the Latin, persona, could suggest that the face is where the person begins. As Georg Simmel put it, the human face at once veils and unveils the soul. 6 Its charge in the history of the visual arts is so great that the facial image is sometimes synonymous with the charge of image making as such: the survival of the dead in the mummy and the mummy portrait; a token of authority, power, and value on busts and coins; the incarnation of God in the visage of Christ and the iconic myths of the sacred face (Veronica’s veil, the vera icona), whose iconoclastic prohibitions prove by negation the power of the face; the humanist portrait where the face proclaims itself as the sensory vector of subjectivity that condenses and declares biographical and social signs; the physiognomic codification of features and expressions so easily abused by institutions and regimes; the modernist effacement, objectification, fragmentation or emptying-​out of the human figure; photography’s devastations and compensations–​these are some touchstones in a weighty cultural history of the face with which the cinema has had to contend (Figs. 0.1–0.3).7 But the cinema has also been understood to salvage the human face: its capacity to register, amplify, and perpetuate the face’s expressive movements—​t he life of the face unfolding in time—​is without equal. The face on film, and its progeny across media—​in news broadcasts, presidential debates, interrogations and interviews, talk-​show confessions, Facebook, Facetime, Instagram—​r isk ubiquity, interchangeability, promiscuous circulation to the point of exhaustion. Has the face been debased, devalued, over-​cathected or fetishized in its innumerable media avatars? 6  See Simmel’s “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face,” originally published in 1901. Georg Simmel, 1858–​1918, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 1959), 281. My discussion, above, joining the literal or physical—​t he position of the head on the top of the body—​a nd something about our habitual way of “anchoring” the person in their primary-​representative part, the face, resonates with the opening of Bataille’s definition of “Mouth”: “The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals. … But man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one’s attention; it is the eyes or the forehead that play the meaningful role of an animal’s jaws.” Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–​1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 59. 7  For a succinct exposition of the face’s transmutations in visual culture see John Welchman, “Face(t): Notes on Faciality,” Artforum (November 1988): 131–​8 . Paolo Bertetto maps semiotic and philosophical issues relating to the formation of the cinematic subject via a comparison of the traditional portrait and the close-​up in “Il soggetto e lo sguardo nel ritratto e nel primo piano,” Bianco e Nero 547 (2003).

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FIGURE 0.1:  Egyptian mummy portrait,

FIGURE 0.2:  Roman imperial coin depicting

Hawara, Egypt, Roman Period (ca. 55–70 ad). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Hadrian (Augustus). Photo: Dirty Old Coins, LLC.

FIGURE 0.3:  Hans Memling, Saint Veronica [obverse] (ca. 1470–1475). Samuel H. Kress Collection. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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FIGURE 0.4:  Daguerreotype portrait of Andrew Jackson (1844–1845). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

The compensations that photography and motion pictures have offered for modernist defigurations are in fact formidable and persisting—​certainly not as short-​lived as the daguerreotype in which, Walter Benjamin considered, “in the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time. This is what gives them their melancholy and incomparable beauty.”8 The daguerreotype has no negative that would readily lend itself to multiple, indefinite reproduction (Fig. 0.4). The substantial time of exposure and, thus, the sitting required for the image to register effect, perhaps, a sense of intensified temporality—​it might seem to capture thereby something of the subject’s unfolding into the image. This, the delicacy of the process, the dusky mirroring effect of the daguerreotype artifact—​typically a small, hand-​held object with its own cover or box—​must inform Benjamin’s definition of the aura. This “last entrenchment” of an 8  See “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings et  al. (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 27.

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auratic web of space and time in an effect of distance is nested here in a transitional zone between technological reproducibility, automatic genesis, and the unique image of a human face as if magically returning our gaze from within the daguerreotype—​as from a lake, or a mirror which reflects at the same time the light and movement of the external, living, present world of the viewer. Miriam Hansen further suggests ways in which Benjamin’s aura also comes to encompass a sense of “futurity” embedded in the photograph’s mediatory properties and in its mobilizing of the gaze.9 During such prolonged exposure, the (self-​) consciousness of the daguerreotype-​sitter confronting their image-​in-​the-​making and confronting, as well, the artist-​photographer, perpetuated something of the traditional portrait’s phenomenological constitution. It is as if a cumulative inter-​subjectivity, effected by the face-​to-​face of apparatus and sitter, is deposited in the portrait—​pictorial, sculptural, photographic—​and comes to stand, indeed, for the longer biographical and historical time, for the experience, the life of the person that has brought him or her hither. But one cannot remain locked in this particular early photographic process whose meaning would, in any case, alter with time. If the extended sitting dictated by early photographic portraiture is comparable, somehow, to the subject’s confrontation with the movie camera, instantaneous photography—​itself a condition for the advent of cinema—​brings a whole other temporal and phenomenological texture to the snapshot portrait: above all, its capacity to elude the subject’s consciousness (as a matter of principle if not always in practice). These media in their various applications, affording duration or denying it, open up so many ways of possessing or cutting through the subject’s time, eliciting different forms of consciousness more or less manifest in the image, still or moving. What we gather from these cursory considerations are the potentialities of Benjamin’s braiding of space and time in the experience of the image: if the aura shies away from mechanical (or any) reproduction and eludes sheer visual spectacle, it nevertheless beckons as an effect of temporality, as “optical unconscious” of the fleeting expression cutting through hitherto unknown dimensions of the person, or through the face’s reemergence in extended or otherwise altered temporal order— like ​t he expression’s dawning, its coming into being. The projection of pastness and futurity in the unfolding present—the temporalized space of the moving image—unravels a subject caught in a weave of the visible and the absent, the ephemeral or contingent, and the time of return. These may not suffice, but they nevertheless befit auratic experience. Especially in regard to the human face, the cinema carries certain powers that render it more resilient than what indifferent mechanical reproducibility—​lending itself both to avant-​ garde and to kitsch—​m ight have seemed to allow. Positing the face as the cinema’s point of origin and its most subtle register Jacques Aumont proposes, in Du visage au cinéma, that it is through its faces that the moving image has been able to compensate for photographic modernity’s mechanistic and objectifying thrust—​to resurrect what still photography had stifled.10 This capacity is not wedded, in principle, to the proclivity for mimetic realism: neither photography nor the cinema evolved strictly as handmaidens to life-​l ike painting, even if this did turn out to be among their uses. Likewise, a careful reading of André Bazin reveals that what is at stake for 9  See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 336–​75. See also Diarmuid Costello’s discussion of the “Little History of Photography” in “Aura, Face, Photography: Re-​reading Benjamin Today,” Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 164–​8 4. 10  Jacques Aumont, Du visage au cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/​Cahiers du cinéma, 1992).



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him is not really verisimilitude, but the photographic power to provide “a magic identity substitute”—​not “likeness” but, as Hans Belting would say, “presence”: an ontological claim comparable to that of archaic and ritual forms like the Egyptian mummy or the Byzantine icon, whose professing of presence is distinguished from questions of resemblance.11 Could it also mean that one might locate a margin of cinematic experience that intimates presence without actually depicting a face by feats of verisimilitude or, say, capturing a “realistic” expression? Might one trace a cultic, auratic charge of a gaze that compels attention and recognition through the spatio-​temporal weave of the image, its layering play of presence-​absence—​as does a face? If the human face stands out in the visual field, it is because it is not an object or surface form like any other. What addresses us in a face, as in its image, is unbound by any particular objective physical form, facet, or expression. Emmanuel Levinas would say it is the Other’s call for recognition. And while I would not discard the physical face, and remain committed to its image, the sense of address is delivered outward of the face. Non-​object, abundantly familiar yet singular and inexhaustible, the human face thus also stands as model for the auratic core of the artwork.12 Jean-​Luc Marion identifies the potential iconic charge of the modernist pictorial surface in a way that illuminates this. Even as there is no “reverse” side to painting, Cézanne’s achievement can be understood in his way of letting the thing in all its sides appear and impress us with the force of an event. This is how, Marion suggests, what we see can be said to happen to us. Cézanne’s landscapes of the Mont Sainte-​Victoire are a supreme example of such a totality of an image which, in Marion’s terms, transpires as a saturated and saturating phenomenon.13 It is a facial conception of the world that awakens our attention and our recognition. Our gaze permeates the image and is thereby permeated by it. Such perception is therefore unstable; its intensities are not equally distributed: just as not all faces are the same to us, it draws us to some forbidding limits. The face is thus easily exploited on either end of a polarized axis of surface and depth, material “construct” and “essence.” An inflated use of the face as transcendental currency itself risks dissolving its singularity, its unique corporeality, its distinct address as image. Even as one hopes to locate in the human countenance a force of resistance to instrumentalizing and reification, the expressive, empathetic, or spiritualizing suggestion of the face is, to be sure, 11  Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (1967; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 9–​16. Bazin argues that photography’s momentous intervention was to “free Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and [allow] it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.” This autonomy—​achieved in the “spiritual” reality that Bazin sees epitomized in medieval art but also, he implies, with certain modernist practices like abstraction—​is ultimately also the aesthetic goal of photography and cinematography as they realize their ontological bind with questions of presence, identity, and duration. 12  In “On the Art of the Future,” The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15–​27, Susan Stewart develops in similar terms, and most compellingly, a comparison between the face of the other and the work of art, allowing for the fundamental ethical orientation, the political power, and pleasure of the art work—​i ndependently of its “content”—​where Levinas would not admit the objective being of the image as compatible with his ethics. 13  Jean-​Luc Marion discussed painting—​from “the icon of the invisible God” to Courbet, Cézanne, Klee, and Rothko—​ in these terms in a seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Winter 2014. His many writings elaborate on the idea of visibility, appearance, saturated phenomena, the icon, the idol, and the image in such books as The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

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itself easily commodified. On this end, self and world, particular and universal, face and soul flip into each other and risk plunging the film critic into the pathetic and other fallacies.14 The revelatory investment of nature with a gaze, the colonizing of the world by a universalized subjectivity, has sometimes taken one absolute human form—​white, male, Christ-​like, and so forth—​a nd could not be sustained as an unchanging, idealized measure of faciality. No particular correlation of subjectivity (or “spirituality”) and the face can guarantee plenitude in a post-​sacred universe. Nostalgia for some such revelatory plenitude still weighs upon motion pictures when, with the best intentions, it seeks to confirm a universal human integrity of the world. It mars, for instance, some of Béla Balázs’s early utopic formulations of the ways in which the movie camera synthesizes all human difference in a universalized (by which he means Western) psyche. It drowns Carl Theodor Dreyer’s expressive close-​ups in accounts that see in them pious evidence of God in the world, or that fuse a sometimes foggy-​qua-​spiritual gaze with the effects of atmosphere (or, simply, the weather) in Andrei Tarkovsky. One is wary of such instant redemptive endowments of faciality in the world. But perhaps some mythical streak is still necessary for survival in a disenchanted modernity. How else would our gaze meet the world—​d isjointed, refracted, mediated as it must be in the technological, automatic, moving image? At certain historical moments in particular—​as we shall see when summoning the facial concepts of the 1920s—​the cinema was understood to endow a face-​like expressivity upon other objects small and big: hands, plants, houses, street corners, entire landscapes are sometimes described as having a face—​which also translates as being, or having, character or soul. As figure, or indeed as instrument of expressivity, the face routinely strives beyond its morphological coordinates: the reaction shot and the shot–​reverse shot are only the most common ways in which the face can extend expression beyond its own perimeter, most obviously as its gaze is (actually or virtually) oriented toward other objects, as it traverses the space of a shot and inflects another. It need not look out—​in fiction film, this is the obvious taboo—​so as to refract its expressive charge and its address to the spectator. But even when expression is apparently vacated or displaced, even when the face is de-​sacralized in avant-​garde practices and leveled in modernist grids, even in the weightlessness of zeroes and ones in the digital matrix, the powers of the human face are so formidable that—​w ith the slightest invocation, with a minute twitch, or a temporal accent that appeals to attention—​it summons yet again the magnetic fields of faciality. Against the depleted, cool virtuality of the media, mere flickers of expression suffice to exploit, if only for an instant, all the riches—​t he gravity—​t hat the face has inherited, to turn expressive nuance and intimacy inside out and expend them, promiscuously, across glossy spreads, vast billboards, or in public sculptures (Figs. 0.5–0.6).15 14  Neither John Ruskin’s mid-​n ineteenth century refutation of the “pathetic fallacy” in Modern Painters IV, nor the New Critics’ critique of the “expressive” and “affective” fallacies in the mid-​t wentieth century (Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Verbal Icon) could put to rest these fantasies even in contemporary culture. 15  In an essay extending his important scholarship on actors, Francesco Pitassio parses the tensions between singularity and reproducibility, between the desire invoked by the star-​image—​a desire that he sees predicated on indexical values of photographic/​c inematographic contingency—​versus the manipulability of digital technologies insofar as these impact the status of the actor. While I certainly acknowledge the massive digital anxieties visited upon the actor’s image, I am not quite convinced that, on the level of spectatorial experience, such opposition necessarily always holds; it must be studied in view of particular cases—​a nd indeed accomplished and exceptional ones—​rather than as a rule, a priori and technologically determined. See Pitassio, “Natali di stele. Di qualche questione genetica e divistica,” Ágalma 22 (October 2011): 48–​59.



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FIGURE 0.5:  Vienna (2013). Photo: Federico Passi.

FIGURE 0.6:  Jaume Plensa, Crown Fountain (2004) –​detail from digital public sculpture in Millennium Park, Chicago. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​VEGAP, Madrid. Image courtesy of Art Resource, NY.

THE FACE AGAINST THE IMAGE Even when the human face—​as we thought we knew it, or that it can be known—​is displaced, fragmented, or emptied out, its efficacy might be sustained in another order. For the face is not only, and not wholly, contained in the image. In some of its most compelling instances it does

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not offer access or the illusion of access: it is not an open book, nor an icon that inspires adulation; it extends no humanist assurance of individuality and autonomy. In the same period with which we are chiefly concerned such perceptions of the face in general and in the cinema in particular are debated in philosophical discourses that have garnered much attention. For Levinas the face cannot be contained and resists the “cold splendor” of the image: in this somewhat iconophobic perspective, it must be completely distinguished from objective form and surface in the visual arts. The face is construed here in an oblique relationship to vision: this is what affords its ethical charge. As prime ethical figure the face contests, or refracts, any perceptual form that would delimit it, and preserves thereby the infinity which is the Other.16 Can such freedom of the face be signaled from within the image? On a different planet, it seems, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also associated the face with the operations of language and thought to challenge the facializing systems by which we impose ourselves—​our own image, our individuation, the economic forms of power and of our all-​consuming signs—​on everything we confront.17 In this system, the face is not a visual incarnation of subjectivity, nor an envelope of the “person.” Rather, the “white wall/​black hole” machine of faciality engenders subjectivity in the first place, and thereby inscribes signification in a rhizomatic universe. Even for iconophiles and cinephiles, the visuality of the face is, in fact, equivocal. While we take it to be the most nuanced register of an inner life, the face is also sensed as a barrier. More than the sum of its expressions, the face communicates only up to a point: often it is more, or else less, than legible. Complex or muted, it confounds the cognitive range of analysis. As a strong image, it retains a margin of illegibility that interferes with physiognomic, narrative, or otherwise discursive codes. This constitutive illegibility of the face might render it inscrutable to the point of hostility: we readily imagine this when in close range in daily rides on public elevators or buses. But the illegible face can also be sensed as ineffable, inward, mysterious, or absorbed. At once mask and window—​for who could sanely survive without both together—an “orgy of disproportion,” as Michael Taussig calls it, between surface and depth stirs the dynamic of de-​fetishization and re-​enchantment, the ebb and tide of our everyday modernity.18 We sometimes rush to embrace ineffable depths, imagining that human meaning, and humanity itself, is somehow available behind these eyes. But perhaps more often, now, we sense the face’s opacity in the extreme: the multiplications, substitutions, enlargements, and reductions that we 16  The key chapter that Emmanuel Levinas devotes directly to the face in Totality and Infinity (originally published in 1961) questions the relation between the face as seen, and the face as it claims a special, non-objective, visual relationship: “Is not the face given to vision? How does the epiphany as a face determine a relationship different from that which characterized all our sensible experience?”. Here, vision is a detour of consciousness which de-​objectifies surface, grasping it as interior, and distinguishes it from all other surfaces—​for example the architectural façade, whose “cold splendor and silence… does not deliver itself. It captivates by its grace as by magic, but does not reveal itself.” Conversely, the face’s transcendence “cuts across the vision of forms.” Ultimately, for Levinas, the true medium of the face, which figures the relation with the Other, is speech. Emmanuel Levinas, “Exteriority and the Face,” section III of Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), quotations from pp. 187 and 193, respectively. 17  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Year Zero: Faciality” in A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia (originally published in 1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167–​91. 18  See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), especially 223–​5.



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encounter in the crowd, in the media, may be disconcerting, even alienating. But such opacity might also be comforting insofar as it preserves the privacy and intimacy of the face, guarding it from the violence of the public eye. And so the mask, with its range of social and magical effects—​shielding, screening, entrancing—​returns.19 The depth and urgency of these concerns was acutely felt in the post-​war, post-​classical cinema with which this book is chiefly concerned. The 1920s enchantments with the nuanced richness of the human face on film must have been, in part, a symptomatic response to crises of industrial modernity and its technological images as well as those traumatic visions of gas masks and prosthetics of the the First World War. But what remains of the human image—​how to speak of the glamour of movie stars, projections of beauty on vast screens, the cultivation of glossy surfaces—​in the wake of the unimaginable phenomena surrounding the Second World War? Questions of the face are concomitant with questions about the survival of art, about the possibility of aesthetic experience—​the very possibility of expression, of inter-​subjectivity as such after Auschwitz. While I offer no novel thesis in this regard, and no sealed historical argument, my set of concerns does clearly correspond to the period extending, roughly, from the wake of World War II to the rise of digital imaging, which coincided with the first dissolutions of the Cold War.20 These concerns also bear, finally, upon our time, where they are often joined with the transactions and consolations of identity constructions in the culture at large. A substantial body of films persist in exploring, testing, and narrativizing the human face—​at times by allegorical reflection on the cinema’s own technological processes, digital and otherwise. Questions of identification and legibility of the other are perpetuated not only in art-​house and art-​gallery efforts but also in mainstream films that shore up humanist remnants and air anxieties of representation that breathe into late-​modern conditions of the person, fictions of the face, and the technologies and powers of its image. From James Cameron’s Terminator 2 (1991) to his Avatar (2009), from Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) to Face/​Off (John Woo, 1997)—​so much of this work builds on the great old questions of faith and doubt, of identity and individuation, the existence of others, and the media by which we can, and cannot, know them (Figs. 0.7–0.8).21 19 In Screening the Face (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a book rich with insights, Paul Coates moves through a wide range of cases to explore what he terms in the Introduction: “the face, the mask and the Thing.” While I share some of his theoretical sources and concerns, Coates works through concepts and especially through his examples quite differently. Our books might be read as complimentary—​particularly in view of the fact that Coates devotes his closest attention to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a film that I had chosen to avoid. 20  An evocative work on the face in contemporary media is Therese Davis’s The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition, and Spectatorship (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2004). Davis juxtaposes the alluring faces of early motion pictures with those of contemporary mass media. She proposes to identify and re-​establish a domain of mystery, or “unrecognizability” in television (primarily) and related media events and personalities: the image of Princess Diana is among her most striking examples. The filmic medium and its history constitute, however, more of a backdrop rather than proper object of study in Davis’s book. 21  I list only few mainstream examples here, spanning the past 25 years and involving impressive special effects through the shift to the digital. One could consider many others, as does Jean-​M arie Samocki in “Nouvelle fictions du visage,” Trafic 38 (Summer 2001): 93–​113. Samocki’s lament on the presumed decline of the face—​which he calls “the last frontier” of the human in American cinema—​confuses, it seems to me, a discourse on the death of cinema and what I would consider, instead, a compelling engagement with the “post-​human” condition in so many of the films under consideration. The way in which struggles across the frontier of the human take place in the arena of the face does not signal decline, it seems to me, but genuine and anxious concern.

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FIGURE 0.7:  Flesh-​metal-​soul: Terminator 2 (James

FIGURE 0.8:  Non-​individuation: twinning effects

Cameron, 1991) –​frame enlargement.

in Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) –​frame enlargement.

Even with expressionless cyborgs as protagonists, the strongest films articulate very well a continued anxiety about “the human” by way of questioning or indeed assaulting the face, whose digital transmorphing is both a marvel of special effects and a more or less explicit theme. These are the descendants of quainter humanoid types rooted far back in the cinematic imaginary: Wegener’s Golem, the robot Maria, the Frankenstein monster (Figs. 0.9–0.11). We weigh their cyborg masks—​actual, made-​up, or mimicked—​against the more or less sensitive human faces that interact with them, or that act and may be recognized through them. The manifest expressive work of the particular actor’s features when divided between his several faces in those narratives of conflicted identity so well adapted to the screen—​as with Frederic March in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), or Jerry Lewis in his 1963 The Nutty Professor (Figs. 0.12–0.15)—​uses the face as dramatic arena in which a range of cinematic effects battle with the familiar face of the star. Across the divide of the World War, they span from black-​a nd-​white ​expressionist monster horror to pop iconographies that have interiorized the lessons of advertising and hallucinatory cartoon corporeality. These are faces at once possessed and removed, convulsing between fits of hysteria and feats of control—​t he actor’s virtuosity accommodates both, as in the supreme example of Lewis’s sado-​masochistic play with his own face and body allegorizing, finally, his own auteur/​performer, subject/​object rupture. 22 A range of spectacularized practices of the face has been adopted also by the rarified creatures of the art gallery to stage (at times, rather too obviously) physiognomic categories, social conventions, and mimetic-​expressive fallacies—​f rom the physical manipulations of skin, flesh, bone, and ligaments in the broadcast surgical passions of Saint Orlan (since 1990) to the trained muscular gesticulations magnified in Bill Viola’s Passions series (since 2000) (Figs. 0.16–0.17). These extend to the moving image a genealogy that had reached its previous peaks in photographic history with Duchenne de Boulogne’s electric manipulations of his paralyzed patients

22  In “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis’s Life as a Man,” Camera Obscura 17 (May 1988): 194–​2 05, Scott Bukatman writes most insightfully on Lewis as often split through diametrical oppositions of masculine–​feminine, active–​passive, controlled–​hysteric, etc.—​oppositions narrativized, first, through his partnership with Dean Martin, and then reflected through his own range as auteur-​performer.



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FIGURE 0.9:  The Golem (Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, 1920) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 0.10:  Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 0.11:  Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) –​ frame enlargement.

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FIGURES 0.12–​0.13:  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) –​frame enlargements.

 

FIGURES 0.14–​0.15:  The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, 1963) –​frame enlargements.

FIGURE 0.16:  Orlan, Sewing and Stitching, 4th Surgery-​Performance, titled Successful Operation, 8th December, 1991, Paris. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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FIGURE 0.17:  Contortions-​Passions in Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished (2000).​Color video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room.​Projected image size: 4 ft 7 in × 7 ft 11 in. 15:20 min.

and in Charcot’s theater of hysteria (Figs. 0.18–0.19). 23 The human face is here externalized to the limits of its own plasticity. Physiognomic formulae fastened to sheer plastic form are insinuated into the free-​play, zero-​g ravity technological fictions of the culture, which now questions the face as a unique, essential, or secure entity. Yet the juggling of masks—​mannerist, cosmetic, digital—​itself re-​produces the anxiety that launched the process in the first place. In both popular and ambitious endeavors, legibility is then courted for reassurance: it prevails also in those cases which involve, if anything, only limited and rather tame facial ambiguity, just slightly complicated by the play of irony—​t hat common, and somewhat exhausted post-​ modern trope. The desire to anchor oneself, and to know others, in an image persists through these transmutations, whose limits expand constantly. Some recent science fiction and horror films—​l ike Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)—​ dramatize these anxieties and desires, not only in their plots, but in the expressive work of their predominantly female protagonists. The face is thus sustained as the critical test case when basic empathetic responses to human, almost-​human, pseudo-​or post-​human subjectivity are challenged, as in the most advanced digital processing animation. Artistry, technology, and business have sometimes been found to weigh against one another, as on the slopes of the Uncanny Valley. The concept refers to the sudden dip in the graph of spectator response to robots or to digitally animated faces when distinctions blur: an animated face can be charming and can even inspire empathy when more or less life-​l ike—​t he range is very wide—​by way of form, movement, and/​or expressive mimicry. One would have thought that with identification and empathy—​insofar as they translate to box-​office receipts—​t he more life-​l ike, the better, yet when an animated facial image comes 23  See G.-​B. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, ed. and trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Georges Didi-​Huberman’s discussion of Charcot as a sort of mad artist-​scientist in the Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

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FIGURE 0.18: Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne performing facial electrostimulus experiments. From his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; où, Analyse électro-​ physiologique de l’expression des passions (1862). Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

FIGURE 0.19:  Hysterical Yawning. Photographs by Albert Londe (ca. 1890). First published in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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FIGURE 0.20:  Tripped into the Uncanny Valley: Mars Needs Moms (Simon Wells for Walt Disney Pictures and ImageMovers Digital, 2011) –​frame enlargement.

too close to a naturally moving cinematographic face, while not definitively distinguishable from it, a deep level of discomfort kicks in, which animators of commercial films want to avoid. The most notorious case was Mars Needs Moms (Simon Wells for Walt Disney Pictures and ImageMovers Digital, 2011), where the joining of motion-​capture technologies, CGI, and 3D tripped the film’s facial effects into the Uncanny Valley, then understood as a major cause for the film’s box-​office failure, among the worst in film history (Fig. 0.20).24 Even in de-​idealized, post-​humanist, and “post-​human” spheres, the problematic of the image—​its affective and its social roles, its symbolic and cultural effects, its transmutations and its survival—​t hus continues to be strongly identified with the face and to be figured by it. Both art and commerce resort, as quick solutions to age-​old questions, to the consolations of identity constructions, barely disguising consumerist “choices” that might be borrowed, purchased, recycled, and dispensed with at will. Yet the singular binding of concealment and disclosure in the human face still gives the lie to the wishful thinking that we can be entirely put together, at will, out of a repertoire of identities fashioned, borrowed, assembled out of, and recycled back through, the narratives of our time. Should we not, rather, be relieved that the faces that conceal and reveal us, our masks and our nakedness—​like the persons, both ourselves and others, that we must finally make do with—​a re not totally subject to our control, and our responsibility? If only it were skin deep or wholly epidermal; if only the layering and variability of expression could be accounted for by a limited set of communicative codes, in ways that felt true to experience; if the face could be approached with some stable physiognomic or syntactic model, as if it were a solid shell of signifiers—​resistant to contingency and, indeed, to the ravages of time, as both cosmetic and digital enterprises fantasize—​t hen one might settle for a lexicon of expressive grimaces, for a technological and stylistic mapping of the cinematic close-​up or the reaction shot, the developments of film stock, color, and the significant contribution of Max Factor to cinema history. Such avenues of research beckon to 24  The Uncanny Valley is the subject of numerous studies. See a summary of some of the debates and key examples by Margaret Talbot, “Pixel Perfect,” The New Yorker (April 28, 2014), accessed online July 25, 2015.

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scholarship:  material and economic history, the impact of media and technology on cinematic style, or the cultural and ideological underpinnings of film language—​a ll are necessary but insufficient to an understanding of what really intrigues us in the facial image and how deeply the cinema has delved into it. This book is, therefore, not a morphological or etiological study of, say, the close-​up as cinematic articulation, nor a symptomatic account categorizing myriad film styles across cultural moments. While I devote substantial time to the description and analysis of sequences, this is not geared toward a systemic locking-​off of motivation and interpretation: I am not concerned with the “reading of facial expressions”—​ which I  perceive as scientifically sound as palm reading. One should always mind the gap between the face and any narrowly formal, graphic coordinates of its image, as well as the gap between the face and coded, lexical systems of interpretation—​between the face and language, in short. Bazin did not mince his words when he rejected outright, in a discussion of the child protagonist of Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), just such habits of reading motivation or intention: “The fact is, simply, that the signs of play and the signs of death may be the same on a child’s face.” 25 Just how much can one infer and presume to know—​f rom the knotting of brows and the quivering of a lip, from the dramatic play of light and shade, from editorial juxtapositions—​t he self “behind” the face? Can one even speak of interiority in an image? Yet one will not let go of questions of human expression, consciousness, attention, reflection. In most cases that matter to me, legibility is only courted to a point, then it is disturbed, diverted, and contested, and the very questions of inwardness and exteriority come into play as on a Möbius strip that belies their opposition. The cinema, in its finest instances, teaches us to look intently and, at the same time, to recognize what we cannot know by this look. All my chapters lead, one way or another, to discerning patterns of interference between seeing and knowing—​a nd their equivocation in the facial image. Innumerable films can inform our discussion of these ideas—​readers will certainly imagine different cases on their own. But only a handful of films, each radical in its way, sufficed to occupy and indeed challenge me in the subsequent chapters of this book, to privilege and deepen particular lines of thought, allowing me, at the same time, to contain my inquiry. By different routes, each of these films allowed me to think through the face, and arrive at a recognition of its equivocations in the moving image: the ways in which it is exteriorized, intensified, and withdrawn; the ways in which it sets what we see against what we know. I have been drawn to films that explore and exploit the human face to elicit our hermeneutic impulse, but that immediately complicate this call and deflect the desire without stifling it: films in which facial legibility is always courted and deferred, where expressivity is irreducible to a name or a code, or is otherwise resistant, where it is withdrawn or else crystalized in such way that the face becomes its own barrier. The power of the face is nevertheless sustained—​not because of “what it expresses” but because it does not give itself away, so to speak. When the excesses of “performance” are exhausted; when discursive constructions, the signs and coordinates of “identity” break at

25  André Bazin, “Germany Year Zero,” Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. and trans. Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 124. Bazin criticizes in this essay not only fallacies of interpretation but also the presumptuous practice of certain filmmakers who seem particularly exploitative with regard to children’s faces. The illegibility of the face is, for Bazin, bound up with the inherent ambiguity of reality that he valorizes in neorealist cinema.



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the seams; when the impositions of the apparatus are taken to the limits; when disparities are frankly revealed between actor and role; when the mask fractures in plain sight but is not discarded—​processes I explore, one way or another, in every chapter—​t hen some singular intimation of the person might transpire through all its mediations, and address the viewer. In all these ways, our appreciation of the face on film is not, strictly, a formal matter nor only a historical one—​even as these considerations continually inform our experience of the facial image. My post-​classical periodizing suggests that the cinematic face thinks and rethinks itself comparatively—​by looking back and forth in time, over or across genres and modes, film–​ cultural precedents, and the transformations of media. But this does not transpire as in a hall of mirrors. I return, therefore, throughout this book to the situation of the spectator, whose experiences—social, historical, perceptual, affective, ethical—​in the movie theater and in the world are, somehow, of a piece. These considerations inform my occasional appeal to notions of the “person.” This old-​fashioned term might be deemed a symptom of my own humanist residues, and might also differentiate the work carried out in this book from academic discourses on affect. Affect theory drives much of the current discussion of the face in cinema and the arts, partly in Deleuze’s footsteps: its appeal to primal perceptions and corporeal intensities, and their implications for a radical dismantling of social and political forms, is not inconsistent with my interest in the challenge of the face to language, and with some of my phenomenological turns. I  remain closer, however, to film-​critical traditions, and to Jacques Aumont’s understanding that the face is simultaneously a film-​h istorical register and a driving force—​a n understanding that hinges on some continued faith in vital myths of human singularity and commonality that sustain our lives. This understanding cultivates the lessons of cinema to deepen our experience of the face, and of the face-​to-​face—​perhaps even more important now, in an era of internet meetings, distant teachings, and Skype parties. One stands to comprehend these practices better from the example of cinema, which itself draws on earlier traditions and even archaic facial models that its inherent modernity would otherwise seem to sublimate. Even where historical situations, social reality, technology, and its host of both radical and reactionary practices throw such faith into crisis, some basic humanist investment of an ethic-​w ithin-​a n-​aesthetic perception may be necessary to make an idea of the face—​a nd the faces of others—​not just possible, but livable in the first place.

ITINERARIES An intensive engagement with the face as moving image, and indeed as dispositif, informed cinematic thought in the 1920s, especially in Europe: this was the first direct formulation in film history of the order of questions that I explore in this book. They have not expired, as some moments of academic film studies seemed to imagine; they persist and beg for reconsideration in light of new technologies and shifting media practices, and in view of historical situations that have thrown that earlier cinematic modernity itself into crisis. The early flourishes of the cinema’s self-​consciousness—​when it was propelled to think seriously for the first time through the potentialities, the effects and implications of the medium—​were bound up with developments in film language and the classical maturation of narrative cinema, even as the expressive

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force of the moving image always seemed to exceed its taming institutional forms. Questions of the technological and the human, of experience and discourse, of image and language, were quickly understood to be of grandiose implications: how does consciousness transpire in the moving image? How does the moving image prompt consciousness? What does it add to, or elicit in, the perceptual field, unfolding in time?26 How was the facial image—​as inherited by the cultures of modernity—​to survive its technological incarnations, and how does it pull through its late-​modern iterations? The basic questions of expressivity—​f ragmented, remediated, in excess or in withdrawal—​were already in place and in flux in these earlier flourishes of moving-​i mage culture. They resurface with an intensified consciousness of pastness, of loss, of historicity in the post-​classical era with which we are concerned—​not only with the strata of film history itself, but with the aftershocks of World War II and its implications for an understanding of the technological image. How did such questions of the cinematic face then evolve through the increasingly hyperbolic spin of consumer and media culture, and how do they further mutate today through the permeation of social and private life by the digital image? Chapter One traces an itinerary through these 1920s film-​historical and theoretical milestones. I re-​read here, sympathetically, passages from the writings of Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein and also explore the striking physiognomic aspects of Sergei Eisenstein’s sensual-​figural thought. Some recent critical and theoretical reflection about these facial concepts of the 1920s—​especially on the part of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Aumont, and Mary Ann Doane—​help guide my own inquiry in these pages. At the heart of this chapter I delve into Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)—​which first seemed an inevitable signpost and then unraveled as still the most productive point at which to confront hard questions of visuality and legibility: the face interrogated and impenetrable, defiant in its own flesh, and as filmic image. In that transitional point of film history, Dreyer radicalized the camera’s confrontation with the human face to such an extent that it interfered with the ostensible narrative of transcendence and plunged the moving image back into the thick of life, the reality of the body’s losing battle with death. Since I am concerned with honing a conception of facial dispositif that can be sustained through the post-​classical cinema that is my main object in this book, I telescope in the last part of Chapter One some of the principal film-​historical touchstones in-​between: the major implications of synchronized sound—​specifically the human voice as it inflects the cinematic face—​ the impact of color, and the phenomenon of glamour in classical cinema, which interests me for both its phenomenological and its anthropological charge. In defiance of the studio-​fabricated star image, neorealism’s anti-​glamour constituted, in the wake of war, an exemplary historical and film-​historical response, which should itself be understood within a broader tradition. Some of its variants—​from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) to the naked faces of Bresson’s “models,” as he called his actors, at once resistant and malleable—​we encounter at different points in 26 In Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Malcolm Turvey sorts out some of the major classical theories engaged with the epistemological capacity of the cinema. His treatment of the writings of Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs, in particular, is helpful in mapping this terrain. However, in polarizing some of these writers’ terms, Turvey’s analytic critique sometimes sublimates their bolder speculative edge. While I would agree with him that the cinema may not, ultimately, reveal the inner life of things in quite the utopic ways that these writers had envisioned, I grant, in what follows, greater credit to the continued intellectual and imaginative efficacy of these early efforts, which identified in the cinema a way of thinking that could not have been realized before and that remains valuable to our time.



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this book. Both the truth and the myth of these bare post-​war faces, by turns self-assertive and vulnerable, served to elaborate varieties of cinematic expressivity, comprising the special potentialities of reticence. A rhetoric of authenticity and ironic consciousness are tightly braided in some of its later achievements, among which I single out, early on, Godard’s Anna Karina, and Warhol’s Ann Buchanan. Cinematographic and human substance are welded in the tears they shed, which nurture our thought about the human face—​or what remains of it—​after mid-​century. With the devastations of the Second World War throwing all concepts of representation—​ historical, testimonial, poetic—​into crisis, one must contend with the rise of consumer culture in the 1950s and 1960s, its self-​sustaining myths, and its attendant proliferation of media. The ways in which advertising highjacked the facial image, exploiting a gamut of styles that even devoured anti-​glamour—​inform the critical sphere of Chapter Two, which considers the intersection of art and commerce in the physiognomic arena of late modernity. Roland Barthes’s several texts of the early 1950s on the facial image articulate a sense of loss and nostalgia for an archaic plenitude—​real or imagined—​a nd are weighed against expressive fallacies in a new key. His most celebrated, and celebratory, vignette on Garbo’s face achieves clarity and scope in light of the several lesser-​k nown texts, particularly “Visages et figures,” that I read closely in this chapter. This eclectic early essay proposes nothing less than the outlines of a new anthropology of the human face as afforded by the cinema. But I also follow up on Barthes’s cryptic comment on Audrey Hepburn, to consider here how Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957) stages a dialogue, or rather a dance between the advertising image and the poetic image in that era. Barthes’s characteristic working through connotations brings the subject—​as beholder, as spectator—​a nd the image very close in these writings. His essayistic mode remains my privileged model also beyond this chapter, at different turns of this book. As is frequently the case, the sustained engagement with particular films in the chapters that follow preceded, in practice, the meditative historical and theoretical perspectives that dominate the first two chapters. My retroactive reconstruction of a broadly historical itinerary is not meant to serve any rigid causal development but, rather, to make salient anachronic streaks: persisting myths of plenitude, archaic returns, the continued promise of re-​ enchantment—​a ll sustain the cinematic face as it sails through modernist and late-​modern signposts. In the post-​classical era it evolves through negation and self-​a lienation, but it is not tossed out as an empty shell. The damages it suffers, its brokenness and its resilience under institutional scrutiny are dramatized in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man—​in some ways more desperately, and without the redemptive promise of Dreyer’s Passion. In Chapter Three, close analysis of exemplary junctures of identification and misidentification, contingency and identity, demonstrates how the legibility and inscrutability of the face converge. While The Wrong Man features the abundantly familiar, beautiful faces of Hollywood stars, its source in a minor news-​item case of mistaken identity appeals to a neorealist vernacular, binding the momentous and the ordinary in staging the struggle for recognition. Like the dubious interpretations of physiognomy or facial expression, the subjugation of the face to coded anthropometric systems is dramatized here for all its pitfalls. The failure of investigative and juridical procedures gives way to epiphany—​embedded in the chance perception, the instantaneous glimpse—​presented as a supremely visual evidentiary force that overtakes institutional and analytic proof. The inadequacy of modern apparatuses—​t he police, the insurance agency, psychiatric institutions—​to the person resonates here with the potentially oppressive gaze of the cinema itself.

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While Dreyer’s and Hitchcock’s films explicitly implicate the cinema—​as apparatus and language—​as juridical interrogating machine, a no less taxing examination is staged as screen test, which I classify in Chapter Four as a facial genre of sorts, and a special mode of portraiture. The screen test is an exacting industrial and market device that insinuates itself into broader cinematic domains, laying bare the predicament of the singular human subject that the apparatus confronts, or devours. While the situation of the screen test, as part of the microcosm of the movie studio, was understood and very well-​d ramatized previously, we find its existential parameters radicalized across different film projects in the mid-​1960s. It is most famously elaborated in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–​1966), but in fact, all of Warhol’s portrait films—​of anonymity as in Blow Job (1963) and of celebrity as in Outer and Inner Space (1965)—​carry strong test components, endured by his portrait sitters with varying results. What does it mean to pass or to fail such tests? What is the test for and what are its existential implications in confounding the relation of person and persona, actor and role within in the situation of filmmaking? Michelangelo Antonioni’s little-​k nown short, Il provino (The Screen Test, 1965), exactly contemporary with Warhol’s project, circles its elusive subject, Princess Soraya—​former consort of the Shah of Iran, exquisite beauty and aspiring actress—​prompted to enact “her own role” as paparazzi-​hunted celebrity tested for a part in a Dino De Laurentiis production. In different ways both Antonioni and Warhol open up an intricate space between celebrity and privacy. The woman’s face as visual spectacle is at once exposed and masked, opaque, unknown. Warhol’s invasive strategies are distinct from Antonioni’s: his test-​l ike portraiture ventured further to capture from his would-​be stars some flickering, or even flaring, of the subject, offered up for public consumption while shrouded by a consciousness of inadequacy, and by the pathos of time whose figure—​t he death’s head—​has always extended its shadow in the art of the portrait. The human face is not renounced even when inflated, assaulted, or emptied out by the ravages of consumer culture. And it can endure in reticence.27 This is my key figural epithet, in Chapter Five, for Robert Bresson’s singular work with the face. In his films, not only the face but the moving image itself seems to retreat, humbled, before something it will not wholly bare, or contain. The chapter proposes that such reticence is matched by Bresson’s eclectic distribution of facingness through the field of the moving image. André Bazin was surely the first to discern the radical consciousness at work in Bresson’s expressive displacement and facial reticence already in Diary of a Country Priest (1950), articulating it in a critical essay so powerful that it might have itself inspired Bresson’s subsequent and fullest realization of his vision. I therefore follow closely in Bazin’s footsteps in this chapter, tracing how his earlier notion of identity’s imprint (in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”) achieves, in light of Bresson’s practice, not only a more radical appeal to the image-​as-​presence, but also evolves—​in a proto-​semiotic move—​t hrough a recognition of absence: the withdrawal of the body, paradigmatically the human face, and its convulsion into sign. As the face seems withdrawn, or vacated, so the personal and the social are pared down to a primal state in which even animals, and other objects and entities, animate and inanimate, or any part thereof, seem to share in Bresson’s films. One need no longer “rescue” a face (as this book will have labored to do, to this point) since the impersonal cinematographic perception—​shedding the humanist veneer of individuality and 27  It was Paolo Barlera who first suggested to me this felicitous rhetorical figure as a way to think through the workings of negation in the facial image.



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sovereignty, indifferent to anthropomorphic hierarchies—​permeates and grips all entities equally in Bresson’s universe. Facing or effaced, naked and withdrawn, the ebb and flow of the face’s figural transmutations is itself symptomatic—​as must be the present study—​of an intense preoccupation with the image in periods of technological and cultural transition. In our time, when scenarios of the death and rescue of cinema are rehearsed in both moving-​image practice and theory, the particular contours of such accelerated shifts in the fortunes of the image are still difficult to capture or fully comprehend. My commitment in this book is not to this immediate scene but, rather, to a period when film was film by way of medium, and when going to the movies was still a fairly regular and controlled practice in terms of the experiential qualities of space and time, give or take the various modifications of the post-​classical era. From the street and the lobby to the communal darkness of the theater; the beam of shifting lights emerging from behind us, laced with smoke; the sense of irreversible, absorptive directionality and temporality; the pleasure of devoting one’s senses to one bright screen so much larger than we were. Then, the apparition of these faces—​not only star-​faces, but common faces, faces unknown—​not much more was needed than for a film to hold faces together in its frame, to light them up, to have them address us in so many ways, traversing fiction and actuality. Tom Gunning does not hesitate to say this even about movies that would seem so much more removed by history: the earliest 1900s Mitchell and Kenyon factory gate films. They need not involve stylized close-​ups: even as they partake of “crowd splendor,” these faces feel close enough, for still now they return our gaze: They are not simply documents for specialists, whether historians of culture or of early cinema. They address us directly; we participate in their humanity and their spontaneity. These workers still look us in the eyes… . It is as a filmic experience, which is also a moment snatched from history, that I will approach them. 28

Nor will our visual technologies and arts today—​so sophisticated and so ubiquitous—​renounce these incarnations of the person in the moving image, these projected and screened shapes of self. We need not always master or discipline them with our scholarship, yet we still seek their address, which is also their power of re-​enchantment. All such images are, finally, subject to our own willing recognition, and as we live by our face-​to-​face with others, so we must lend them our regard.

28  Tom Gunning, “Picture of Crowd Splendor: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate Films,” The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, eds. Vanessa Toulmin et. al. (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 49–​58. Gunning quotes Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” on “the apparition of these faces in the crowd”—​a s he also did, so memorably, when discussing these films with my seminar on the face at Yale, Spring 2004.

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CHAPTER 1

WE HAD FACES THEN

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s soon as the cinema paused to think—​a nd to write—​about itself in the late 1910s and through the 1920s, it noted everywhere and with some self-​admiration the human figure, particularly the face, as if unraveled for the first time by the technological magic of the apparatus. What did it mean to see the face in this way, and under so many different aspects: incredibly natural yet a vast, luminous mask; intimately familiar yet from so close-up, also an alien terrain? The moving, projected image could embrace all these. Moreover, it could lend an expressive, anthropomorphic charge to any object small or big, part or whole, animate or inanimate and, in fact, could supersede these oppositions altogether. This chapter thinks through these ideas of the 1920s that responded, on the one hand, to the classical maturation of film language in narrative cinema and, on the other, to the advanced artistic experiments of the cinema in that same period—​t he eve of the talkie. Some of these theoretical writings are juxtaposed in the scholarship, but fundamental questions of expressivity, articulated more or less explicitly in relation to a facial dispositif, persist across otherwise discordant positions. In their light, the chapter begins to formulate questions of image and language, the expressive visual plenitude and the limits of legibility in the cinematic face, its inextricable braiding of exteriority and interiority, its corporeal appeal, its nudity and its opacity. I bring these ideas to bear on Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which is, at the same time, a celebratory incarnation, certainly a monumental landmark of the face on film, yet it also transpires, it seems to me, as a strange, even audacious limit case. The film’s heightening of primal, corporeal, and archaic powers of the face, dramatized in confrontation with the modern apparatus, will remain pertinent for our consideration of later works. The present chapter also opens, in its last parts, some issues begged by the cinematic face as it acquires a voice, and in view of other technologies, like color. These, I wish to recall, have often taken the human face as a measure, and as paradigm. I finally begin to parse here some film-​h istorical considerations bound up with the immediate post-​war period and its sense of rupture, the implications of which were very much felt in the arena of the facial image. These will be deepened, in light of key films, through the rest of the book.

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EXPRESSIVITY IN THE 1920s The film-​t heoretical writings of Béla Balázs are bound up with a rediscovery of the face and posit the special power of cinema in its physiognomic projection: the human face emerges as prime figure in an anthropomorphic poetics of film. Locating Balázs’s thought within the history of ideas of European modernity, Gertrud Koch notes his intellectual apprenticeship under such figures as Henri Bergson in Paris and Georg Simmel in Berlin. Perhaps it was the latter’s critical phenomenology of the everyday object and of the minor gesture, and certainly Simmel’s essays directly concerning the human face—​h is “Sociology of the Senses” and “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face”—​that inspired Balázs’s facial-​c inematic dispositif.1 In Simmel’s footsteps, Balázs’s binding of socio-​a nthropological observation and aesthetic experience to reveal the underlying patterns of modernity gives rise to what one might call an anthropomorphic media archeology. Balázs’s thoughts on film were first articulated piecemeal in his reviews for Der Tag—​t he major daily paper in Freud’s Vienna—​t hen collected in Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930). They focus on the cinema as prime specimen, as social and aesthetic register of contemporary experience. The cinema’s capacity to elicit even in the most trivial detail or action a momentous emotional and expressive potential is itself construed as a “facial” principle. At the same time, the significance of the detail—​a mplified in the revolutionary technique of the close-​up, and further enhanced by the cinema’s temporal manipulations—​ assumes in Balázs’s account a “democratizing” perception: everything is significant. The facial close-​up epitomizes the expressive image; with it, the world itself becomes articulate. It affords a departure from chronological temporality: liberated from linear and spatial calculation, from succession and progression—​t he artificial segregation of past and present—​ the close-​up, in Balázs’s’s account, releases an immediate and unmediated inner experience of duration which is, in this Bergsonian vision, the dimension of consciousness. As Erica Carter puts it, Balázs’s film theory evolves as a new perceptual economy that approaches “a utopian vision of a cinematic body that overcomes empiricist dualism and the reification of the written word.” 2 Gertrud Koch considers that Balázs’s thought should be understood in the context of philosophical traditions that identify expression with the articulation of subjectivity. She succinctly 1  Gertrud Koch, “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things,” trans. Miriam Hansen, New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 167–​7 7. I have learned from Erica Carter’s timely introduction to the English language edition of Béla Balázs’s major works, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Erica Carter (Berghahn Books, 2010), xv–​x lvi. In what follows, when citing from Balázs’s writings, I refer to the relevant title of his work, although both are in this one translated volume. Carter elaborates on Balázs’s ambivalent relationship with Georg Lukács: each of these critics’ efforts to square their distinct aesthetic visions with Marxism was fraught with tensions. I have also learned from Antonio Somaini, “Il volto delle cose: Physiognomie, Stimmung e Atmosphäre nella teoria del cinema di Béla Balázs,” in Atmosfere, eds. T. Griffero e A. Somaini, special issue of Rivista di Estetica 33, no. 3 (2006): 143–​62. Georg Simmel’s essays that focus most directly on the face are “Sociology of the Senses,” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 109–​2 0, and “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face,” Georg Simmel, 1858–​1918, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 276–​81. 2  Carter, introduction, xxix. On Balázs’s adoption of Bergson’s ideas of duration, via a musical analogy, see Spirit of Film, 101; see also Carter’s discussion of Bergson’s influence, introduction, xxxii–​x xxiv.

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parses the host of tensions that would need to be navigated if one were to have the cinema surpass its technological reproducibility and proclivity to mass circulation (and exploitation) on the one hand, and the bequest of dogged reference to reality on the other. How is the technological medium to be consciously and assertively modern—​namely modernist, autonomous—​ when it is so predominantly bound up with imitation and description? Expressionism which, Koch points out, coincided with Balázs’s formative period, offered a solution that clearly informed his investment in the idea of an optical expressivity as homologous with inner states. 3 In the expressionist orbit the psychic and the visual intersect, paradigmatically, in the arena of the face. The idea of a gaze of nature responsive to the human glance—​a romantic metaphor that feeds into the expressionist universe—​is in a sense literalized in the novel technique of the facial close-​up. It is, for Balázs, a prime instance of the cinema’s visual power to elicit a subjective consciousness from its objects, animate and inanimate, and at any scale: houses, landscapes, grasped as unified, whole, integral forms—​Gestalt mirrorings of the consciousness that confronts them. Balázs’s search for affinities between face and thought, between face and nature, or the cosmos, does not propose any fixed lexicon. Even as the implication of a privileged cultural and racial standard marred, in its early formulation, this romantic-modernist’s vision of a universal humanity, Balázs’s “microphysiognomy” progresses by nuanced observation and speculation, and gives rise to surprisingly productive reflection on cinematic aesthetics, medium, and dispositif.4 In formulating his microphysiognomic dispositif in the Visible Man, Balázs appeals to Goethe’s authority by way of modifying Johann Kaspar Lavater’s static, deterministic, inductive scientistic physiognomy. He cites from Goethe’s Contributions to Lavater’s Physiognomical Fragments, casts it in a romantic light and, under the title “Goethe on Film,” reads it as a proleptic legitimation of the cinema: Nature shapes man, he alters it, and this process of alteration is itself natural; a man finding he has been set down in this great wide world builds himself a little hedge or wall within it, and furnishes it in his own image. 5

Balázs’s physiognomy draws on Goethe’s vision toward a dynamic hermeneutic of observed nature, of physical appearance and expression grasped not as a static, fixed system, but as bound up with process and change. What is described here is a productive collaboration between the human and the natural, between intellect and body, whole and part, identity and mutable form. As man is embraced and shaped by nature, nature takes on an anthropomorphic aspect. As a human environment evolves, its structures (like a hedge, or a wall) both separate nature and man and relate them in new ways—​but by human measure, and in human likeness, as does a portrait. Human imagination and intuition mediate an evolving dialectical relation of outer and inner, objective and subjective spheres, weaving an intricate syntax to engage them, as Carter 3 Koch, 169. 4  Carter discusses in her introduction, p. xxxviii, the pitfalls of Balázs’s “Enlightenment universalism that seeks to embrace a common humanity, but simultaneously inscribes the ‘enlightened’ human subject as white, European and male”. 5  Goethe as cited by Balázs in Visible Man, 29. Susanne Lüdemann helped me think through some of these passages.



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notes, “in a permanent state of becoming.” This principle of temporality and change, salient in the play of facial expression—​somewhat suffocated in Lavaterian systems—​becomes central to Balázs’s physiognomic dispositif: the cinema amplifies this principle which, turned upon the world, endows it, too, with a face—​a n always-unfolding one, responsive, mutable.6 Balázs’s neo-​romantic lens allows here for a frankly humanizing perception, and for more subjective departures than does Goethe’s regard for scientific observation. But it is in Goethe’s footsteps that Balázs seeks to revise narrowly analytical ​physiognomic conceptions of the Enlightenment, and not lose sight of experience, history, and milieu. He trusts that the cinema’s contribution to perception introduces a new step in this larger project of modern culture. In response to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Balázs notes how narrative space-​t ime and, basically, ordinary perceptual experience are superseded in Dreyer’s litany of close-​ups. The isolated, intensified face in close-​up becomes a conduit to a domain of the maid’s claim to truth—​at once interior and transcendent, and delivered to us at “face value,” as it were: For a thousand metres of film, nothing but heads. Heads without spatial context. But this spatial absence does not alarm us… . It is not within space that these raging passions, thoughts, beliefs clash.

And again, If we see a face isolated and enlarged, we lose our awareness of space, or of the immediate surroundings. Even if this is a face we have just glimpsed in the midst of a crowd, we now find ourselves alone with it. We may be aware of the specific space within which this face exists, but we do not imagine it for ourselves. For the face acquires expression and meaning without the addition of an imagined spatial context. The abyss into which a figure peers no doubt explains his expression of terror, it does not create it. The expression exists even without the explanation. It is not turned into an expression by the addition of an imagined situation. Confronted by a face, we no longer find ourselves within a space at all. A new dimension opens before our eyes: physiognomy. The position of the eyes in the top half of the face, the mouth below; wrinkles now to the right, now to the left—​none of this now retains its spatial significance. For what we see is merely a single expression. We see emotions and thoughts. We see something that does not exist in space.7

The emphasis on the isolation of the face, namely its freedom from spatial coordinates—​the separation of facial expression from motivations and contexts, whether implied or given—​clearly 6  On Goethe’s critique of Lavater’s physiognomic systems, I learned from Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 139–​51. Carter, too, glosses Balázs’s physiognomic ideas as mediated by Goethe’s relative and more dynamic grasp of somatic expression when compared with Lavater’s rigid system. See her introduction, p. xxvii. Leonardo Quaresima emphasizes the transformative thrust of Balázs’s physiognomy-​qua-​dispositif, for which the cinema is a supreme agent: see his introduction to the Italian translation of Béla Balázs, L’uomo visibile, trans. Sara Terpin, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Turin: Lindau, 2008), especially 28–​30. 7 Balázs, Spirit of the Film, 102, 100–​1, respectively.

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distinguishes Balázs’s ideas from the Soviet tradition of montage, particularly as advanced by Kuleshov’s experiment. We recall the contemporaneous experiment that sought to anchor the cinematic perception of facial expression in relative, retroactive, syntactic relation to its objects, and its implication of causality, however fabricated it might be—​which is of course the norm in fiction film. In Pudovkin’s account of the experiment, the neutral, or perhaps ambiguous, expression on the actor Mosjukhin’s face in close-​up followed by a plate of soup, by a dead body, or a child playing, would become a specific and legible expression that the filmmaker controls and manipulates at the editing table.8 Balázs, in contrast, abstracts the perceptual experience of the face per se, extracts its duration from presumed causes on any front, and cultivates instead the expression’s openness, its fluidity and ambiguity, in ways that are not closed off by the syntactic operations of montage. In this sense, too, his notion of physiognomy is not quite what is traditionally posited as the pseudo-​science of coding and interpretation that fastens the structure, proportions, and relations of facial features to a narrow, congenitally determined moral identity along a limited number of lexical codes. Various systems of physiognomy—​understood to compartmentalize and decode, in more or less contrived ways, bone structure, proportions and relations of facial features, skull indentations and muscular contractions—​have been refuted and resurrected since antiquity, entering the Enlightenment with Lavater. Some versions survive to our time and are still employed not only in identification protocols, but as indices of character and inclination, or else as alphabet of the emotions or passions across a range of sociological studies and applications—​we shall return to some of their institutional bearings in Chapter Three.9 Balázs’s notion of physiognomy—​specifically what he terms “microphysiognomy,” defining an intensified, subjectivized, empathetic order of facial perception—​is based, on the contrary, on an idea of unmediated visual expressivity as part of a broadly defined facial dispositif: expression is immediate, epiphanic, intense yet nuanced. It transcends spatio-​temporal categories and any particular syntax or language-​system. Under the cinema’s microphysiognomic perception, the face in close-​up is so intensely expressive and visually communicative that it “drives out narrative extension.” Films, Balázs finally suggests, therefore have no real need for intricate plots.10 The face that has carried through history the corporeal sublimation of Western civilization, and whose expressive register was itself undermined by a “word culture” culminating in the printing press, is

8  Kuleshov’s experiment is reported by V. I. Pudovkin in Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Bonanza Books, 1949), 137–​45. See commentaries by Yuri Tsivian, “Some Historical Footnotes to the Kuleshov Experiment,” Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 247–​55, and by Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley, “The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classical Experiment,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 2 (1992): 59–​75. I comment on it further in Chapter Three. 9  A Tufts University Department of Psychology study funded by the National Science Foundation, claimed its accuracy on the basis of photographic portraits, which lead to the conclusion that “Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces,” by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady, published January 18, 2010 in PLoS ONE 5(1): e8733. doi:10.1371/​journal.pone.0008733, accessed November 4, 2010. One still hopes, however, that—​quite apart from the most overt textbook symptoms and independently of statistics, health insurance, and liability protocols—​t he diagnosing family physician or psychotherapist is, by both talent and experience, capable of perceiving a great deal more in the unhurried face-​to-​face with the patient. 10 Balázs, Spirit of the Film, 110.



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understood here as the last remnant and salvaging anchor of a transverbal expressivity. Thus, it emerges as both model and as universal carrier of a properly “visual culture”—​t he term is Balázs’s. The expressive surface of our bodies has been reduced to just our face. This is not simply because we cover the other parts of our bodies with clothes. Our face has now come to resemble a clumsy little semaphore of the soul, sticking up in the air and signaling as best it may. Sometimes our hands help out a little, evoking the melancholy of mutilated limbs. The back of a headless Greek torso always reveals whether the lost face was laughing or weeping… . For in those days man was visible in his entire body. In a culture dominated by words, however, now that the soul has become audible, it has grown almost invisible. This is what the printing press has done. Well, the situation now is that once again our culture is being given a radically new direction—​this time by film. Every evening many millions of people sit and experience human destinies, characters, feelings and moods of every kind with their eyes, and without the need for words. For the intertitles that films still have are insignificant; they are partly the special meaning that does not set out to assist the visual expression. The whole of mankind is now busy relearning the long-​forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions. This language is not the substitute for words characteristic of the sign language of the deaf and dumb, but the visual corollary of human souls immediately made flesh. Man will become visible once again.11

Balázs’s physiognomic-​cinematic perception would propel the viewer directly, without mediation or translation, from vision to insight, from body to mind, from outer to inner and back again. His observation in the Visible Man is striking: “Film is a surface art and in it whatever is inside is outside.”12 The way in which the technical-​optical apparatus immediately articulates a psychic disposition affords, according to Balázs, the possibility for identification between spectator and image. The primacy of the visual in the cinema defies linguistic or otherwise conceptual coding and mediation: the immediacy and accessibility of the face transcend, for him, the verbal model and its false categories and oppositions that cannot account for nuanced and layered expressivity directly perceived. The doubling of actor and character, as of individual and type, in the cinematic face is bound up with this layering and multiplicity, the “polyphony” of human expression that blurs the contours of the person. Since the cinema, for Balázs, is not subjected to the linearity of writing 11 Balázs, Visible Man, 10; emphases in the original. The juxtaposition of the printing press and the movie camera is of course striking as it foreshadows, firstly, Benjamin’s more radical thought on mechanical reproducibility and, secondly, McLuhan’s discussion of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In a superb paper written for my Yale seminar on the face in Spring 2004, Phillip Ekhardt elaborated on a notion of “surfaciality,” ​a n equation of filmic and facial surface, or façade—​etymologically related, of course, to “face”—​a s defining the crux of expressivity in Balázs’s thought. He followed Balázs’s comment on the face-​l ike expressive force of the Greek torso back to its likely inspiration in Rilke’s famous poem on the “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Ekhardt further explored ways in which filmic linearity, as well as surface-​depth models of meaning, give way in Balázs’s writing to a planar articulation that foreshadows Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thought. 12 Balázs, Visible Man, 19; emphases in the original. We shall encounter, in Chapter Four, Andy Warhol’s similar formulation with regard to pop art.

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but is likened, rather, to the experience of music (Balázs was, famously, librettist for Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle), it also bridges the opposition of succession and simultaneity. Polyphony resonates in the variability of the face, in every instant and across time: this is how one expression may hide behind another and may unfold and give rise to another. This struggle to formulate a comprehensive “anthropocentric aesthetics of expression,” as Gertrud Koch calls it, suggests imaginary leaps from perceptual surface to psychic interiority, from the exteriority of optics to the interiority of consciousness, from object to subject and back again. It informs Balázs’s striking formulation of spectator identification in the cinema, where Koch discerns an ancestry of ideas that evolve not only in the most influential writings on modernity and its media—​mainly by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer—​ but, to our time, in psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship inspired by Jacques Lacan.13 Indeed, for Lacan even a sardine can floating on the ocean waves on a sunny day can face us, can become the point of the gaze, can anchor and return a human look: optic slides into psychic, and forges our subjectivity in the process. The priority of the face in the exchange of the gaze, and its implied disposition of facingness, thus opens up both psychic and aesthetic possibilities: the face may be located across a range of objects and images; it may refract from one thing to another and—​projected onto a temporal-​musical register—​it may exceed and expand the present moment and open up to past and future, traversing bodies and minds in the process. Antonio Somaini glosses, in this context, Balázs’s privileged term Stimmung—​ an untranslatable German concept in which Balázsian physiognomy, aura, and atmosphere converge. Emanating beyond the contours of the individual body and fusing, by a sort of perceptible empathy, the contours of person and milieu, subject and object, the synaesthetic, emotive condition of Stimmung is a human-​physiognomic illumination, understood as the proper medium of cinematic identification.14 Balázs takes this principle of reciprocity—​t he mutual permeation of person and milieu, the empathetic relation of subject and object—​in a particular direction. There is something specific to the cinematic experience of identification—​“eliminating the spectator’s inner distance from the screen”—​which only emerges, he says, in the projection of motion pictures. It introduces, thereby, “a radical new ideology” into art. One notes here, in nascent form, an idea of identification that is developed in much later film theories, informing both a consideration of the apparatus, and the constitution of the spectator as its subject. Balázs is emphatic on the point that the film thus reveals something different, and something more, than what might have evolved in the studio, before the camera, where the actors went through their motions and recited their lines.

13  Koch, 171. Balázs’s passage on identification is in Spirit of Film, 98–​9. In his Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), especially 27–​ 33, 55–​62, Francesco Casetti offers an elegant account of the way in which Balázs’s dialectic of objective-​subjective vision reciprocates with several contemporary theories of perception and representation, both in the context of the cinema and beyond. Particularly striking is the link that Casetti draws here to Erwin Panofsky’s “Perspective as Symbolic Form,” published between Balázs’s two early film books: an essay that dwells, of course, on the ways in which optical geometry does not, in fact, describe phenomena as neutral but, rather, as “contingent upon human beings, indeed upon the individual… the freely chosen position of a subjective point of view” (Panofsky, cited by Casetti, 29). But even as one person can inhabit another’s point-of-view, just how an optical configuration translates to a subjective, psychic condition remains, of course, an open question. 14 See Visible Man, 51. On the correlation of “aura,” “atmosphere,” and “physiognomy” in Balázs’s notion of Stimmung, as it partakes of German aesthetic discourse at the time see Somaini, “Il volto delle cose.”



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Expression is something recognized—​as a face is, simply, recognized—​but when an object, or image, thus seems to return our gaze, there is also a way in which it is defamiliarized: it disconcerts us and makes us conscious of our own look. Physiognomy is, in this sense, the instrument of a reflective consciousness by which the subject nevertheless exceeds its limits—​exceeds its subjectivity, as it were, while realizing it in the world. Such potential to transcend the limits of subjectivity is, for Balázs, the properly productive and creative function of cinematography.15 In Du visage au cinéma, Jacques Aumont has already accomplished a great deal by way of re-focalizing questions of the face on film that have been left dormant since the late 1920s. He emphasizes the way that “concepts of the face” are thus foregrounded by both Balázs and Jean Epstein as the cinema’s generative-​creative principle: “Cinema adds to what it films as thought adds to what it is reflecting on.”16 A comparably expansive facial dispositif—​whereby the cinema is taken to project subjectivity across human, natural, and inanimate forms, comprising the screen itself—​thus informs the French concept of photogénie. Imported from photography to the cinema by Louis Delluc, and intensively elaborated by Epstein in the avant-​garde booklet Bonjour Cinema (1921) as in subsequent writings, photogénie does not simply describe—​as one colloquially does—​persons who turn out nicely in photos. Rather, it is a transformative quality superadded to things in cinematographic reproduction by the “intelligence of a machine.”17 Importantly, photogénie is understood to be equally available to documentary and experimental as to mainstream narrative film—​this despite Hollywood’s seemingly naïve and conventional reliance on mimesis and illusionism. Yet this technologically predicated cinematic supplement to the human (or to its image) does not involve any definite formula that would guarantee or fully account for the precious effect of photogénie. Somewhere in the vicinity of Balázs’s Stimmung, it, too, pertains to an empathetic experience of spectatorship. But even more so than for Balázs, the physical conditions and atmosphere—​all that transpires in the movie theater—​informs, for Epstein, the exchange of a humanized gaze, joining subject and object across the permeable space-time of motion pictures. 15 Balázs, Spirit of the Film, 99. 16  Jacques Aumont, Du visage au cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/​Cahiers du cinéma, 1992); I refer extensively in what follows to Aumont’s essential work in Du visage au cinéma, one chapter of which has been translated to English: “The Face in Close-​Up,” The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 127–​4 8. I quote from this translation where relevant, and offer translations of my own when drawing on other parts of the book. The above quotations are from “The Face in Close-​Up,” 138. 17  See Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, 2 vols., (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1974–​1975). For English translations see Jean Epstein, “Bonjour cinéma and other Writings,” trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage 10 (1981): 8–39; Jean Epstein, “Magnification and other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (1977): 9–​25; several essays are included in French Film Theory and Criticism, 2 vols., ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul’s edited volume, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)—​Keller’s introduction to this excellent volume is particularly useful. Stuart Liebman maps the cultural and intellectual contexts of Epstein’s thought in “Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 1920–​1922,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1980, and across several important essays, such as “Visitings of Awful Promise: The Cinema Seen from Etna,” Camera Obscura Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 91–​108. L’Intelligence d’une machine is also the title of Epstein’s book of 1946, but the idea of transcending the apparent contradiction between cinema’s mass, mechanical aspects and its psychic, poetic, and creative potential permeates Epstein’s thought much earlier: “The Bell and Howell is a metal brain, strandardised, manufactured, marketed in thousands of copies, which transforms the world outside it into art,” see Epstein, “Bonjour cinéma,” 14.

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Mary Ann Doane returns to these texts as part of her illuminating study of scale and detail, emphasizing the way in which Epstein’s photogénie, like Balázs’s physiognomy, posits a supplementarity outside the margins of film language and its mediating, instrumental forms.18 She points out how these thinkers locate an essence of cinema, paradoxically, outside of discursive or narrative coding and even beyond the deliberate maneuvers of stylistic devices. Photogénie does not, therefore, lend itself to critical paraphrase but only to phenomenological description or poetic approximation. It is not a fixed formal entity; it resists advance calculation, hierarchy, and coding; it cannot be held on to, cited, or paraphrased; it cannot be pointed to (and thus has only a tenuous relationship to cinematographic indexicality)—​yet it is something added to the world, joining the particular and the general, embracing bodies, persons, entities, memories. Epstein thus writes: The screen generalizes and defines. We are not dealing with an evening but evening, yours included. The face a phantom made of memories in which I see all those I have known. Life fragments itself into new individualities. Instead of a mouth, the mouth, larva of kisses, essence of touch. Everything quivers with bewitchment. I am uneasy. In a new nature, another world. The close-​up transfigures man. For ten seconds, my whole mind gravitates round a smile. In silent and stealthy majesty, it also thinks and lives.19

In its erratic, ephemeral quality—​t hat almost seems to infect Epstein’s writing style—​lies also the power of photogénie and its epiphanic claim to unmediated vision and a totality of experience—​a spiring to a primal, pre-​lapsarian, pre-verbal condition. The mutable facial expression in close-​up is the paradigmatic spatio-​temporal arena of Epstein’s photogénie, which can in turn render the image in its entirety as an intensely charged, subjectivized entity. Across many writings of the 1920s the experience of the cinema is described glowingly, as imparting a sense of integral presence, of revelatory personhood, and even auratic agency to film. Freely offered without codes, conditions, or strings, it is a sort of gift: an act of grace. In Epstein’s passionate account, the spectator-​c inéphile sees himself addressed by it in person: face-​to-​face. The projection of subjectivity as a supplementary force, which is at the same time the radiant core of photogénie, might initially seem to be associated with elusive optical phenomena, but in Epstein’s description it also involves corporeal and earth-​bound, even organic attributes. One might gloss here the extended connotations of Epstein’s term “magnification,” seminal in his account of photogénie, which suggest in the French grossissement also the condition of pregnancy. This feminine-​maternal-​corporeal charge of the term is laden with the biological dimension of reproduction—​one recalls that Epstein had studied medicine. The visual confrontation in the close-​up carries, in this way, a sense of overall physical transformation: the enlargement of the maternal body, the incredible swelling in its middle, 18  Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-​Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–​111. In the Derridean sense supplementarity would imply a deconstruction of any hierarchy between the different terms, within and outside the margins of discourse, the definition of codes, the workings of signification. It would also imply a breakdown of the distinction between consciousness and the face. 19  Epstein, “Bonjour cinéma,” 13.



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comprising its uncanny register of movement—​seen, yet sensed as profoundly internal to and at the same time autonomous from the body that envelops it. The imaginary process of identification is thus associated with the actual condition of incorporation—​a s in the pregnant state. 20 Biological reproduction, fecundity, and specifically the condition of pregnancy, traditional metaphors for the artistically creative act, are anthropologically joined here—​a s they are in so many cultures—​a lso with miraculous connotations, inspiring reverence (more or less religious) for the creation of life. Superadded to the abstract optical denotation of “magnification” are, then, the corporeally reproductive, the artistically creative, and the miraculous or magical connotations of the term. The magnification of the facial close-​up is here not a quantitative or geometric measure—​ as of something simply added, optically enlarged or inflated—​but invokes a sense of becoming, of a new and ultimately independent life about to come to light yet still perceived as an internal being lurking under the surface, as it were. Its corporeal, physical features are extended, in Epstein’s account, to the temporal register of slow-motion, epitomized in the dawning of expression upon the face. In its immanence and potentiality, in its projection of a future life embedded in the pregnant form, one notes the intensely temporalized, anticipatory aspect of grossissement. The sense of life lurking in the swelling form traverses and grips, in Epstein’s description, all things big and small, of the body and beyond: mouth, face, earth, volcano, the sea. The movements of earthquakes and the heaving of volcanoes blur, in Epstein’s excited descriptions, distinctions of animate and inanimate, internal and external, visual perception and intoxicating, dizzying bodily sensation which enfold, finally, also a sense of danger. 21 Likewise, the sea swell can acquire uncanny corporeal resonances in the cinema: especially with the maneuvers of slow or reverse motion, as Epstein has done so beautifully in several of his Breton documentaries, and when joining documentary footage with such cinematic magic in Le Tempestaire (1947). No still frame enlargement can convey this animistic effect, entirely predicated on the manipulation of movement and time, as well as framing that—in removing comparative scale indications—disturbs the spectator’s sense of orientation and stability. The uncanny animistic effect of the moving surfaces of earth and water, magnified by the play of slow or reverse motion, connotes the unique registers of bodily and facial movement not so much by metaphoric operations of the affective fallacy, but by phenomenological projection: a sense of embodied consciousness visited upon its objects. In this account the cinema opens up for modernity a liminal or, as Victor Turner elaborated on the term, liminoid space in which widely diverse entities, dimensions, and actions or events

20  Diana Fuss, in Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995) touches on this idea as part of her mapping of the psychoanalytic process of identification: “The pregnant woman is in many ways the perfect figure for a psychoanalytic model of identification based upon incorporation” (23). 21  Epstein’s association of cinematic perception as a corporeal, limit experience is expounded in his 1926 book Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna, see translations in Keller and Paul, 287–​310. See also Liebman’s illuminating discussion in “Visitings of Awful Promise,” and Jennifer Wild in “Distance is [Im]material: Epstein versus Etna,” in Keller and Paul, eds., Jean Epstein, 115–​42. In Chapters One and Two of my dissertation, “The Earth Figured: An Exploration of Landscapes in Italian Cinema,” New York University, 1995, I discussed the image of volcanic landscapes in relation to the pregnant state, specifically in light of a nineteenth-​century photograph by Giorgio Sommer, “Pompeii, Human Cast: A Pregnant Woman, 1868 Excavation,” and of the celebrated last sequence of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950).

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reciprocate and exchange qualities. In the liminoid condition—​which also delivers us to the altered temporal order of ritual—​a nimate and inanimate, internal and external, subject and object, spill over and into each other, intimating both a creative and a threatening force in the breakdown of categories. 22 The human face, in Epstein’s account, is a conduit for just such liminoid state. There is no contradiction, for Epstein, in the fact that the figurative-​r itual-​magical leaps of photogénie, traversing bodies, entities, subjectivities, are technologically based in mechanical and optical instruments. Since the apparatus is complex and involves a multiplicity of interlaced and partly hidden systems, both perceptual and psychic, that not every spectator can completely command—​it is as good as magic. 23 Alfred Gell’s concluding comment in “Technology and Magic” on the anthropological power of advertising could well apply to such conception of the cinematic medium: if it does “not lay claim to supernatural powers, it is only because technology itself has become so powerful, that [it has] no need to do so.”24 Under its spell the mechanical and the artificial can seem natural, the calculated can seem spontaneous, self-​generating, even ex-​nihilo. In both archaic and modern cultures, such magical perception can be invested, as Gell so astutely parsed it, across all the basic orders of technology, understood in a broad sense as traversing all aspects of life: technologies of production, of reproduction, and of enchantment. The domain of enchantment—​t he symbolic systems and operations that exceed the basics of survival (production) and of socialization (reproduction) strategies—​propels the manipulation of intelligence, desires, and passions. Enchantment thus feeds back into, and can indeed inspire production and reproduction, while the skill and effort of technology, in turn, sustain the effects of magic. To some extent Epstein’s conception of cinema might, likewise, seem to suppress the economies of production and ideologies of reproduction, that one would associate with the cognitive and communicative dimensions of the cinema. Yet Epstein does not deny that these continue to operate except that, in a sort of reversal, they become a

22  See Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–​111, and Turner’s “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow and Ritual.” Rice University Studies 60.3/​The Anthropological Study of Human Play, ed. Edward Norbeck (Summer 1974): 53–​92. See Rachel Moore’s excellent discussion of Epstein’s anthropological imaginary in “A Different Nature,” Keller and Paul, eds., Jean Epstein, 177–94. See also her study of the relation between archaic and modern experience, and the magical space between object, image, language, and spectator as articulated both in early film theory and in avant-​garde practice: Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 23  Some half a century later, also apparatus film theory, particularly as mapped by Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et.al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), interlaces optic and psychic systems of various scales. 24  Alfred Gell’s expansive notion of technology as a psychic, corporeal, and social complex is succinctly relayed in his seminal 1988 essay “Technology and Magic,” rpt. in The Best of Anthropology Today, ed. Jonathan Benthall (London: Routledge/​The Royal Anthropological Institute, 2002), 280–​7. Magic, Gell maintains, can apply to all categories of technology that sustain survival, socialization, and symbolic-​psychological reflection or manipulation. The formal and metaphorical devices of enchantment can supplement or inspire a technology—​at times without added cost, effort, or risk. Gell follows Malinowski in his remarks on advertising in consumer culture: “The propagandists, image-​makers, and ideologues of technological culture are its magicians, and if they do not lay claim to supernatural powers, it is only because technology itself has become so powerful, that they have no need to do so” (287).



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mundane backdrop to the cinema’s revelatory, magical core: the expressive-​projective force of photogénie, epitomized by the enchantment of the face in close-​up. 25 In the epiphanic immediacy and freedom of photogénie, figure and ground are, in a sense, reversed while the image as a whole, and paradigmatically the face, is disengaged from spatio-​ temporal and causal or motivational functions. The facial image acquires a life of its own: it is personified by sheer intensity and is thus experienced as breaking through the image surface, reaching out to penetrate the shell of our own subjectivity. The way in which the close-​up, in eliminating background and depth, brings so close together face and screen-surface tips the viewer to another dimension: optical enlargement alters substance; quantity is converted to quality and attains the condition of being and of becoming. In a ritual-​magic effect, size and proximity alter the experience of movement and temporality, and as in an altered state of matter, the space between spectator and image is condensed, transubstantiated. The primal, animistic flux of liminoid experience takes on, finally, also ethical and intellectual dimensions. The close-​up is an intensifying agent because of its size alone… . But whatever its numerical value, this magnification works on one’s feelings more to transform than to confirm them… . The close-​up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. It’s not even true that there is air between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament. Maximum visual acuity… . I have neither the right nor the ability to be distracted. It speaks the present imperative of the verb to understand. 26

There is a progressive intensification here, a condensation of attention, of compassion and indeed empathy that partakes in corporeal knowledge and ethical consciousness at once. It is not simply the pictorial flattening of the close-​up, then, but its departure from the spatio-​temporal flow of the film that endows the image with “maximum visual acuity,” effecting its substance, its experience, and the consciousness that confronts it. Extracted from the illusionistic world of the film, the image facialized by photogénie projects forth in time and outwardly in space. One could envision a vertical trajectory here not unrelated to what Roland Barthes describes many 25  Mary Ann Doane astutely demonstrates how, in some of Epstein’s examples of photogénie, narrative and discursive uses of the close-​up continue to operate: his famous example of Sessue Hayakawa in The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) for instance, is in fact based on precise eyeline matches and a series of looks and shifts that contribute directly to our interpretation of motivation, action, drama. Doane concludes from this that photogénie is an effect promoted less in the present experience of the film and more in the (cinéphile-​critic’s) memory of the facial close-up, which continues to radiate, as it were, even after the dramatic narrative has been concluded. While her discussion of the recollected image is intriguing, I believe it does not fully account for Epstein’s meaning. He emphasizes, to begin with, the brevity of photogénie, namely that one need not have a palpable suspension in the progression of the film to experience it, so there would be no inherent contradiction with the face’s narrative function in this regard. Indeed Epstein is consciously seeking to locate photogénie precisely in the “ordinary run” of cinema, within its routine mechanisms, in popular American fiction film. Finally, his emphasis on the heightened temporal quality of photogénie is associated with a sense of presentness (“The present imperative of the verb to understand”), and then of anticipation and potentiality as heightening the experience of spectatorship, more so than a retroactive inclination. 26  Epstein, “Magnification,” 13–​15.

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years later as the photographic punctum.27 Like a glove turned inside out, the space in front of the image—​t he spectator’s space—​is at once permeated and clutched, possessed. Epstein’s account of such intimate contact and arousal in the face-​to-​face of cinematic spectatorship joins optical, corporeal, and quasi-​religious ecstasy—​t his last in direct reference to the ritual sensorium of the Eucharist.28 Its lightening epiphany dawns, finally, in ethical contemplation: the moving image, like a living, sentient entity, is addressed in the second person, and personhood must be attended to, for it speaks “the present imperative of the verb to understand.” Knowing full well that we are not in actual fact being looked at by faces on the screen—​ at least not in traditional film-​based projection—​what is suggested here, nevertheless, is a way in which the facialized image prompts recognition, engagement, and even a sense of liability. Is it the case that one is addressed by the image just in the measure of one’s own capacity to address it? This is an idea—​much inspired by Thierry de Duve’s discussion of the ethics of confrontation with “Art in the Face of Radical Evil”—​to which I return at different points in this book.29 But for now, as we map some of the founding terms of the cinematic face in the 1920s, it suffices to observe that Epstein’s conception of an embodied space joining image and spectator is not just mindless cinephiliac hallucination but can become—​as does Eisenstein’s notion of “ecstasy”—​a conduit for knowledge, recognition, and moral insight. Indeed, there is a way in which the embodied presentness of space—​t he face-​to-​face of image and spectator—​bridges experience and knowledge, expression and the phenomenological projection of self. Indeed it is in such compound conception of the close-​up, insofar as it activates the domain of the spectator, that Mary Ann Doane locates the subversive potentiality of photogénie. 30 It is where the spectator is no longer subjected to a seamless geometry in which her disembodied gaze is absorbed but, rather, a dynamic space opens up between spectator and image. This is where the facialized cinematic image comes into its own; it is also where the spectator, then, comes into her own. JACQUES AUMONT OBSERVES that the valorization of a present-​tense cinematic visuality

such as photogénie—​elusive and fleeting, but superseding the syntactical, functional, expressively legible “silent face”—​has given rise to the most productive thinking about the image in

27  I stretch here, of course, Barthes’s notion of the punctum, expounded in Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). While Barthes defines the photographic against cinematography, photogénie might suggest a closer affinity between these media. The punctum can be theoretically independent from indexical and analogical values, which are otherwise central to Barthes’s discussion; it may indeed be posited as the supplement to those basic photographic conditions. The “vertical” address of the image may be further associated with Tom Gunning’s seminal discussion of the attraction, itself traversing diverse types of film; see “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 56–62. 28  In the Eucharist the wafer placed in the mouth is understood to be transubstantiated into (not merely symbolic of) Christ’s body—​itself grasped, in this theology, as incarnate spirit, letter-​made-​flesh. 29  Thierry de Duve, “Art in the Face of Radical Evil,” October 125 (Summer 2008): 3–​23. 30  Doane’s compelling discussion hinges on her special focus on the politics of scale: the close-​up is charged by the meeting of the minute and the monumental. Photogénie is in this way read as a precedent to the “contemporary schizophrenia of scale”: in consumer culture the promise of the whole in the fragment, and the plenitude in the detail or the instantaneous, all respond to a form of commodity fetishism—​itself related to the proliferation, and the polarizing, of gigantic and miniature projection and screening conditions that are, of course, everywhere around and among us. See Doane, “Scale and Detail,” 108–​9.



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the 1920s. 31 It is not strictly the lack of audible speech, but Epstein and Balázs’s investment in a more primal visual acuity—​preceding illustrative, narrative, and iconographic functions—​ that opened up for film theory deeper questions of a cinematic dispositif and allowed it to reflect, in turn, and more broadly, on the image. The re-​positing of the relation of visuality and legibility yields, in this perspective, new forms of knowledge. Idealistically invested by these European authors the face nevertheless remains, Aumont maintains, “an organic unit, infrangible, total”: It is less a question of making close-​ups than of seeing in close-​up, which means, first of all, a total vision of the surface of the screen, and even an all-​embracing vision. In the close-​up, it has been said, the screen is completely invested, invaded; it is no longer an assemblage of elements of representation within a scene but a whole, a unit. If this close-​up is a close-​up of the face, the screen becomes all face. 32

The freedom with which these early theorists contemplate the cinematic face as paradigmatic figure for the broader operations of perception and consciousness, and to question—​precisely in light of the new medium—​traditional hierarchies of knowledge, can be traced as philosophical principle later in the twentieth century. Aumont sends us at this point to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Alongside his philosophical rereading of Bergson, it is the idea of close-​up and faciality, inspired by the early film theories, that most prominently account for Deleuze’s special interest in the cinema. From the perspective of film studies, Deleuze can thus be understood as a strong reader of 1920s film theories that posit the human face, and the close-​up—​one and the same to Deleuze—​a s an expressive perceptual dispositif, one that can be differentiated from the linguistic-​s yntactic operations of montage. It is perhaps his prerogative—​a s philosopher rather than film historian—​to disregard technical and disciplinary categories that, in fact, makes Deleuze’s exploration of cinematic faciality so flexible. His idea of the cinema as, itself, a mode of thought finds one of its vivid instances in the discussion of the “affection-​i mage.” One recognizes here, too, the struggle to account for the empathetic experience of spectatorship, while keeping at bay the psychoanalytic inclination of the concept of identification. Deleuze’s dictum, in Cinema I, that “the affection-​image is the close-​up, and the close-​up is the face,” is in fact formulated in reference to Eisenstein, yet it defies traditional compartmentalizations of Eisenstein’s thought: Deleuze’s goes as far as to suppress an understanding of montage as linguistic, syntactic concept—​which is how it is expounded in the textbooks. 33 One pole of 31  On “silent” and “legible” face see Aumont “The Face,” 127–​9. Aumont associates the aspiration for a primal cinematic visuality with the legacy of Cézanne (​who he must be contemplating through Merleau-​Ponty). 32  Aumont, “The Face,” 139–​4 0. Aumont conjectures that, among these early theorists, Balázs had the advantage of the German word Stimmung, the atmosphere, or radiance, however ephemeral, that might suffuse an object and intensify it to perception. See my earlier discussion of the term, as glossed by Antonio Somaini. 33  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87; italics in the original. In the “Preface to the English Edition” Deleuze explicitly states that the concepts that he sought to produce “are not technical … or critical… . Neither are they linguistic… . The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that is, a preverbal intelligible content” (p. ix). Does this statement fully justify Deleuze’s disregard for editing?

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the affection image, the “intensive” face (as distinguished from the “reflective”), traverses in Deleuze’s account the thought of both Balázs and Eisenstein. One might reinforce this curious camaraderie between odd bedfellows that Deleuze traces through Balázs and Eisenstein’s shared interest in physiognomy. Not only Balázs drew on Lavater’s physiognomy—​v ia Goethe’s physiognomical studies, as we have seen—​but also Eisenstein (who of course had read Balázs) found use for physiognomy in both film theory and practice. Eisenstein maintains that, like mythology and its personifying operations, whose originary function would have been to offer some coherent vision of phenomena, but is now, for us moderns, a source of poetic figures—​so Lavater’s physiognomy, that no longer has scientific import, can still serve as model and as imagistic source for the fleshing out of character and type. Physiognomy as an affective property of perception still sustains “a subjective impression of an appearance and not the objectivity of the correspondence between the appearance and the essence of the character.” Eisenstein’s discussion here is directly informed by his contemporary interest in inner speech and in anthropological theories of sensual-​figural thought—​especially Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl’s distinction between “civilized” cultures based in analytic thought and speech, and “primitive mentalities” grounded in pre-​logical, imagistic, affective figures, in embodied yet consubstantial identities whereby subject and object, self and other, human and animal comingle. 34 Balázs would endorse the Soviet master’s understanding of physiognomy as, basically, a dimension of spectatorship. The syntactic underpinnings of Eisenstein’s Kuleshovian formation are suppressed here, as in the Deleuzian idea of the affection-​image. The Eisensteinian affection-image may be contained in the face or may extend beyond it: Deleuze describes it without any inherent reference to editing. His intuitive reading cuts through the usual academic classifications, yet it is not foreign to Eisenstein’s own ways of expanding the idea of montage since 1929 and through the later notions of “pathos” and “ecstasy.” What dominates in Eisenstein is the “intensive face”—​A umont’s paraphrasing of Deleuze is more lucid on this point than the source—​“that which, in the terms of technical portraiture, escapes from the facial contour to permit the facial features to rise to the surface and have free rein… without ever spilling over into the semiotic.”35 Disengaged from any particular morphology, from reference to shot size, and from the combinatory logic of editing, such faciality is principally defined by the intensifying power of attention that it elicits, carrying from one condition, or one object, to another, and attending to a psychic rather than actual (optical, geometrical) proximity. This is the power that Deleuze and Guattari call, in A Thousand Plateaus, the “abstract machine of faciality (visagéité),” operating at the intersection of perceptual strata and consciousness. The face in this account “is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels,” but is engendered out of “the white wall/​black hole system” at the intersection of “signifiance” (by which they mean the physical-perceptual strata) and “subjectification” (consciousness, passion etc.). 34  See S. M. Eisenstein’s 1935 “Speeches to the All-​Union Creative Conference of Soviet Filmworkers,” First Speech, Selected Works, vol. III, Writings, 1934–47, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 26–​9; quotation from p. 27. See Masha Salazkina’s discussion of Eisenstein’s interest in anthropology, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 35  Aumont, “The Face,” 141.



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The abstract machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces… . [The face] touches all other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance. The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that produces the face and facialization. Although the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. 36

Even preceding any specific reference to the cinema, this understanding of faciality as a fundamental operation of human consciousness can be seen in close affinity with Balázs. The expressive order of the face is that of “micro-​movements,” a term that surely draws on Balázs’s vocabulary (itself inspired by Simmel):  it takes the unique registers of facial expression—​ whereby movement and nuance effect the greatest impact with the minimum change—​as a model for intensified perception and attention, whether or not the object is in fact a human face. Whether relatively contained as a “passive-​reflective unity” (as in Griffith’s cinema), or intensive and transformative (as in Eisenstein), both facial-​image types, according to Deleuze, are abstracted from spatio-​temporal coordinates, from the syntactic implication of editing, and thus separable from psychological motivation or narrative causality. Moreover, faciality can be displaced beyond the delineation of the face proper: the face is not its only agent or its only referent. The cinema can grasp anything as if it were a face in close-​up. The radical implication of this in Deleuze’s universe is the idea that the affection image can be disengaged altogether not only from spatio-​temporal coordinates, not only from the individual, but from the human, to become its own entity. The facial close-​up is both the face and its effacement… . The close-​up does indeed suspend individuation… . One only need recall that the actor himself does not recognise himself in the close-​up… . This is simply to say that the close-​up of the face acts not through the individuality of a role or of a character, or even through the personality of the actor—​at least not directly… . A single close-​up can simultaneously join several faces, or parts of different faces (and not only for a kiss). Finally it can include a space-​ time, in depth or on the surface, as if it had torn it away from the co-​ordinates from which it was abstracted: it carries off with it a fragment of the sky, of countryside or of an apartment, a scrap of vision with which the face is formed in power or quality. It is like a short-​circuit of the near and the far. 37

The cinema instructs us—​so Deleuze states here against conventional wisdom—​t hat the close-​ up suspends individuation, that pure expression can ultimately efface the face that underlies it. Deleuze’s re-​reading of Balázs thus basically turns the Romantic-​humanist inclination of 1920s facial-​fi lm theory on its head and maneuvers it to connect to Eisenstein—​against the latter’s

36  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Year Zero: Faciality” in A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), quotations from pp. 167–70; emphases in the original. 37 Deleuze, Cinema I, 100–​4. Other than the example of Bergman’s Persona, Deleuze attends at this point to the big profile close-​up of Eisenstein’s Ivan with the line of people that I reproduce, further down, as an example of a “short-​ circuit of the near and the far.”

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famous protest that “Béla forgets the scissors,” and against all the conceptual oppositions which film history and theory have advanced in its wake. 38 Deleuze’s equation of face and close-​up under a third term—​t he affection-​i mage—​effaces the distinction between the integral expressive close-​up and the montage grammar of expression, and suggests that we read Balázs and Eisenstein in tandem. The face as such is not, in fact, a concept that Eisenstein seems to want, or need—​t his despite the unsurpassed physiognomic gallery of his cinema. However, an idea of face-​l ike expressivity, bound up with the efficacy of the image and its spectatorial address, clearly animates his work. The Eisensteinian expressive image is distinguished from just any use of faces, and from the proximity of the close-​up per se. In good formalist fashion we might approach it via what Eisenstein would eventually call “foreground”—​a spatial concept related to the broader notion of “figure” such as we have summoned earlier as a facial principle. For Eisenstein this concept concerns not so much an objective or even strictly formal property, but a relative position wherein ground, figure, and spectator are dynamically related. Initially, Eisenstein seemed interested in the face as if it were a body—​surely in affinity with the comedic acrobatics of early cinema, and with the theater. The privileging of large musculature, broader gesture and grimace, also afforded his leap between the singular and the multiple, between part and whole, individual and type. Expression is thus dynamically distributed across the entire body and throughout the larger field of the image. This does not mean that nuances, shifts, and a rich polyphonics of expression are absent in his work, but Eisenstein opens up, as a matter of principle, the possibility for the face to be used freely, as both literal and figural entity, and as flexible rhetorical principle—​one that can project onto wider domains. The extent to which the close-​up is figurally intricate in Eisenstein’s writings itself elicits a comparison with Balázs and Epstein. Eisenstein emphasizes a qualitative leap effected by shifts of scale. He thinks it through a juxtaposition of the very terms for “close-​up” and their connotations across different languages and film traditions. His discussion foreshadows our consideration, in Chapter Two, of the face in language. In Russian we talk about an object or a person being shot ‘on a large scale’ [krupnym planom], i.e., large. An American says: closely (the literal meaning of the term ‘close-​up’). Americans talk about the physical conditions of seeing. But we talk of the qualitative side of the phenomenon that is linked to its significance (just as we talk about a large talent… .) … . This comparison immediately shows up the most important function of the ‘large’ in our cinema: not merely, and not so much to show or to present, as to mean, to denote, to signify. … . 38  “Béla forgets the scissors,” is the title of S. M. Eisenstein’s 1926 essay; see Selected Works, vol. I, Writings 1922–​3 4, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 77–​81. One should remember that Visible Man preceded, in fact, Eisenstein’s sensational break into the international scene of cinema, but it soon became clear that Balázs had highest regard for Eisenstein’s work and subsequently brought it into account.



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Its amazing feature—​t he creation of a new quality of the whole, by juxtaposing it with the part—​was what instantly attracted us to the method of the close-​up. Whereas Griffith’s isolated close-​up was often a ‘crucial’ or ‘key’ detail, in the tradition of Dickens’ teapot; whereas the succession of facial close-​ups was a silent-​fi lm anticipation of future synchronised dialogue … we put forward the idea of a principally new qualitative fusion that resulted from the process of juxtaposition. 39

The qualitative fusion of the “montage-​image,” Eisenstein maintains, involves a breaking-​t hrough of signification by means of figural, synechdochal operations of the image, bound up not simply with the dynamizing of scale as such, but with the intensifying force of totality and simultaneity, the projection of an entity beyond the limits of the particular detail or the formal coordinates of the image. Yuri Tsivian glosses “montage-​image” as an indivisible unit which consists, nevertheless, not of one but two things as well as the tension in-​b etween them. This is not a conception of the image as representation, but the image as the product of conf licting features whose mutual, internal dynamics are experienced as a totality. The tense mutuality of the montage-​image need not be expressed only in editing—​m ontage proper—​but also in a montage-​l ike power effected by framing, movement, acting, lighting, or any aspect of cinematography. 40 While Griffith’s use of the close-​up, and the term’s American connotations, suggest to Eisenstein an appeal to the telling detail within the situation of spectatorship, the “large scale” notion in the Russian connotes to him an embracing grasp (even if by means of details, or fragments) of something already composite and substantially greater—​a s if thickened, or leavened, by the dynamic interaction of qualities. The figural operation of pars pro toto, namely synecdoche, is not a decorative circumlocution or just an economical solution to a problem of representation but, for Eisenstein, the realization of an identity of part and whole, of detail (or individual) and mass. This figural transmutation does not settle into a harmonious set of relations but is continuously dynamized by the inner tension of elements pushing against their own limits, as it were: even as the parts stand in for the whole, they also disturb—and thereby animate it. Signification and expression are projected beyond the limited, available facet of an object and its morphological coordinates as such. It is finally, also the embracing and propelling power of the image vis-​à-​v is its spectator: not “the physical conditions of seeing” (as in the American close-​up) but, Eisenstein suggests, the qualitative condensation of signification, a conceptual fusion in the image as it is experienced. It is the intensity of “sensual thinking”; it is how an image emerges as thought, how it gains higher intellectual efficacy. The figural possibilities of pars pro toto are already developed earlier in Eisenstein’s thought, as when he analyzes the impact of this device through the example of the surgeon’s pince-​nez in Battleship Potemkin (1925) (Figs. 1.1–1.2). 39  S. M. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves,” Selected Works vol. III, 226–​7; emphases in the original. 40  See Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 29. Tsivian further analyzes (pp. 37–42) Eisenstein’s technique in the portrayal of Ivan via framing, lighting, the actor’s pose, the distinct connotations of particular facial features (amplified by make-​up), and the art-​h istorical sources so richly exploited by Eisenstein.

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FIGURES 1.1–​1.2:  pars pro toto: Battleship Potemkin (S. M. Eisenstein, 1925) –​frame enlargements. This device consists of replacing the whole (the doctor) with a part (his pince-​nez) which plays him; at the same time it turns out that it plays that role with a much greater emotional intensity than the whole (the doctor) could have done, had he merely been shown a second time.41

The pince-​nez grips us too—​Eisenstein might have said—​by the nose: as montage-​i mage its sharp sensory effect is imprinted in memory; in this way it gains the power to found thought. Eisenstein suggests here that intensification through shifts of scale and the pars pro toto effects a sort of projecting-​forth of the image and, with it, a qualitative dynamizing of meaning. Such intensified montage-​image could be understood to press the spectator, too, to transcend the limits of identity—​to identify with a larger social body. The dynamic that Eisenstein describes here will culminate in his notions of “pathos” and “ecstasy” in the years to come.42 Eisenstein’s analysis of the pictorial full-​length portrait, Valentin Serov’s 1905 Portrait of the Actress Maria Yermolova (in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) is emphatic on the principle of a simultaneity of impressions that dynamize perception in both space and time (Fig. 1.3). The simultaneity with which the construct exists at two levels—​i n the whole and in the parts—​is the precise analogue of a fundamental characteristic of human perception in general, which has the ability to comprehend a phenomenon in two ways, as a whole and in its details, immediately and in mediated form; complexly and indifferentially.43

Even without the objective conditions of cinematic movement, temporality, and editing, this painting is propelled by framing and composition, in a series of perceptual leaps which dynamize and temporalize it even as they are all co-​present in the painting. It is not, Eisenstein asserts, the provenance of the portrait genre, with its social and symbolic representation of character, that intimates subjectivity here, but the way in which the sense of the whole is mobilized in the detail 41  Eisenstein, “Speeches,” 30. 42  On pathos and ecstasy see Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 43  Sergei Eisenstein, “Yermolova” in Selected Works, vol. II, Towards a Theory of Montage, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. M. Glenny (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 96; other terms quoted from pp. 95 and 103.



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FIGURE 1.3:  Eisenstein’s 1937 analysis of Valentin Serov’s 1905 Portrait of the Actress Maria Yermolova. Reproduced from S. M. Eisenstein, Montazh, ed. Naum Kleiman (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2000).

  

FIGURES 1.4–1.5:  The eccentric-​explosive body of the actor, and of the film, in The Old and the New (S. M. Eisenstein, 1929) – frame enlargements.

and thus achieves an “apotheosis” (the term is Eisenstein’s) of the subject in her image. Serov’s Yermolova addresses the viewer as a virtual succession of frames, like a sort of “compositional montage,” so that the full-​length figure (as if in long shot) is experienced both in its “monumental immobility” and in its “dynamic movement”—​in close-​up-​like immediacy and presentness. One might have already identified earlier, and in Eisenstein’s own film practice, the power and flexibility of facializing shots “on a large scale”—​as per the Russian term for close-​up—​like the foregrounded detail of the kulak’s ear and folds of his neck in The Old and the New (1929) (Figs. 1.4–1.5). In Eisenstein’s emphatic use of the profil perdu in extreme close-​up, the kulak’s face is so turned away that only the tip of the nose, the cheek and neck outlines remain, while the tight framing defamiliarizes the head as a whole. The side and back parts of the head, with the ear jutting out, thus seem to turn to us to tease our attention: they seem to acquire a face, and a gaze, in some ways

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more articulate than the actor’s own. In a different, sidelong view, the familiar, humanizing front of the face is once again deframed, as Eisenstein isolates what now seems like a vast expanse, stretching across the screen, between the ear and the tip of the moustache. A similar expressive system evolves through Eisenstein’s late work, where one witnesses variants of such leaps from face or part thereof, to body, and from body to other detail, to the setting, and to the image as a whole. Indeed, what is the “part” and what is the “whole,” and can the human face be sustained as a stable measure thereof when a wild range of elements are so dynamically enframed as to spin our perception and return the gaze so assertively? A similar trajectory of facializing operations is put into play by a range of different devices, which Yuri Tsivian describes with quasi-​horror-​movie connotations in his book on Ivan the Terrible: the particular expressivity of the actor in the role seems to break through the confines of the individual body, effecting a “back-​and-​forth interaction between the eccentric body of the actor and the eccentric body of the film… . The character ‘explodes’ to expand… . The montage-​image … ‘planted’ inside the hero’s physical body transcends it in order to be reproduced.” A contagious anthropomorphic expressivity seems to circulate between actor, setting, and the film itself; boundaries become permeable; everything comes alive as it partakes in such eccentric-​ecstatic corporeality. Traversing the differentiation between self and non-​self, the familiar and the alien, the montage-​image—​in Tsivian’s inspired description that follows Eisenstein’s own spirit—​releases the fecund powers of art and of sex, as well as the powers of horror.44 Another operative term emerges in one of Eisenstein’s late texts to describe how synecdochal intensification can thrust any and all elements, and the films own body, toward face-​like expressivity: “foreground.” It is, one recalls, among the privileged rhetorical devices—​consistent with the Russian formalist principle of estrangement—​meant to counter the automatism of language and endow the poetic text with salience that ordinary language does not carry.45 An apparently simple rhetorical figure, “foregrounding” has in fact been imaginatively employed, and lent itself memorably to Erich Auerbach’s characterization of the epic-​Homeric style: extended similes and digressions are leveled with the narrative thread of the epic world, which knows no background, and where everything is equally foregrounded, and illuminated. Annette Michelson has brilliantly projected this principle onto the temporal register of Eisenstein’s work to analyze the raising of the bridge sequence in October (1928). She demonstrates how, in that incredible scene, foregrounding is bound up with temporal interruption and recursion, so that at any instance the present moment can be opened up to its historical fullness. The sensory presentness of each and every detail is thus intensified, making salient the relation of any piece of the filmic event to its deliberate ordering process—​all within the dynamic panorama of the Revolution.46 Further elaborating on the cinematic stylistics of foregrounding, Gilberto Perez juxtaposes Eisenstein’s synechdochal rhetoric with Alexander Dovzhenko’s style in Earth (1930). While both filmmakers use the close-​up to rupture space, Dovzhenko tends to endow each object, and each shot, with a unique intrinsic solidity, an emphatically embossed presentness that, Perez suggests, tends to suppress on every level—​spatial, material, historical—​t he relation to what is 44 Tsivian, Ivan, 51. See pp. 65–66 for Eisenstein’s diagram of “ecstasy” qua “ex-​stasis,” and Tsivian’s gloss on it. 45  “Foregrounding” is singled out by Jan Mukarovsky of the Prague structuralists. See Willie van Peer and Frank Hakemulder, “Foregrounding,” The Pergamon Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 4, ed. Keith Brown (Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 2006), 546–​51; http://www.sciencedirect.com, accessed November 8, 2010. David Bordwell invokes throughout his work related formal concepts to describe cinematic articulations maneuvered vis-​à-​v is the classical standard. 46  Annette Michelson, “Camera Lucida Camera Obscura,” Artforum (January 1973): 30–7.



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FIGURE 1.6:  Metonymy or simile? Full-face, all-​present: Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko,1930) – frame enlargement.

not seen, what is before, beyond, or after the particular shot. Dovzhenko seems interested not so much in the whole but in its distinct parts, not in the links between elements but in the plenitude of their sensory existence: each instance is confronted in its own “full face” (Fig. 1.6).47 Eisenstein is, of course, equally invested in the emphatic visuality and plasticity of the detail, but he uses it eccentrically, “exploding” it—​as per Tsivian’s account—​outward of itself, so as to intensify the image and transfigure the sense of the whole. It is not strictly proximity, size, or particular expressive facial features on which Eisensteinian foregrounding hinges, but on a projecting-​forth, a leaping of the detail into implication and meaning always greater than itself, its expressive value always exceeding any actual, particular face in close-​up. “My first conscious impression was a close-​up”: perceptual experience, memory, and the cinema join in this formulation from a late text, “History of the Close-​Up,” where Eisenstein deconstructs, in effect, any settled diametrical classifications of thought such as part and whole, near and far, simple and complex, foreground and background.48 Cinematic expressivity is likened, rather, to a dream vision that achieves directly, without mediation, the sort of insight that in quotidian experience only the trained eye, or an exceptionally astute perception, can discern—​Eisenstein’s model here is Sherlock Holmes. In a stream of recollections, composed as a poetic verbal montage approximating a highly personal “autobiography” of the close-​up as a form 47  Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), see especially pp. 165–​70. Foregrounding can be productively considered also in light of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s equation of face and landscape. I have analyzed, in a different context, Pasolini’s frontality as negating the opposition between figure and ground, also in view of Roberto Longhi’s reading of Piero della Francesca. Piero’s frontality might be juxtaposed with that of Caravaggio whose figures are, of course, very much foregrounded, as they seem to project out of a recessed, dark setting. Even as they are often situated in a realist milieu, Caravaggio’s bodies are thus suspended between this world and another, and may be juxtaposed with Piero’s evenly-illuminated universe, where frontality can be equated with the pictorial surface itself. See my chapter “Archaic: Pasolini on the Face of the Earth,” Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), especially pp. 136–56. 48  Sergei Eisenstein, “History of the Close-​Up,” Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. IV, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute and Calcutta: Seagull, 1995), 461–​78. It was Yuri Tsivian who drew my attention to this curious text, and thus encouraged me to deepen my engagement with Eisenstein in this chapter.

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of perception and of memory, Eisenstein invokes visual impressions that seem to emerge from a semi-​consciousness triggered by sleep, wine, the Mexican sun or, possibly, illness—​indeed he was already quite ill when he wrote these lines in June 1946. A formative instance in which a figure suddenly take shape, as if in response to his gaze, against the indistinct flow of infant vision, is invoked in Eisenstein’s recollection of what seems like nothing less than the birth of consciousness. A branch of lilac. White, Double-​flowered. [… .] The close-​up of white lilac swaying above my cot is my first childhood impression. [… .] A small foreground detail can attain such size that it dominates everything else in the painting. Then somehow a chair was put through the screen in two places. I remember it had two holes in it. The screen was taken away. I think these two branches brought two, organically connected ideas together—​t he idea of a close-​up, and the idea of a foreground composition—​i n one living impression. And many years later, when I began to look for the historical precursors of the cinema close-​up I automatically began searching not in isolated portraits or still lifes but in the fascinating history of how an individual element in a picture begins to move forward from the picture’s general make-​up and into the foreground.49

Tellingly, throughout his little “History of the Close-​Up,” Eisenstein does not invoke the human face with any specificity. Yet is it not possible that there is something more distinct about a sprig of lilac, say, in a childhood memory, than in a mother’s face—​insofar as the former is embalmed in the past while the latter accompanies us with time and is (ideally) always with us? Indeed, the mother’s “first” face—​l ike her breast—​may be construed as the ground, or screen, against which distinct figures are drawn. Bertram Lewin’s screen metaphor, describing the most archaic foundation of the dream as preceding any of its particular figures, is pertinent here: the screen is like the mother’s breast upon which the content infant falls asleep after nursing. Likewise, as Jean-​Louis Baudry argued, the movie screen is routinely ignored, yet it is a necessary condition for the distinct image—​l ike that of the lilac branch—​to come into being, and to be perceived. 50 Both the movie theater screen, and the Japanese screen-​partition as ground for the lilac figure 49  Eisenstein, “History,” 461–​2; the line breaks and indentations follow the text. 50  Jean-​L ouis Baudry cites Bertram Lewin’s notion of the “dream screen” as support of the projected image in “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 299–​318. Recollections comparable to Eisenstein’s infant vision abound—​one thinks of Proust, but I recall here the poetic intensity of Godard’s celebrated coffee cup sequence in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), where a falling out of and back into focus rehearses the birth of consciousness out of figural play, joining the intimate absorption of the close-​up with a vaster reflection. One might conjure one’s own earliest memories as bound up with such consciousness of the image: for me it was a painting hanging above my baby cot that took shape one day around the figures of two children holding hands in a dance. I seemed to have realized simultaneously that the painting was always there, but that it had no distinct figures or features, for me, up until that moment of recognition.



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are likely operative in Eisenstein’s imagination. “Half-​embroidered, half-​painted,” the figure seems at one to pierce through the screen and to be depicted upon it—​a rebus of sorts. This emergence into foreground is understood in Eisenstein’s text as the founding condition of consciousness, awakening to life. Its anthropomorphic aspect surfaces with Eisenstein’s reference to the two holes piercing the surface—​as if to follow his gaze from one branch, and one idea, to another. Somewhat like the eye-​holes of a mask—​empty yet hypnotically returning the gaze, at once irresistible and forbidding—​these two holes in the screen are not themselves firmly located, but they seem to mediate the distant and the near, solid and surface. More than morphological similarity of parts, it is the mediating function of the holes, their transfiguration of vision, that seems to respond to the child’s gaze: physiognomy emerges as a field of dynamic figure and ground relations. Thus, in a sequence of dream-​like metonymic passages, attention shifts as if in successive foregrounding compositions from the lilac sprig to the chair put “through the screen in two places,” to the memory of two holes and, with the screen removed, to the two branches that, in turn, yoke “two ideas”; the sequence as a whole then crystalizes as a total, dynamic impression. Indeed, it seems progressively impressed—​upon the screen and then in memory—​as the image shifts from the white of these lilac petals, to holes, to branches. Evolving organically, in response to the child’s gaze, the figure is reduplicated and displaced. Joining these with our other examples, we find implicated here a dissolution of generic distinctions between pictorial modes—​the isolated bourgeois portrait and the still life—​by means of a transmorphic cinematic perception that breaks through categories and dynamizes the identity of all objects and figures, parts and whole. As Eisenstein put it when tracing the different connotations of the American concept of the close-​up versus the Russian (and French) shot “on a large scale”: it is “not so much to show or to present,” literally and narrowly, a particular face that he is after, but the cinema’s ability “to mean, to denote, to signify” face—​and thereby to facialize the image as a whole. Swerving from the particular formal parameters of a face, an image can nevertheless be like a face: a dynamic operative figure, it can do and it can mean what faces mean and do—​return the gaze, compel, address. New dynamic relationships of distance and proximity, of figure and ground—​which can itself emerge as figure—​are thus mediated. The two holes from the autobiographical “History of the Close-​Up” resonate well with the masks and skulls of Eisenstein’s Mexican project. The play of internal framing, scale and focal length, effecting volumes and cavities, dynamize these paradigmatic facial forms that seem, in Eisenstein’s film fragments, to seize, focalize, and thrust forth, as it were, even background elements, projecting them toward the foreground (Fig. 1.7). These relationships are vividly material, visual, and even tactile; they invoke a primal, intuitive child-​like play of concealing and peeking-​through. But as an ensemble, they eventually mediate the passage to formal and syntactic relations, affording “the link between painting and literature, seen as equally plastic.”51 The juxtaposition of objects, surfaces, entities of every scale in ways that force even the most distant object to jut forth as figure and address us as such—​to face the spectator even when faces themselves might not—​this is the achievement of Eisenstein’s art (Figs. 1.8–1.9). With little elaboration on the human face per se, Eisenstein thus develops an idea of foregrounding that elicits and intensifies the emergence of a figure, and lends the image as a whole a face-​like power of address, set against both rationalizing “daytime” perception and narrative

51  Eisenstein, “History,” 464.

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FIGURE 1.7:  Background and foreground dynamics in Que Viva Mexico! (S. M. Eisenstein, 1931) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 1.8:  Rhyming of background and

FIGURE 1.9:  Rhyming of background and

foreground in Que Viva Mexico! –​frame enlargement.

foreground in Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (S. M. Eisenstein, 1945) –​frame enlargement.

integration. Forgrounding exceeds, by this account, conventions of figure-​g round relations, teasing in the Eisensteinian montage-​i mage a corporeal-​physiognomic facingness. 52 Propelled by dislocation, dissociation, and violent association—​operations already at work in his earlier “montage of attractions”—​t he advanced montage-​i mage overruns, in Eisenstein’s discussion, conceptual, coded mediation and addresses itself directly to the spectator. The horizontal-​ linear textuality and legibility privileged in linguistic accounts of montage is overtaken here by the vertical dynamics of the montage-​i mage that always explodes its own boundaries, projecting from (or even through) the screen outward to incorporate the viewer. Likewise, the corporeal expressivity of Eisenstein’s late poetics of the image breaks with the evenly illuminated, balanced grids of Renaissance perspectival models—where each figure had its secure and stable place—and evolves through his art-​h istorical examples of whirling bodies in dynamic baroque masses, or of Piranesi’s dark vertiginous spaces, that resonate with the corporeal, at once quasi-​i ntestinal and psychic interiors of Eisenstein’s late films. If Soviet montage was 52  I return to the notion of facingness, in closer affinity with Michael Fried’s use of the term, in Chapter Five. In the present context, a more pertinent association would be with Tom Gunning’s expansion of the Eisensteinian attraction as cinematic dispositif—​see note 27, above.



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first described through mechanistic and linguistic metaphors, the figural expressivity of the montage-​i mage recovers a primal, corporeal, sensual vitality—even as Eisenstein posits it, at the same time, as an agent of complex thought. How to comprehend all this alongside Eisenstein’s high praise—​though unelaborated—​for Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc? While it is a film that could just as well be admired by an opposite sensibility—​one that would see in its rhetoric of authenticity and presence a prime case for a revelatory paradigm whose imperative is, plainly, “Believe!”—​Eisenstein’s thought, and his work, may also be seen in dialogue with Dreyer’s. 53 The Passion does not in fact consist in its entirety—​as it is sometimes remembered—​of facial close-​ups, but it is a film in which, Eisenstein might say, all is foreground. The intensification of foreground, where details are yoked in violent simultaneity, by no means gives rise to the human face as a harmoniously reassuring, infrangible totality. On the contrary Dreyer’s face-​work is fraught with violent dissociations, displacements, paradoxes and barriers which—notwithstanding its hallowed reputation—​one should parse.

JOAN OF ARC, INEVITABLY Moving through the facial-​expressive trajectory of the 1920s we arrive, inevitably, at Dreyer’s door to reconsider there how the terms and turns of the facial image are truly pushed to the limit. Dreyer’s film gives a particular meaning to the rather broad question of how the cinematic image is invested with consciousness, how expression is facialized and addressed—​a lso since The Passion so consciously straddles the transition to the talkie, when the synchronized human voice was to introduce a shift nowhere more salient than in the perception of the face. 54 All the more reason to marvel at its audacity, in view of Dreyer’s cutting back and forth between expressive faces, whose mouths pronounce words that one can often decipher, followed by dialogue intertitles (quoting the historical trial transcripts), that at times repeat those very words, and back again to the actor’s face, sometimes completing the phrase that the titles already spelled out. All this far exceeds standard intertitled film practice where—​ apart from the common wisdom that one should not burden the spectator with too much reading—​t he excessive mouthing of speech in close-​up is routinely avoided not only for the sake of economy, but since it so disconcertingly highlights the absence of voice, and might even seem 53  For Eisenstein’s expressed admiration of Dreyer see Beyond the Stars, 230 and 336. Dreyer for his part stated that his work was inspired by Battleship Potemkin—​so reports Casper Tybjerg in his commentary on The Passion of Joan of Arc, Criterion DVD edition (1999). In his Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 62–​63, David Bordwell cites an anonymous review from the New York Times (February 16, 1930) that ascribes to Eisenstein instead a negative opinion of Dreyer’s film: “very interesting and beautiful… but not a film. Rather a series of wonderful photographs.” Bordwell also cites Paul Rotha’s gloss on the opposition of Dreyer and Eisenstein as, predictably, following the opposition of the individual expressive shot and the montage of attractions. By the time he considers the film again in The Films of Carl Th ​ eodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), Bordwell revises his earlier assertion of its “splendid unity,” and admits the “disunity and contradiction” of Dreyer’s Passion as “one of the most bizarre, perceptually difficult films ever made” (66), pointing out, as well, how Dreyer pushes everything to the foreground of the image. 54  According to Bordwell’s Filmguide, p. 14, Dreyer’s original conception was of a talking picture; when settling on silent he still retained far more dialogue than is common in silent cinema, and which the actors were to speak in toto. Notoriously, a sonorized version was put together by Lo Duca in 1952, but was rejected by Dreyer.

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FIGURE 1.10:  Mouthing speech, then swallowing the camera: an “interiority” of sorts in The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901) –​frame enlargement.

uncanny. How and why should one stare into a mouth twisting open in inaudible speech? This was already parodied in the earliest cinema with The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901) (Fig. 1.10) where the oral movements of speech, magnified, evolve into the mock-​monstrous swallow. Surely, if Joan is so spiritually or psychologically saturated—​as viewers maintain—​ one should not be gaping into her mouth quite so directly and so extensively. Yet between numerous intertitles, Dreyer often leads us to do just that! How to navigate between the physical gesticulating mouth; the muted charge of speech, crying, pleading, breathing; and the intertitle quotes from historical documents? The face flutters somewhere in-between these elements in The Passion of Joan of Arc. David Bordwell has commented on this peculiarity, noting the difference—​one could well invoke here Derridian différance—​between the spatio-​temporality of speech-​as-​moving-​i mage and that of writing. It is this same difference—​or interference—​t hat marks the relation between the sensory and the intelligible, between the beholding of a human face and the act of reading in the film. The dialogue titles foreground the crucial difference between speaking and writing: lips move and then we read what they have already said. Through Jeanne d’Arc’s insistence on the principle of dialogue, the archaic dialogue title gets recharged with formal significance. 55

The significance is even more than formal. The elaborate artifice of repetition and syncopation between image and text in this film is such that time itself seems to stutter when facial and verbal expression seem to not simply repeat but interrupt each other, breaking the spatio-​temporal flow of cinematic experience and the linearity of reading (Figs. 1.11–1.13). The temporal 55 Bordwell, The Films of CTD, 91. In his earlier Filmguide (especially pp. 22–​8) Bordwell emphasized the temporal condensation of action in the film, which he ascribes to Dreyer’s abstraction of both duration and space. Such condensation is true to the broader narrative span of the film and its balance of fabula versus syuzhet; but one notes that it is not reproduced at the level of the discrete units of exchange in the film, where temporal retardation and dislocation are at work just when one might have expected a more economical and psychologically coherent flow.



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FIGURES 1.11–1.13:  Mouthing the word before and after written dialogue title in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) –​ frame enlargements.

dilation in the rebounding of the written text and the speaking mouth render language itself as a sort of material, corporeal substance. What results is that not the coherence of psychological character (well established in cinematic representation by that time), nor the integrity of Joan’s inspiration—​the divine revelation of her own presumed visions and voices—​all these are not quite held together in Dreyer’s system.56 Some new, alien territory emerges in the gap between image and language, and in their mutual interference in the arena of the face. 56  My emphasis on the breakdown of psychological coherence goes against what some viewers may consider the intuitive association of the expressive face with psychological truth, which was also Dreyer’s stated intention in many of his pronouncements on the film.

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This interference aggravates the frequent dissociation, noted by scholars, of eyeline matches and, more broadly, the dissociation of spaces in The Passion. When eyeline matches do occur, it is often in moments of crisis when, as James Schamus argues, Joan is in fact being deceived by her judges. 57 The intent, expressive facial close-​ups are often divorced, then, from the syntactic functions conventionally implemented by film language. With such coded, communicative legibility repeatedly thrown in doubt, a mute visual-​corporeal expressivity sets in—​but it is never a reassuring one. When can we read and when must we suspend the sovereignty of our languages and codes in confronting the nudity of the human face on its own—​a nd on its own turf, which is what Dreyer’s film seems to set up like no other film before it? When camera angles or the direction of glances suggest that the face is intent on communicating beyond itself, Dreyer’s disruptive system—​t he frequent lack of establishing shots, the vertiginous framing with heads often de-​centered, the dissociated editing—​a ll work to isolate the face and forge its own space. And even when, as is often the case, off-​screen space is signaled, it tends to be frustrated by unreliable eyeline matches. These shattered spatial coordinates, too, make us feel the space surrounding the head as a void—​but a void that is somehow substantial, heavy, grave. Not only by way of editing, but also in the use of mise-​en-​scène, vast yet oppressive expanses—​either blank or else emphasized with arches and other architectural fragments—​ gape above or alongside faces and often occupy the greater part of the frame (Figs. 1.14–1.15). Such perverse, warping compositions conspire against the centripetal unity of expressive-​revelatory plenitude—​t he psychological or spiritualized face that the film is said to promote. An iconographic-​s ymbolic interpretation of such compositions is compelling: in pictorial tradition such spaces might be occupied by virgin’s robes, by soaring angels’ wings and saints’ thighs; thus, the palpable lack of such divine apparatus could signify the condition of a world from which the incarnate gods have departed and that now encroaches upon the solitary human creature. 58 But what one confronts here is also the breakdown of legibility and representation. I would describe it as a cinematic correlative to Georges Didi-​Huberman’s account of the weight of empty spaces in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (ca. 1441) in the Monastery of San Marco in Florence (Fig. 1.16). Angelico’s reduction of architectural elements and props as well as of realist pictorial devices—​spatial constructions, shading, molding, all that would render the space and the sacred encounter that transpires in it intelligible as representation—​ gives rise to a profound ambiguity. The bare expanse that gapes in the middle of the fresco posits what one sees versus what one knows: the enigmatic composition with the vacuum at its midst interferes with both narrative and pictorial spatio-​temporal coherence, and thus opens figuration to perpetual displacement. What is at stake here, according to Didi-​Huberman, is a loss of legibility and, with it, a radical otherness that comes to lurk at the heart of seemingly 57  James Schamus’s scholarship on Dreyer has inspired some of my own thinking about the film; see Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrude: The Moving Word (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 66. Noël Burch’s discussion in “Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Major Phase,” Richard Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1980), particularly 296–​300, is compelling on most accounts. He makes the point that the space conjured in the film is specifically, and exclusively cinematic—​i n assertive rejection of both the proscenium-theatrical space and of the transparent, illusionistic filmmaking style. Yet his argument that Dreyer links shots “exclusively through eyeline matching” and yet maintains at the same time an “open” relationship between them remains problematic. 58  Such interpretation has been forwarded by my students in a seminar on the face at the University of Chicago, Winter 2010.



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FIGURES 1.14–1.15:  The weight of empty spaces in The Passion of Joan of Arc –​frame enlargements.

FIGURE 1.16:  The weight of empty spaces: Fra Angelico, Annunciation with Saint Peter Martyr, fresco (ca. 1440–​1445). Image courtesy of the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Licensed by Scala/ Art Resource, NY.

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intelligible representation. These are the equivocal workings of an art already informed by humanist innovation but ultimately serving other ends: the riddles of divine mystery and its necessarily oblique figuration in the image. 59 Across the various Christological attitudes to image and figuration—​t he Florentine monk’s and the modern Scandinavian’s—​strategies of interference and anachronism probe the riddles of incarnation, through and against the situation of the human body in space and time. Dreyer’s work with framing and décor is consistent with his editorial system. It signals, almost palpably, just such loss of intelligibility that inflects what would first appear as a succinct narrative rendering of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, buttressed by historical documents and a range of quasi-​realist, authenticating devices. But Dreyer’s challenge is to render not simply the trial, but the Passion, which is certainly no straightforward representational and psychological matter. His breakdown of eyeline matches, his assertive foregrounding of empty spaces, his recursive interference with temporal flow—​u nder the guise of strict linearity, which Dreyer underscored by shooting in chronology—​a ll these isolate and accentuate the one element consistently charged and overdetermined in the film: the human face which persists as if on its own, and against our routine effort to comprehend its situation, orientation, and communicative meanings. Its peculiar fullness in isolation, always circling on the edge of intelligibility, has inspired one of Gilles Deleuze’s best passages of formal description: Joan’s face is often pushed back to the lower part of the image, so that the close-​up carries with it a fragment of white décor, an empty zone, a space of sky from which she draws an inspiration. It is an extraordinary document on the turning towards and turning away of faces… . Dreyer avoids the shot-​reverse shot procedure which would maintain a real relation between each face and the other, and would still be part of an action-​i mage. He prefers to isolate each face in a close-​up which is only partly filled, so that the position to the right or to the left directly induces a virtual conjunction which no longer needs to pass through the real connection between the people. 60

Dreyer’s foregrounding principle and his isolation of the human face is what propels the image, as Deleuze puts it, into an “immediate relation with the affect” and underscores its “triumph of a properly temporal or even spiritual perspective”: The Passion is thus, he concludes, “the affective film par excellence.” But there is something else about the face in this film: even as, for its great theme and its reputation, we expect to be transported to some “spiritual perspective,” or at least psychological depth, we sense at the same time a way in which the face is here both conduit and intrusion to such journey. In fact the face’s physical being—​by way of appearance, frequently marked by the haptic appeal of skin texture, wetness of cheeks, dryness of lips and so on—​is often sensed as inordinately tangible. The concrete fleshy faces that populate the film—​both the judges’ and the possessed 59  I draw on Georges Didi-​Huberman’s discussion across two books: Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 113–​23, and Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 2005), 13–​2 8. 60 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 107.



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FIGURES 1.17–​1.18:  Sensory primacy: a nudity of face and of being in The Passion of Joan of Arc –​frame enlargements.

protagonist’s together—​are reiterated by the striking procession of bodies and body parts in the outdoor crowd scene. Most memorable are the contorted acrobats and the baby at its mother’s breast. In this universe where everything is so disconcertingly foregrounded, Joan/​Falconetti’s features—whose peasant-​girl connotations Dreyer wished to emphasize—​resonate with both the oppressive voids that so often encroach upon her and with the plenitude of concrete, corporeal being. Not so much by virtue of her expressions—​since for the most part the various figures and movement in the crowd scenes do not seem to be within her line of vision—​but by way of metonymic contiguity delivered to our perception in montage, Joan’s face could be said to inflect these other spaces and figures, or else to suffer them. In effect, Dreyer asks us to compare, and equate, the sensory-​expressive quality of these diverse figures: all are foregrounded; all are facialized, and this equation must be brought to bear on the sort of truth of the face that Dreyer must be aiming at—​no foggy spirituality but intimately, umbilically, immersed the thick of life. Casper Tybjerg cites from a contemporary review of the film by Lis Jacobsen, a Danish philologist who had attended its premiere—her powerful observation points in the direction that concerns me. It is not just the absence of make-​up, Jacobsen wrote, but it is as if the skin itself is ripped off the human face in The Passion of Joan of Arc; its nudity is not simply that of the sentiments, but of human existence from cradle to grave. Truth is hurled at our faces: an image of a suckling infant pictured not as a mother with a child at her breast, but as a huge bulging naked bosom clasped by a lustily feeding baby mouth. 61

Clearly, this is not the image of a Madonna and Child as sublimated by tradition and convention (Figs. 1.17–1.18). Whatever iconographic connotations and metaphoric leaps Dreyer’s string of images might invoke—​Joan’s longing to be embraced to comfort by God in heaven, the violent assault on her child-​like innocence—​is surpassed here by the impact of raw being. The truth of the naked face meets that of the naked breast (with which the face also resonates formally) on which the infant suckles; the mouth that is seen to speak, and pray, and take the Eucharist resonates with the immediacy and necessity of the baby’s wet mouth; Joan’s keen look with the baby’s intuitive turn of the head, disturbed only for an instant from its primal absorption—​a ll are metonymically joined and forcefully equated on the same plane by expressive foregrounding. One might say that an exchange of intensities thereby occurs between these various figures: 61 Tybjerg, The Passion DVD commentary, citing Lis Jacobsen.

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all are oddly intrusive, offering the spectator no relief. Everything transpires in an absolute presentness, concreteness, and out in the open. Spaces empty and full, objects of all sorts blunt and sharp, body parts—​a ll press forth, charging the faces that confront us. In Dreyer’s reliance on historical documents; in his insistence on shooting in chronology, perhaps by way of impressing upon his cast a ritualistic re-​enactment of the Passion; in the assault of his close-​ups upon the exposed faces of the actors—as if the camera were extending the trial’s techniques of interrogation and torture—​in all these ways the film appeals to a rhetoric of authenticity.62 However the obvious must not be overlooked: that it is an acted, costume, fiction film. Its actors’ faces, like most cinematic faces (and bodies), are to be seen as both their own and as being lent to the characters they enact—​a split itself thematized in The Passion’s dwelling on certain characters’ duplicity, and on the forging of the king’s seal and signature.63 We shall have occasion to develop the question of acting-​as-​being and being-​as-​performance when we consider the screen test as “facial genre” in Chapter Four. But due to the loud claim of authenticity in The Passion, its effects of bareness and presentness, and by sheer proximity, the actor’s person and role are palpably yoked here, more so than in standard dramatic film practice. This is what prompted André Bazin’s famous observation that, despite the artifice of theatrical gesture and décor, and despite its principle of fragmentation, the film transpires like a documentary of its actors’ faces. Bazin’s ontological realism seems not too far here from Balázs’s microphysiognomic perception and even Epstein’s geological animism: The greater recourse Dreyer has exclusively to the human “expression,” the more he has to reconvert it again into Nature. Let there be no mistake, that prodigious fresco of heads is the very opposite of an actor’s film. It is a documentary of faces. It is not important how well the actors play, whereas the pockmarks on Bishop Cauchon’s face and the red patches of Jean d’Yd are an integral part of the action. In this drama-​t hrough-​ the-​m icroscope the whole of nature palpitates beneath every pore. The movement of a wrinkle, the pursing of a lip are seismic shocks and the flow of tides, the flux and reflux of this human epidermis. 64

Bazin is not naively equating here the acted fiction film and documentary. What he identifies in the arena of the face is, rather, the triumph of a physical, corporeal nature caught on film vis-​à-​v is conscious, intentional human gesture and action, or acting and, more broadly, representation. As in the neorealist tradition that he privileges, what Bazin sees in Dreyer’s work is the bare, almost intrusive corporeal reality of the actor pushed against mimicry 62  For a nuanced discussion of the film’s violent use of the close-​up vis-​à-​v is its odd realism, see James Schamus, “Dreyer’s Textual Realism,” Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 315–​2 4. 63  The nagging question of dissimulation with regard to the face in the cinema, and in this film in particular, was sharpened for me by Michael Cramer’s contribution to my seminar on the face at Yale University, Spring 2007. 64  André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema, Part Two,” What Is Cinema, vol. I, trans. Hugh Gray (1967; Berkeley: California University Press, 2005), 109–​10. Bazin’s reference to the “red patches” in what we obviously see in the film as black-and-white is perhaps effected by Dreyer’s appeal to our recognition of quotidian phenomena. Extreme proximity ruptures formal barriers, as well as our sense of the “envelope” that shields the person. This effect is recognizable in new wave cinemas: I’m thinking of John Cassavetes’s close-​ups of Gina Rowlands in Opening Night (1977) where, as per Bazin’s discussion of Dreyer, the theatrical context makes the cinematic gesture even more salient.



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and against the illusionistic flow of the narrative fiction. The effect of the non-​actor in neorealism—​t ypes marked by class, profession, milieu, region—​is of a piece with this idea. One may well dub this corporeal intrusion of the face—​following the Cahiers du cinéma editors’ celebrated expression—​a “reality of the inscription.”65 The question remains: how does such cinematographic insistence on the face-​a s-​body still seem to endow it with a dimension of interiority and of revelation; how does one move from the material opacity of flesh to the supposed transparency of “spirit,” from the epidermal to the self, from image to consciousness? Can this translation be accounted for by some sort of equivalent to a physiognomic lexicon? Does the merciless attention to creases, pores, flaky scalps, moles of all shades on the judges’, the guards’, and the torturers’ faces in Joan of Arc simply translate into an “inner ugliness,” their guilty conscience, their fall from the divine into corrupted flesh? Would such translation then also apply to the bodily effects of the maid herself, implicating some motivated link between her outer, inner, and transcended domains—​namely our seeing one as cause, or evidence, or index of the other? Joan is anxious to protect the integrity of all these aspects of her self, bound up as one in what she is, in her being: when threatened with torture she begs her judges to not separate her body from her soul. But when we are confronted with the shearing of her hair and the bleeding; and even more so, it seems to me, when we get subtle shimmery glimpses of the inside of her mouth and nostrils, ​we might ask then how all such fleshy orifices and corporeal excretions are part of her self—​since they forge her cinematographic being in the first place?66 Just like the tears carving paths, for posterity, down the textured surfaces of her complexion—​t hese bodily effects are what make us truly wonder what a self might be. How does subjective agency rise out of these many layers of physical being, out of the thick of life? The flesh is not transparent—​beneath it there is more flesh, and blood. If we try to remove these layers, we kill the patient, in a manner of speaking—​it is what burning witches is all about. Nor does the legible range of Joan’s facial expressions, which is limited—​fear, supplication, pity—​suffice. Its limits are those of discourse and of representation: symbolic systems that cannot encompass the mystery of self. And so, since the physical substance of flesh inundates us here with excessive proof of existence—​what would that self be?

65  Collective text by the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 495. 66  The production trivia, pointed out to me by Richard Suchenski, that in the shot isolating the arm the bleeding was in fact done to a stunt does not destroy, it seems to me, the corporeal blows of the film, even if it intrudes, somewhat, upon its myth. The fragmentation of the body by editing or other cinematic devices is a fact that Dreyer, with his dispersive editing style, would not deny. The sight of the blade cutting through flesh and the blood jetting out contain enough of a manifest cause-​a nd-​effect within a single shot to affect most viewers quite viscerally, and in ways that may be said to compensate for the editing of two bodies into one. This is a common cinematic conceit that underscores the fundamental difference between theatrical and cinematic bodies. In the theater the body is, at least in principle, integral and sovereign. In the cinema, too, the actor lends her body to the role, but not in quite the same way that she lends it to the camera: body and face are subjected to the cinematic apparatus and, in some sense, the apparatus always, and in principle, prevails—​it has the final say, as it were. Films that explore this difference by appropriating theatrical modes of perception—​l ike emphatic frontality and, above all, in certain uses of the long take—​often do so to parse the question of the actor. The split between role and camera is very much at stake in Cassavetes’s Opening Night. But what to make of it in Dreyer’s film? We shall encounter throughout this book other such radical, and more or less juridical, situations of confrontation of face and apparatus.

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There is a way in which all these bodily effects are like facial expressions—​indeed like strong expressions that, whether or not discretely and fully legible, manifest, at the very least, the intense presentness of the experience with which we are confronted. But insofar as these bodily effects exceed a parade of signifiers more or less conventionally joined toward a literary characterization of the maid’s character and her distress, they are set against a verbal order—​a lso undermined in Joan’s rejection of the forcibly signed confession. Their cumulative layering proclaims depth; this is what layers structurally do, especially when a temporal process—​recursion, duration—​partakes in their layering. The dissimulation of the actor, whose body both reveals and conceals the subject, is mirrored in the dissimulation of the character who, in her very person, both conceals and reveals the mystery; these dissimulations, too, are part of that layering process. Such layering signals a depth of experience but exceeds any discursive or legible content to be read therein. What it adds up to is the density and opacity of the subject: much as one peels off layers, the power, even threat, involved in raw being is bound up with the resistance to legibility and to iconographic decoding. Dreyer might be positing here not an inwardness offering itself to be read but a stubborn rebounding of self—​whatever that self might be—​t hrough the physical density of the visual. It is the subject’s most precious aspect, and it is what Joan’s face, and her very person, presents to the judges, and to spectators. Dreyer’s film spins such ideas—​such double-​negations—​into circulation in the cinematic image. How, then, is Joan/​Falconetti’s face part of her self—​a nd what is that self, insofar as cinematography can tell? In its routine operations the cinema (like other fictions) presumes to know what it shows, and display what it knows, to define and make legible its subjects (because it invents them). Dreyer explores the uncompromised presentness of the living, human face on film, staging its nudity and its layering to figure an agency—​be it a grand theological mystery or the little mystery of the person. He progresses against the representational inclinations of his medium by repeatedly pointing to the gaps between seeing and knowing, by moving continually toward and away from legibility. A Passion is figured, but what it manifests is that its mystery cannot quite be disclosed—​cannot be altogether subjected to representation, cannot be possessed by knowledge. Another way to describe this conceit—​a lways skirting the mind-​body problem in its properly philosophical formulations—​is to consider that the face is a medium in just the way that a person partaking in some ritual invocation might be taken as medium of exchange between the living and the dead, between present and past, matter and spirit. The archaic theater actor is invested with similar powers of mediation: in the actor’s performance, the dramatic operations of mimesis, dissimulation, substitution, doubling, or repetition are equipoised by the presence and immediacy of the actor’s body, lent to (or possessed by) the role (or some oracular spirit). Vestiges of such daemonic exchange might be seen to inform the distinct spatio-​ temporal presence-​absence condition of motion pictures. In just such terms Miriam Hansen glossed Benjamin’s aura, effected by an apparatus that “at once threatens and inscribes the subject’s authenticity and individuality”: its efficacy may well be driven by this double movement. 67 It is not, then, an actual return of the gaze in the subject’s direct look at the camera, but the agency of a gaze that matters—​as it permeates, emanates, but is at the same time also alienated from the subject in its refraction across a distance. This distance, spatial and temporal, 67  Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 342–​3 .



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is synonymous with the gap between disjunctive entities, human beings, states of being. It is especially pronounced when technologically inscribed facial indices are as accumulated and densely layered as in Dreyer’s film. With the relations of image and language dislocated, with the body’s intelligibility pushed to the limits and drained, with an avalanche of expressions drowning the face, auratic distance is mediated by figural leaps—​a nd by falls. Joan’s “otherworldly” gaze toward a transcendent “elsewhere” is, at once, excessively charged, audaciously embodied, and disjointed, drained. It is as if the most intensive eruption of facial expressivity must also be sensed in its utter strangeness and otherness for the face to come into its own—​ but that this should happen before our eyes. Such interpretation is corroborated by Françoise Meltzer’s understanding of the story of Joan of Arc as an emblematic intersection of archaic and modern discourses—​this well preceding its particular exploration in Dreyer’s film. It is after all, as Meltzer puts it, the story of a woman’s encounter with a symbolic system that strives to make her “a ‘subject’ without agency.” Yet Joan, being a woman, is “not a subject or person before the court.” What takes place, then—​as it has done symptomatically throughout history—​is that agency “flows through and is realized by the body.”68 The scandal that this presents to our culture’s symbolic regime is, itself, emblematic. James Schamus, likewise, describes Dreyer as staging here a “refusal between the traffic of language and image.” Joan’s renouncing of the signed confession allegorizes the breakdown of a verbal, male-​gendered, regime in the face of the maid’s visions—​visions corroborated in the excessive domain of the cinematic image. We do not need to see Joan’s visions for ourselves: the face thus foregrounded carries their agency with a fullness that exceeds both everyday perception and the ordinary, functional visuality of narrative cinema. Schamus adds: “Dreyer, by rupturing the marriage between word and image, approaches the real.”69 Illegibility is set up not as an impediment, but as a necessary condition of the strong, charged image. The iconicity of the cinematographic image would first seem to convey plain availability and intelligibility. But then Falconetti’s skin, nostrils, mouth, the twitches of tiny muscles caught in her close-​ups—​all these crowd our view, cannot be deciphered away, and force us to confront again the gap between seeing and knowing. Even tears, the most human of fluids by medieval interpretation—​noble, repentant, or redemptive as they might be—​a re at once self-​evident and profoundly ambiguous. Among their many meanings—​which Moshe Barasch brilliantly parses in late-​medieval Christian iconography—​even the most obvious, sadness and compassion, can shift to mystical joy. “Are we at all permitted,” Barasch finally wonders, “to ask what crying ‘means’?” The challenge of 68  Françoise Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), I quote from pp. 9 and 39. Although she does not treat Dreyer’s film specifically (even as Falconetti commands the book cover), Meltzer’s discussion is absolutely pertinent, and provides the best preparation for thinking about the film. 69 Schamus, Gertrude, 53 and 90 respectively. The Lacanian/​Ž ižekian “real,” intimated by Schamus, joins with “excess,” “supplementarity,” “aura” in a rather fluid nomenclature. But while we should not seek a perfect homology between these terms, there is a way in which what one struggles to describe in Dreyer’s Passion can be approximated by any and all. My recurring notion of “illegibility” in these pages perhaps mirrors the principle of supplementarity by which Doane had glossed Balázs and Epstein, and also adjoins Eisenstein’s pushing of foreground to the point of ecstatic leaps across and outside the flow of discourse. Tom Gunning pressed me to reflect on my preference for “illegibility” over “ineffability” here, to which I  would respond that the ineffable carries heavier mystical connotations. These are not irrelevant to the discussion at some points in this book, but may also be juxtaposed with how the illegible sets itself more explicitly against symbolic or iconographic systems, and introduces moments (or sites) of crisis in their midst.

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tears to the interpretation of causes and expressions is, perhaps, the most overt form of the face’s margins of illegibility with which this book is concerned. Already here, in Dreyer’s Passion, we see tears suspended between expression reaching its zenith, a temporal bodily eruption, an appeal to empathy, perhaps even a gift—​but they do not readily lend themselves to causal interpretation or “reading.” 70 Indeed, Dreyer’s attention to bodily presence in certain close-​ups—​a presence that mediates but also obstructs meaning—​sometimes involves a disconcerting emphasis on the humid roundness of Falconetti’s eyeballs, like spheres that almost seem to float in her teary face. And so, even tears cannot be altogether sublimated here into psychological or metaphysical meaning. Joan is firmly located in her body, and in her face-​a s-​body. There is no getting around it in this film. The corporeal disturbance of legibility discerned here is allegorized, finally, by the simple fact that, of course, we do not see Joan’s own visions, nor do we hear her voices (we hear no voices at all)—​such things do not translate across media, as it were. Any such claim would amount to vulgar literalism, itself critically echoed in Joan’s interrogation, when the judges try to trick her into a heretical account of her vision of St. Michael’s clothing or hair. This literalization offends her, and us: we are relieved by her clever skirting of the trick question—​she answers with another: “do you think God was unable to clothe him?” But then we, too, must suspend the questions posed by our secular modernity which, Dreyer might say, perversely mirrors these judges’ own dogma, and we grant Joan her truth, whose literal content we need no longer question. Not the learned judges’ doctrine, nor our secular one, can demarcate these visions as they beckon and withdraw, at one and the same time, their epiphanic promise. The human face is where we encounter time and again, in the visual, what we cannot really know. The gap, or abyss, signaled here also means that Dreyer’s audaciously foregrounded close-​ups can in fact transpire as distance. This is where Joan’s truth flickers—​a s consumed by fire, or as across an abyss, or in the form of a question: such, at least, is Joan’s answer. Dreyer’s film bluntly dramatizes questions of face and agency that we also encounter in later cinema: that if it is not to be objectified on the one hand, nor diffused as metaphysical currency on the other, if it is to come into its own, the human face always disturbs epistemological and communicative channels—​it is not transparent, it cannot let meanings, reasons, motivations, settle. But there is a price to pay for maintaining the life of the face-​as-​image, while preserving its freedom. The Passion of Joan of Arc thus also allegorizes ways in which cinema can itself become an interrogating machine, like the battery of judges weighing upon Joan. One does not interrogate consciousness directly. The cinema has developed its own ways of veiling and masking, of shielding and preserving the human face from the violence of visual interrogation and the constrictions of interpretation—​by others and by the apparatus. But the face may then emerge as its own defense—​may block, or deflect, as much as it mediates. Its illegibility need not be shrouded in divine mystery; it may still impress us as a productive principle, as a generative form of attention that knows no limits. It compels our response. But what does it mean to cultivate such forms of illegibility, yet persist in offering the face as incarnation of self in the world, a visible token of our humanity? 70  See Moshe Barasch, “The Crying Face,” Artibus et Historiae 8, no. 15 (1987): 21–​36; quotation from p. 35. Ralph Ubl, who directed me to this essay, also pointed to the example of Mary’s eyes in José de Ribera’s Pieta (1637, Museo nazionale di San Martino, Naples), and one thinks of numerous other instances where the size, protrusion, and unique texture of eyes makes their corporeal origin interfere with their expression, their gaze, their meaning.



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FIGURES 1.19–1.20:  Variants of a Passion: Karina and Falconetti face-​to-​f ace, tearful, in Vivre sa vie (Jean-​Luc Godard, 1962) –​frame enlargements.

SOMETHING OF DREYER’S   audacious

demand survives in the cinema thereafter, even when incorporated time and again in scenarios of loss and death: a Passion of the face is continually retold through film history. We note it, with just a moment’s glance ahead, in Jean-​Luc Godard’s great face-​to-​face gesture to Dreyer, across a historical divide. This is, of course, the tale of another woman’s martyrdom: the prostitute Nana’s existential struggle to be, in Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). In the third tableau, Anna Karina’s sensitive features are illuminated by reflection from the movie screen as she weeps face-​to-​face with Dreyer’s Joan/​Falconetti, tearfully accepting full knowledge of her redemptive death (Figs. 1.19–1.20). Aumont’s account of Godard’s composition at this point is compelling: it is as if an entire film history—​implicitly encompassing all due glamour of the classical female star—​is traversed in this exchange, this embedding of images.71 Indeed, the one film within the other yields an extraordinary situation of shot-​reverse shot, also joining archaic and modern, time and tears, faces and souls. For Godard at that time—​so well attuned to a last-​bastion humanism—​still believed that the cinema could mediate such an encounter, even if he already worried about its survival: the shabby, almost-​ deserted movie theater is itself still figured here as a space of intersubjective potentiality. As in Godard’s best moments, this is not marred, it seems to me, by the irony of quotation and pastiche or by the glycerin artifice of Nana’s almost-​too-​perfect tears. One other glance, a couple of years later, toward one of Andy Warhol’s greatest Screen Tests (1964) radicalizes such Passion of a woman’s face confronting the apparatus. Subjugated now not to the Catholic inquisition but to Warhol’s own Test regime Ann Buchanan, holding still and unblinking as instructed, sheds a tear under the bright lights (Fig. 1.21). The medium bends here almost to mimic, with the silent speed projection, photographic portraiture. The tear’s decelerated welling heightens our sense of anticipation and eventual change; time itself wavers and its relation to experience (the sitter’s, our own) is cast into doubt. A poignancy of expression is sustained: we ourselves may be affected sympathetically, sensing this instance as a crisis. The complex response that this film elicits pushes against physiological diagnoses or the humdrum question of hypothetical “causes.” Liberated from biographical or fictional anchors, are these tears more or less authentic than Joan’s, or Nana’s? One recalls Barasch’s questioning of a “meaning” for tears and considers, again, that the power of facial expression (tears are expressed) in the cinema need not hang on whether it erupts 71  Aumont’s evocative description of this scene and its contexts is in Du visage, 9–​12.

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FIGURE 1.21:  Variants of a Passion: Screen Test: Ann Buchanan (Andy Warhol, 1964). 16​mm film, black-​and-​white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

from the “inside” or is imposed, one way or another, from without. And again, as for Balázs, “the expression exists even without the explanation. It is not turned into an expression by the addition of an imagined situation.”72 A raw power of cinema breathes through the Buchanan Screen Test: what right have we to dismiss her tears under the pretext of mechanical or physiological causes? Identification and catharsis are, in some sense, automatic, physical responses to dramatic, verbal or visual shifts, to the breakdown of knowledge, to inevitable loss, and to recognition. Technologically conditioned, or a bodily reflex, or an index of the performer’s exhaustion, physical or psychological, tears offer themselves to us, and affect us, as do even those electrically induced expressions that Duchenne de Boulogne (Figs. 1.22–1.23) imposed on his facially paralyzed patients.73

72 Balázs, Spirit of the Film, 100. 73  To almost anyone but the scientist or experimenting physician and his staff, the contact of electrodes with facial flesh and the resulting grimace is an excruciating sight. We have been reassured that—​since paralyzed or otherwise de-​ sensitized—​Duchenne’s subjects do not suffer, so that the impression of pain can be separated, theoretically, from the particular facial expression. This thought, together with our recognition of the destitution (by class, by circumstances etc.) of all these patients and other such contextual considerations, surely come after the primary sensory and affective impact of the image has already hit us with its ghastly contact of instruments and the grotesque facial-​muscular contortion. As in our viewing of the Buchanan Screen Test, but even in a strong melodramatic film, the complexity of response to the expression we confront is impossible to disentangle in its varying range of visceral, empathetic, and intellectual components—calculated, constructed, visually and aurally paced and intricately designed as they might be.



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FIGURES 1.22–1.23:  Variants of a Passion: Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, facial electrostimulus experiments, from his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; où, Analyse électro-​physiologique de l’expression des passions (1862). Images courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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The encounter between the human face and the technological apparatus can be dealt in many ways, and it can be excruciating: the pathos to which it gives rise may be elicited not only by the greatness of theme, and by empathy, but also by authorial constraint or withdrawal, and by the subject’s self-​a lienation. Dreyer’s unique balance of these elements solicits questions of transcendence or spirit, but it is very much a balance couched in the body and in the apparatus itself, and no less eloquent as it is preserved in tears and in light.

THE FACE AND ITS VOICES How did such heightened contemplation of the face—​the belief it inspired in 1920s film culture, its redemptive promise at the heart of technological modernity—​carry over into the talkie? One presumes, and many worried, that its absorptive expressivity would be profoundly altered when it began to speak. Historians of film style demonstrate that the confluence of the close-​up (as well as medium shots, and everything in-​between) with the shot-​reverse shot was, in fact, busily at work in mainstream cinema already in the mid-​teens and evolved in the following decade, together with the eyeline match, as key devices in continuity editing which narrative called for well before the talkie. The use of the shot-​reverse shot as prime carrier of the facial close-​up in mainstream American cinema increases considerably, according to Barry Salt’s statistics, with the proliferation of dialogue in synchronized sound in the late 1920s and the 1930s. It reaches a certain peak of exploitation in the 1940s, though it is always tied as well to conventions of genre, stylistic preferences, and theme, and is always inflected also by nuances in shot duration—​among other stylistic articulations.74 The commitment of the face to psychological causality ultimately subtends, as David Bordwell lucidly puts it, classical cinema’s “personalizing” of space.75 Jacques Aumont argues that with the rise of the talkie, the facial image, now charged with the word, could in fact free itself from the burden of translating it, and at the same time from the need to circumvent it by overcompensation in those non-verbal “zones of pure expression or of pure contemplation. The speaking face is coupled with the word, it works

74 In Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983) Barry Salt does not list the close-​up in his glossary. He does however compare shot-​scale distributions in classical cinema in the statistical charts on pp. 244–​9. The close-​up is also embedded in his discussion of shot-​reverse shot, which he incorporates in the broader term “reverse-​a ngle shot” (392). Salt’s analysis suggests the stylistic diversity of the shot-​reverse shot, although he does not offer a more detailed breakdown by genre, for example, or as tied to types of scenes: conversation of two or of more persons, showdowns, scenes of crisis and revelation, etc. Salt concludes nevertheless that it is not strictly this mode of editing but, rather, “the frontal close-​up as such, regardless of what is on either side of it, is the important device. This must be because the perception of the human face seen closely from the front makes use of basic neural connections, and so has a more powerful effect than the sideways and more distant view of the human figure” (306). Statistics are buttressed here with positivistic assertion of the hard-​w iring of facial response as underlying film style. 75 See especially Bordwell’s chapter “Space in Classical Film” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 50–​9.



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with it, from which one gathers, firstly, that it works, it acts.” 76 It thus takes up the charge of the “ordinary face” of classical cinema—​by which Aumont means its workaday dedication to communicative functions: the “ordinary face” is transitive, circulating, social, syntactic, legible. Its articulation in the shot-​reverse shot in the service of conversation productively binds speech and the look to yield a higher “exchange value”: the face now assumes the task of enunciation, narration, and identification—​a ll of which give rise to a “free and equal subject… who must put his liberty and equality ceaselessly into play with the face of other free and equal subjects.” 77 In this socio-​economic inflection the cinematic face can be seen to rehearse, Aumont implies, the historical birth of the modern subject with all due liberal values of bourgeois-​c apitalist emancipation. Parsing the relations of the face and speech in the cinema, Michel Chion explores the wealth of nuances offered, especially by means of framing and editing, in the talkie’s constitution of space: in monologue and dialogue, with the camera lingering on speaker or on listener, with voice-​off or with the content of speech played against facial expression—​to name only a few common devices. Psychologically and existentially, the uses of facial expression against speech give rise to different orders of dissimulation and, simply, to lying, which takes on special importance. “The image becomes the very surface of this lying,” Chion writes, and then gives this trope a gendered twist: The sound film transformed the human face into a mask, from the moment it liberated faces from having to transmit meaning directly. Filming someone’s face, especially the smooth countenance of a beautiful woman who is expertly hiding a guilty secret, and showing how the relentless progress of time wears at it, and bombarding that face with words, sounds, and music until the person cracks—​t hus creating a kind of analogy between the surface of the skin and the material film surface: some films have been devoted entirely to carrying out such experiments.78

Chion finally notes the play of dialogue across physical obstacles that block sight or contact—​ “the prison-​v isiting-​room effect”—​as another special trope by which to dissect operations of the shot-​reverse shot. When the voice unites characters whose view of each other’s faces is blocked, yet each face is offered to the camera, which implements a shot-​reverse shot construction while, in fact, showing each face on its own, expressive nuances are amplified and have the power to convey the mutual imbrication of face and speech in the fullness of human encounter. The expressive, absorptive, or otherwise assertive use of the close-​up that departs from strictly communicative circulation did not just expire with the coming of sound, as Balázs had feared. Thanks to the voice that could seem to emerge from interior depths, the human face could even be sensed as more fully embodied, endowed with breath, with life: the facial image 76 Aumont, Du visage, 45. One of Aumont’s best readers must be James Chandler who, in An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), draws a striking trajectory of the face-to-face as topos from the eighteenth-century novel to classical cinema, with special emphasis on Griffith and Capra. 77 Aumont, Du visage, 59–​6 0. Aumont’s most elaborate discussion of the speaking face is in the chapter “Le Visage ordinaire du cinéma” (43–​68), following which he turns back to the 1920s, and moves from there to neorealism and other new waves cinemas. Aumont’s many insights on the face in the classical talkie are thus scattered, and mostly considered—​a s I, too, consider it—​i n retrospect from the post-​classical vantage point. 78  Michel Chion, “Faces and Speech,” in Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 362–​3, 374.

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can be played against speech, but it is also kindled by deeper auditory connotations quite independent of verbal content or the range of semiotic functions of the text.79 This is “the grain of the voice” that, in the closing lines of The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes describes as if it were, in effect, a corporeal and eroticized facial power. Strikingly, he cites the cinematic close-​up as paradigm for the “carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language … we may find it more easily today at the cinema”: In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and makes us hear in their materiality, in their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle, … to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes [ça jouit]. 80

The cinematic voice-​in-​close-​up is associated, in the critic’s extended simile, with the warm, humid texture of flesh. The sensory qualities of the mouth overcome, in his excited description, the sublimations of signifying, symbolic systems. The pleasure of the face in close-​up spreads, as if by corporeal contact, through the viewer’s-​listener’s-​reader’s body so that, caressing, grating, it culminates in ecstatic jouissance. Voice, face, body, all emerge here from the concentrated corporeality of the mouth and are poetically transfigured into writing. Voice and face in close-​up amplify each other and jointly possess the spectator, who incorporates them both cannibalistically and sexually. Barthes’s eroticized account of the voice as delivered in the cinematic close-​up echoes and complements, from the side of the talkie, Jean Epstein’s ecstatic incorporation of the silent close-​up. But while film history of the 1920s delivered the human face first and foremost to sight, its corporeality—​culminating in the mouth, as The Big Swallow has already suggested—​can be very much nurtured by the voice. While the voice both intensifies and expands the body, it also confers its own humanity upon the face. But it may also be the case that, even as film studies teaches us to discern the technological, synthetic, syntactic meeting of sound and image in the cinema, in our experience these two entities (or two media), voice and face, are so intimately joined, even when post-​synchronization and dubbing are concerned, that one is always sensed as emerging through the other, and as giving birth to yet another, third entity, as it were: a properly filmic being. Would prosopopeia help describe such figural operation by which voice acquires a face? Paul de Man brings the archaic trope to the heart of Romantic modernity: in his matchless formulation prosopopeia would be the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes

79  See Aumont on the vocal image in Du visage 122–​7. On the relation of body and voice see also Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 162–​76, and Michel Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 80  The French text finishes simply: ça jouit—​“ it comes”—​w ithout the translator’s added “that is bliss” which rather sublimates the strong erotic bearing of Barthes’s language, and which I have thus taken the liberty to omit from the tail end of the quotation. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Test, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 66–​7.



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mouth, eye and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). 81

Face and voice thus come to implicate and inhabit each other, but one cannot be reduced to the terms of the other. Their confluence—​poetic, erotic—​is greater than the sum of their parts.

GLAMOUR/​ANTI-​G LAMOUR The powers of the face have also been amplified by that other technology of enchantment: glamour. While the word may be used lightly, may be reduced to lipstick application, or to titles on glossy magazine covers, it is not an altogether clear or stable entity. Etymologically tied to “grammar” but connoting, in its original English usage, magic and enchantment, “glamour” conveys quite well the complex of partly constructed and coded, partly elusive supplementarity joined in the cinematic face. A longer tradition of glamour, evolving between the earlier, occult connotations and later notions of constructed surface appearance, inform what James Sodelholm—​in a discussion of the Byron legend—​calls “applied aura.”82 Adopted early in film history—​one of its great peaks must have been with the Italian diva—​glamour evolved continuously through the talkie and has been inexhaustibly reinvested to our time. Changes in fashion and taste, driven in large part by the cosmetics industry, both contributed to and borrowed from the techniques of cinematic glamour, whereby the star-​portrait image was always updated and re-​embellished. The cultivation of glamour entered into new gear with the mid-​ 1920s shift to panchromatic stock—​t hat same stock that had in fact allowed Dreyer to work with bare, make-​up-​f ree faces in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Barry Salt discusses the improvement of panchromatic cinematography that went hand in hand with the proliferation of incandescent lights: lighting styles, diffusing techniques, as well as make-​up were all invested in the construction of the female star’s glamorous close-​ups.83 In its supreme instances, the glamorous face—​extending in particular ways the facial “supplementarity” of the silent close-​up—​departs from the busy discursive flow of the talkie’s “ordinary face” to claim its own space and time. Glamour portrait-​shots punctuate—​to cite one celebrated, 81  He concludes: “[Autobiography] deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration.” Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-​facement,” MLN 94 (1979): 926. 82  For the etymology and historical connotations of glamour see the Oxford Engish Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989). James Chandler referred me to James Sodelholm’s introduction, “The Grammar of Glamour,” to his Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 1–​15. See also Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Angela Dalle Vacche’s important work in Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 83  See Kristin Thompson, “Major Technological Changes of the 1920s,” in Bordwell et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 281–​93; Laura Mulvey, “Close-​ups and Commodities,” Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 40–​50; Mary Ann Doane “Veiling Over Desire: Close-​ups of the Woman” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 44–​75; Patrick Keating, “From the Portrait to the Close-​Up: Gender and Technology in Still Photography and Hollywood Cinematography,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (2006): 90–​108. On the relationship—​part material, part metaphorical—​of artistic technologies and make-​ up beyond the cinema see Jean-​C laude Lebensztejn, “Au Beauty parlour,” Traverses 7 (February 1977): 74–​9 4.

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FIGURES 1.24–1.25:  Breathing in extreme close-​up: Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) –​frame enlargements.

albeit hyperbolic example—​Josef von Sternberg’s collaborations with Marlene Dietrich. Mary Ann Doane has most eloquently analyzed the ways in which a dialectic of revelation and concealment, whose prime figure is the veil, partakes in the binding of visual surface, knowledge, and mystery in such supremely glamorous, languorous visions of the female star. Certainly in von Sternberg’s iconic shots of Dietrich one plainly sees how the facial image audaciously departs from narrative and discursive functions, to be enveloped with a silent-​photographic quality, as if snatched not only from the narrative course of the film but from time altogether.84 Yet the swaying of plumes, furs, candles, reflections, shadows, and other micro-​movements about Dietrich’s face—​all in addition to her marked voice—​serve to amplify her very breathing, and with it a sense of living, embodied duration. The wedding scene in The Scarlet Empress (1934) presents an extreme instance of this: beyond the terror of her betrothal to the idiot prince of Russia, and the excitement of her presumed response to the courtier who will be her lover, there is the teasing of the candle flame, reflecting in her eyes and lips, flaring and collapsing as it indexes the uneven rhythm of her breathing. Caught in such close proximity between camera and veil in the extreme close-​up, the swaying candle flame threatens to be either extinguished or else to catch the veil on fire: the palpable tension produced here catches the spectator’s own breath (Figs. 1.24–1.25). Part goddess, part ghost, yet so thoroughly modern, Dietrich floats through a Sternberg film: the feel, the very texture, the body of the film seems to reconstitute itself around her in an undulating, liquescent image. So different and yet in this regard also comparable to Dreyer’s Falconetti, Dietrich is a creature of the filmic medium—​exquisitely molded of black-andwhite cinematographic stuff, taking shape through the most subtle, nervous surface nuances of moving light and shade. Might Dietrich’s hyperbolic veiling—​by means of make-​up, costume, lighting, gauzing and other optical-​surface effects—​be construed as a reverse-​m irror reflection of Falconetti’s epidermal iridescence of bare flesh? Just like the expertly layered artifice of cosmetics and veils—​say, in Shanghai Express (1932)—​Dietrich’s expressions, too,

84  See Doane, “Veiling Over Desire.” Laura Mulvey describes the effect of spatio-​temporal departure of the female close-​ups from the film’s narrative and discursive organization in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 198–​2 09.



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FIGURE 1.26: Layerings. Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) –​frame enlargement.

are layered: frequently we sense an air of irony breathing through these layers and cast like a net over her interlocutor and over the spectator (Fig. 1.26). 85 One is caught in the seductive whirl of these layerings; but, I believe, one never feels cheated. The self-​consciousness effected through these layerings (which themselves involve time and movement) itself comes to embellish Dietrich’s glamour. No pretense of authenticity or nature here: within the diffuse luminosity of complexion and veils, between glistenings and powders, beneath the expanse of the forehead, the expertly drawn lines of her brows, Dietrich’s gaze emerges. It seems at times circuitously reflective but—​even as she need never, of course, look back at the camera—​her gaze, in its striking clarity, seems to break through the screen boundary. Such complex, cultivated, glamour speaks to the knowing artifice of a facial image that openly displays—​because it valorizes—​a n elaborate poetics of seduction, imbricated in its cultural coding and inventively met by the cinema. But such manifest display is also the proclamation of agency—​which is, partly, Dietrich’s own. Lutz Koepnick discusses the ways in which Sternberg’s artistry must have been joined by Dietrich’s own hand in the fashioning of her filmic image. Their collaboration was, as well, a synthesis of the apparatical and the corporeal, which Koepnick sees as the product of a post-​human, cyborgian economy. His image is striking and might carry a certain truth, but one could well place the Sternberg-​Dietrich image within a time-​honored lineage of the pictorial portrait that was always, after all, engaged with the “aesthetic production of the self ”—​a product of the encounter between artist and sitter. We further reflect on the sitter’s participation in her portrait in Chapter Four, but Ewa Lajer-​ Burcharth’s discussion of the “Pompadour’s Touch” in the François Boucher portraits offers a particularly fine account of what must be the precedent to the Sternberg-​Dietrich glamour image. As Lajer-​Burcharth argues, the confrontation of artist and sitter achieves unique resonance in the case of such a powerful female subject as the Marquise de Pompadour. Her agency 85  As James Naremore astutely put it, Dietrich “inhabits a realm where visible artifice becomes the sign of authenticity,” “Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930),” Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 131.

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in the Boucher portraits is figured and extended through pictorial displacements: via the trope of make-​up application, the haptic connotations of fabrics, the books and instruments that evidence Pompadour’s own artistic agency bearing upon Boucher’s work. Her traces within the artist’s trace yield a double-​t racing of glamour: no less a woman’s projection of self than a professional artist’s portrait of the King’s paramour. 86 Dietrich’s participation in Sternberg’s manufacture of her cinematic image is well placed in this already-​modern tradition. The technological and stylistic implications of color film for the facial image at different points in film history deserve far more expert study than what can be ventured here. Other than professional publications, the paucity of film studies attending specifically to the face in color is itself perhaps symptomatic of the challenge of this most obvious question—​since color is so notoriously difficult to evaluate except in view of reliable film prints, and with a proper understanding of optics and chemistry. 87 Even as flesh—​white flesh—​was, to be sure, a standard by which “natural” or “realist” values of color were studied in the industry, the cultural connotations of skin tone in color film, and the altered view of the non-​white face by way of nuanced lighting and hue with the shift to digital cinematography, were obviously bound up with changing conceptions of race and gender. A wealth of stylistic and dramatic possibilities open up between the appeal of what passes for natural, living color and the potential mask-​like effect of color as superadded value. The most overt way to explore it, in American cinema, might be through the limit case: the blackface—​construed as a sort of ritual mask—​a nd, against it, the black-and-white to color, cinematographic-to-digital explorations of African-​A merican skin tones in all their range and nuance. Quite apart from academic scholarship, the subject still awaits to be thematized in the movies—​namely, for a really strong filmmaker to take it up in what I envision can be a momentous bio-​pic of the tragic life of Michael Jackson: a true allegory of America explored not only through narrative discourses of identity, but grafted through the very workings of color in the cosmetic and the entertainment industry. In the next chapter, I reflect further on the mask as facial category, carried over from the hieratical close-​ups of the 1920s, and still informing—​as Roland Barthes considered—​t he face of Greta Garbo.88 Barthes sharply contrasts the iconographic and anthropological import of the classical cinematic face as deliberate artifice vis-​à-​v is contemporary myths of facial “authenticity” that he diagnoses in the 1950s—​a faux authenticity that he is careful to distinguish from the facial repertoire of neorealism. But, of course, the hyper-​commodification of the star’s face does not in the least decrease with the waning of classical cinema. If its iconography and its rhetoric change, it is also with the memory of an earlier plenitude that is now taken as ground, 86  Lutz Koepnick, “Dietrich’s Face” in Dietrich Icon, eds. Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007). Ewa Lajer-​Burcharth, “Pompadour’s Touch:  Difference in Representation,” Representations 7 (2001): 54–​88. 87  Writings on color in the cinema acknowledge the complex effects and connotations color as spanning between the “realistic” and the “spectacular.” Other than cultural and political histories of the blackface, which is a category apart, direct discussion of color technology in relation to complexion are hard to find. One exception is Jacques Aumont, “Couleurs d’homme: la chair, le cosmétique, l’image,” in Aumont, ed., L’invention de la figure humaine: Le cinéma, l’humain et l’inhumain (Paris: Cinemathèque française, 1995), 133–​45. 88  Roland Barthes, “Garbo’s Face,” Mythologies rev. ed., trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 73–​5.



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projected as nostalgic lost object for an aging cinema thereafter. Indeed, from the post-​classical era, one looks back at earlier glamour that now seems coated with a patina of time, as it were. Barthes’s valorizing of the face of Garbo must be seen—​somewhat like Benjamin’s aura—​under this retrospective condition: its mythical-​iconic charge comes into its own belatedly, when it already eludes us. This must also be what Gloria Swanson conveys, with such pathos, in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) when she declares: “We had faces then.” But are these faces still recognizable, do they still speak, or are they lamentably muted, outdated along with the irrecoverable conditions of classical cinema—​its integrated structures, its material and ideological powers and certainties? The American cinema of the 1950s often struggled to recover this plenitude. The meanings and uses of the glamorous close-​up alter, but the signs of struggle are themselves edifying: might they be most eloquent when they spell failure? Aumont suggests that an internal dynamic thus propelled the cinema’s engagement with the face, always in response to an earlier moment, and along a rise and fall trajectory: from expressivity to instrumentalization, to over-​concentration, to emptying-​out which then, presumably, re-​posits the human face as something yet to be achieved or recovered. This reflexive, cyclical model reciprocates with other dimensions of film practice and with the wider cultural field and the blows of history—​a ll of which become particularly salient with the experiences of the post-​ war era. Aumont’s prime case is Italian neorealism in which he sees the face achieve its greatest role: the resuscitation of humanist value, as of humanity itself, in mid-​century Europe. Such recovery of the face could not transpire, he believes, through the “abstract and cold” beauty of photogénie, nor with fabricated glamour, but with the “naturally expressive” beauty that would “reflect the soul”—​be it guilty or innocent. Among Aumont’s examples are the child Edmund in Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) and Ingrid Bergman at the finale of Europa 51 (Rossellini, 1952). While anchored in the individual, the neorealist humanity of the face pertains, he says, to “man in general.” Neorealism’s non-​actors are the paradigm of this commonality-​in-​a nonymity, a humanity that surpasses the particulars of character or identity, while shifting the meanings and uses of the overdetermined star-​presence, so strongly fastened to unique mannerisms, and to a name.89 The question then arises: are Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman, whose representative physiognomies—​the large-​featured Roman “woman of the people,” and the cool Northern-​European beauty polished by Hollywood glamour—​exceptions that prove the rule? Magnani’s expressive grandeur was theatricalized from the start to become its own iconic referent, while Rossellini’s Bergman achieved great eloquence as the perfect bourgeoise whose sculpted face, at first aloof and unresponsive, is repeatedly assaulted and ultimately made to yield and to reflect, as in a convex mirror, the mass faces “of a seething humanity, of ruthlessness, and also of nature” (as Italo Calvino put it) (Fig. 1.27).90 The interplay between these stars’ celebrity, the physiognomic types they

89 Aumont, Du visage, 117–​21. 90  On the interest of Ingrid Bergman’s post-​war persona see Joe McElhaney, “The Object and the Face: Notorious, Bergman, and the Close-​Up,” Hitchcock:  Past and Future, eds. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-​Gonzales (London: Routledge, 2004), 64–​8 4, and Ora Gelley, “Europa ‘51: The Face of the Star in Neorealism’s Urban Landscape,” Film Studies 5 (Winter 2004): 39–​57. Italo Calvino’s phrase is from the 1964 “Preface” to his 1947 neorealist novel The Paths to the Spiders’ Nests, trans. Archibald Colquhoun, rev. Martin McLaughlin (London: Penguin, 1998), 19. It is also Calvino who invokes expressionism as a neorealist inclination.

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FIGURE 1.27:  Hollywood beauty touched by a “seething humanity”: Europa 51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 1.28:  Fishermen à la Vogue? La terra trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948) –​frame enlargement.

epitomized, and the often-anonymous faces interacting with them, presented the richest cases for what Bazin called neorealism’s “amalgam of players.”91 The shared screen-​life, the collaboration and even mutual interference of non-​actors and stars—​all of whom can be said, one way or another, to play themselves—​endowed the neorealist group portraits with unique definition and dimensionality, giving birth to something like an exemplary human commonality. And how does Orson Welles’s notorious comment—​that Luchino Visconti’s camera makes even the actual, destitute fishermen of La terra trema (1948) look like Vogue

91  André Bazin attends to the “amalgam of players” in “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation, What is Cinema, vol. 2, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 22.



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models—​bear on neorealism’s humanist mission, as carried by the anonymous face (Fig. 1.28)? 92 One might ask to whose eyes exactly Visconti’s fishermen would look as they did to Welles—​since, for the contemporary Italian spectators, the expressive features and gestural nuances of particular types would be quite specifically identifiable with respect to regions, classes, subclasses, and professions, not to mention the unique impact of the Sicilian dialect, which required Italian subtitles in this film. Possibly, as with the masks of the commedia dell’arte, neorealism did generalize, and with figures drawn in sharp outline—​comparable to Eisenstein’s typage of peasant, kulak, priest, capitalist—​but these added up to a rich physiognomic gallery. Hollywood glamour is quite often a deliberate reference point against which the composite heroic-​qua-​quotidian expressivity of neorealism inscribed the contradictions of the historical moment and projected the desire for a common humanity that would follow—​but that always already miscarried. The effort to resurrect visions of humanity, whose beauty preceded the recovery of star radiance, did speak to the scars of war. The situation after World War II now involved not only the battlefield traumas of individual soldiers (as was mostly the case in the wake of World War I) but also the widespread ruin and devastation of cities and the countryside, the suffering and death of millions of civilians, the unspeakable atrocities, the entire communities that disappeared. There were the newsreels: visions of the living dead at the gates of Auschwitz, the children of Hiroshima, the scenes of retribution, the confrontation of prosecutors, survivors, and war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. It is impossible to lump together the innumerable faces populating the newsreels and documentaries—of persons still​ living, dying, dead—​a nd put them directly in line with the deliberate sort of facial images handpicked for discussion in this book. They demand a separate inquiry in consideration of the circumstances of their making, their uses and abuses, and how one can even look at them alongside the sort of films considered here. The aesthetic status and the migration of such images into art, shifts the terms and the ethics of spectatorship. It involves a level of inquiry that I do not broach here directly, even as the broader historical resonances and the ethic of spectatorship that it elicits still informs, on some level, any and all consideration of the facial image in our time.93 How, then, does one look upon the human face after mid-​century? One might finally envision the people emerging from the experiences of the war—​survivors, shipwrecks—​as themselves spectators whose perceptions one tries to inhabit, for even they went to the movies. With Hollywood cinema flooding again the international markets, with the distinct repertoire of neorealism and the resurgence of stars on both sides of the Atlantic, a new range of physiognomies and modes of expression evolved. How can any particular face be said to reflect the damage, the trauma, the sight of death—​how does it let us imagine the things that it had seen? What faces could now speak for their time, and more poignantly than the visions of plenitude 92  Peter Bondanella cites this trivia in his History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009), 96. 93  Among the few studies of such limit experiences that have a bearing on questions of the face on film, I would single out Gertrud Koch’s “The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 125–​32. Also pertinent here is de Duve’s “Art in the Face of Radical Evil.”

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and assurances of legible, communicative coherence in Aumont’s “ordinary faces” of classical Hollywood? One way to think about it through a film-​h istorical lens is by speculative juxtapositions: not the immaculate iconicity of Garbo but the mortal, and moral, vulnerability of Ingrid Bergman; not the dreamy perfection of Gary Cooper—​t he pre-​war hero who expressed, as Bazin put it, “the optimism and efficiency of a civilization,” but the dark-ink eyes of Dana Andrews as the traumatized fighter pilot in Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946); not the saintly simplicity and innocence but the guilt-​r idden and eventually maniacal aspect of Henry Fonda’s blue eyes when comparing the early, middle, and later periods in his long career. Each star is sustained by a planetary system of roles that cohere and evolve as screen persona— at once typical and singular—embodied in their countenance, which then strikes us as, indeed, the face of its time. The broader arena of the crisis and transformation in motion pictures from the late 1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, in both European and American perspectives, was bound up, Aumont affirms, with a continued faith in the human, with the reconstruction of daily life, and the return from the limits of experience to the face on a human scale. With all its potentialities and its burdens of documentation and narration, expression and distraction, commerce and art, the cinema did not always confront matters consciously or deliberately, but in some sense it did rethink itself in that era. This was reflected through faces that were almost unthinkable earlier—​at least not in the roles now accorded to them. This is how André Bazin sees the ravaged face of Humphrey Bogart, above all others, as the “visible stigmata” of history inscribed in the person—​resistant and survivor who had internalized the deepest ambiguities of his time. What Bazin manages to convey in his poetic language is the mythical personification of history in the body—​t he face, the mannerisms and gestures—​of an exceptionally eloquent figure. In his exquisite obituary he cites from the “Portrait of Humphrey Bogart” by François Truffaut—​t he latter writing under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay, and prior to the actor’s untimely death. Part merciless physical description, part recognition of the memento mori inherent in any strong portrait, and perhaps part premonition, Truffaut invoked Bogart’s “rictus of a spirited cadaver, the final expression of a melancholy man who would fade away with a smile. That is indeed the smile of death.” And Bazin then follows up in the obituary: When he enters the film it is already the pale dawn of the following day; absurdly victorious from the macabre combat with the angel, his face marked by what he has seen and his bearing heavy with all he knows… . In more and more resembling his own death, it was his own portrait Bogart was completing. Doubtless the genius of this actor who knew how to make us love and admire in him the very image of our decomposition.94

The death’s head lurking in the facial image has a long allegorical tradition behind it—​one that I invoke in subsequent chapters of this book. Bazin saw in Bogart, more specifically, the face of a

94  See André Bazin, “The Death of Humphrey Bogart,” (1957) trans. Philip Drummond in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-​R ealism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 98–​ 101; François Truffaut’s 1955, “Portrait of Humphrey Bogart” was revised and translated in The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon and Schuster), 292–​5.



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FIGURES 1.29–1.30:  The making of Bogart’s face: Dark Passage (Delmer Daves,1947) – frame enlargements.

man who has lived—​to borrow the plastic surgeon’s inspired expression in Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947). It is, as well, the face of a man who has seen: not victor but survivor, and witness, who has known death in close quarters, and who has returned from the dead as one who had already lost something to death and is visibly marked by that loss. Indeed, Bazin might have cited in this context Dark Passage, which allegorizes, in effect, the birth of Bogart’s face out of a situation of irrecoverable loss—​yet at the same time it is not a face with which one is born but, the film shows us, a face that must be deliberately made, crafted (Figs. 1.29–1.30). In his role as escaped convict, Bogart’s face is, in fact, unavailable to our view in the first part of the film thanks to the camera’s adopting his point-of-view; it is subsequently bandaged through the second part and is only exposed to the camera in the third. The surgeon—​at once artist and scientist, kindly and macabre by disposition, his own face deeply lined—​thus addresses the camera directly when preparing Bogart, as would a painter priming his canvas, for his new face which, we know, will be really and truly Bogart’s own. Even as retribution is ostensibly carried out on the level of plot, it is obvious that those already dead will never return and that time can never be recovered—​an acute consciousness of this irreversibility will inform many of the faces we consider in the following chapters. In this particular film the articulation of something lost and irrecoverable hinges on the implication of an earlier, original, natural, and in this sense innocent face of the protagonist—​a face that we never see. In a sense, it is behind the camera: removed through the first-​person point-of-view cinematography. Following the plastic surgery that would make it unrecognizable to the law, it is bandaged for a good portion of the film—​in the manner of shrouds or of a mummy—namely, already dead. Only then, with the removal of the bandages, does Bogart’s face reveal itself for what is it: the face of a man who has lived, which also means one who, after a lifetime’s experience, has come back from the dead. Some primal state of being, a pure “original” face buried underneath Bogart’s own is, in a sense, always already dead. It is striking to consider just how well Bogart’s face was suited to this existential tale: its pock-​marked, parchment-​like quality and cadaver smile enfold loss and decay, even as it is to give him, in Dark Passage, a reprieve and a new beginning.95 95  For a nuanced reading of this film, in close reference to Bazin’s thought more generally, see Dudley Andrew, “André Bazin: Dark Passage into the Mystery of Being,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2015), 136–​149.

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FIGURES 1.31–1.32:  He looks not at her, but at her facial surface: Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) –​frame enlargements.

Georges Franju’s fantastical Eyes Without a Face (1960) is its belated counterpart across the Atlantic. How to live with the burden of a crime, with the face-​to-​face knowledge of death; how to internalize loss and the impossibility to recover a former plenitude—​and yet to live on? In Franju’s film the mad-​scientist father finds the definitive patient in the daughter who had lost the skin of her face, where only her eyes now seem to float against the awful damage. But no physical remedy, no objective measure can heal this rift—​the loss is irreversible. In one poignant scene wherein the father notices the decay of the skin graft that he had hoped would finally succeed, a palpable change of his gaze destroys in an instant the natural father-​daughter face-​to-​face over the dinner table and reintroduces the clinical, instrumental scientist’s gaze that cannot accept her for what she is, but subjects her to clinical scrutiny and testing: a sequence of stills, head-​on, with the girl’s eyes hanging upon the lens, then documents the decay of the facial surface (Figs. 1.31–1.32). As the grafted skin shrivels and becomes mask, the girl withdraws again behind another: the smooth, white, but altogether rigid mask that conceals the horror. Here, as in Dark Passage, one is made to feel the tragic isolation of the eyes from behind the facial shield: it is the knowledge of suffering that these eyes proclaim, and a plea for recognition. Their unique, reflective shimmerings seem like vestiges of a former state of humanity that persists and expresses—even when so little else survives. It is these eyes that we, spectators, are also asked to identify as our own. How to see the cinematic face in the wake of war and industrial annihilation as gauge for the crisis of representation, soon sublimated by the proliferation of the technological image in mass culture and diverted by the entertainment and advertising industries? The devastation of war, comprising the disappearance of people and the guilt of survivors (both winners and losers), followed by the relatively interiorized anxieties of the Cold War, certainly inflected humanist assurances still sought in the cinematic face. How did the desperate existential need for some continued faith in the human, still strongly associated with an integrity or a truth of the face, tally with the shifting demands of motion pictures—​involving altered modes of exhibition and reception, from Cinemascope with its crowds of extras and big faces, to television with its invasive phantasms, that seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once? The balance of faith and doubt in the image must have been shaken, above all, by the commercial and advertising image, still and moving, as by the sensational press. The face-​as-​media-​event now lent itself to new anxieties about what one can and cannot know by the human visage—​a nd what lipstick or what expression might one wear to defray such anxiety. What one then encountered in private—​one’s face-​to-​face with others and one’s own facial “practices”—​could not be disengaged



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from the traffic of images, exploited and exploitative, in the common culture. The frenzied circulation of the face through the media and other public spheres was certainly of a magnitude, consistency, and implication that one could only begin to fathom in the 1950s. Yet what one saw in the cinema was not just a symptom of all this. The cinema offered then, as it can still do today, a privileged space in which to really feel and think through these tensions. For as it did since its earliest days, the cinema navigates in unique ways the forces of art and commerce, of the human and the technological, to work through both the duplicitous power of images, and their regenerative, reflective potential. As through the film-​h istorical recognitions of the 1920s, the face’s openness and its masking play, the barriers that it props up and then must suffer, its distance and its intimacy, its gravity, its charm—​a ll these are still powers to appreciate and to reckon with, albeit in a new key, in the post-​classical era with which we are concerned. We shall probe them by following closely the keen (if sometimes ambivalent) perceptions, connotative threads, and striking insights of one particular movie spectator, in Paris, circa 1953.

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CHAPTER 2

ROLAND BARTHES LOOKS AT THE STARS

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his chapter develops our inquiry, only provisionally outlined in Chapter One, relating to the shifting balance of art and commerce as worked through questions of the cinematic face in an era of hyper-​commodification, when the glamorous facial image is multiplied and exploited everywhere in glossy magazines and huge billboards. Is this what the face’s great cinematic promise, its human charge, its iconic powers, inevitably amount to? This mid-​ century, post-​classical shift has been strikingly articulated by Roland Barthes who, in a cluster of early essays on the facial image generally and the face of the movie star in particular, formulated the aesthetic, rhetorical, and anthropological challenge of the face as forged by language on the one hand and, on the other, by certain operative figures, particularly the mask as a form and as mode of address. The choice of Barthes is not, of course, incidental, for his way of writing, throughout his career, on images of every sort, his acute awareness of a fundamental instability which animates the experience of the image and how this informs the critical task, has had a decisive impact on my thinking throughout this book. Barthes’s questions on the image intersect most productively with his attention to the human face as paradigmatic figure, whose importance and interest in his early thought has not been recognized. In popular spectacle and the legitimate stage, in painting and photography, on screen and on the street—​in everyday encounter, public and private—​t he facial image recurs in his essays of the early 1950s. Substantially anthropological, Barthes’s inquiry is carried out partly in response to the contemporary proliferation of consumer culture and how it links up with the technological image in particular—​t his at a time when the claims of the pre-​war avant-​gardes would seem to have expired along with other modernist utopias, and when some heroic recovery of the human figure is attempted in the wake of its historical devastations. The face is not natural but, in Barthes’s discussion, can only be grasped as an image, or as artifact—​as something produced or fabricated, something assumed or worn, something pointed to or, we might add, projected. Yet is not the human visage also the most sensitive index of inner life, the unique imprint of the person? Barthes notes how, in lived experience, the face that returns our gaze transpires as subject—​its objective, formal aspect dissolves, so that the closest and most intimate faces are those that, in fact, elude us the most, and it is surprisingly

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difficult to conjure them in our memory. The facial image only coalesces at a distance, by some displacement or temporal removal, when crystalized by a special effort of recollection, or when arrested by loss. Barthes considers that the face only emerges as a proper image when individual, living expression is somehow obstructed, and the face fossilizes as a mask. How is it that facial features and expressions can be sensed as so intimate and revealing, yet understood as object, as artifact, as cultural depository, and as historical construct? This variability intrigues him: what is the fundamental instability that quickens the face? What kind of arena does it open between the person and the culture? How does it vacillate between states of being—​body and image, nature and artifice, consistent and variable, solid entity and expressively fluid, object and subject? Possibly, it is just such traversal of categories that defines the face in the first place. Barthes’s essays suggest that something of the truth of the human face is captured in moments of transition, in its evanescence—​in its eclipse. His observation of the unique status of the face, in life and in art, is not surprising: B ​ arthes is drawn throughout his career to limit-​ cases that challenge his own critical, semiotic faculties. What is striking is that he comes to consider the cinema as privileged anthropological register for the transmutations of the face in late ​modernity.

TOWARD “VISAGES ET FIGURES” Of the several essays Barthes devotes to the facial image in this period only few segments made their way into the Mythologies. This beguiling volume, responding to contemporary phenomena of mass culture, is in many ways a brilliant critical premonition of pop art, barely nascent: indeed, when we consider the special challenge of pop to the facial image in Chapter Four, we will find some of these concerns recur right through Barthes’s late writings. The Mythologies volume was assembled out of his early contributions, since 1952, to the journals Esprit and Lettres nouvelles: vivid and witty, these vignettes are not, by and large, celebratory. Along with the de-​mythologizing semiotic critique to which they eventually give rise, these little essays are also marked by Barthes’s poignant lament on the decline of an authentic popular working-​ class culture in the face of the proliferating, homogenized, all-​consuming petite ​bourgeoisie of post-​war France. Yet Barthes’s ideological project does not always proceed in the same spirit. What makes the book so compelling is, it seems to me, the reflective ambivalence that laces the writing with poetic departures that do not always fall in line with the semiotic program retroactively formulated in the closing essay, “Myth Today.” Several of the texts with which the present chapter is concerned are, in fact, gleaned from the margins of the Mythologies—​t hey could not, apparently, be absorbed into the canonical collection as it was edited in 1957. Along with only a few exceptional Mythologies vignettes, they constitute a special cluster, in which Barthes’s connotative method, his affective and aphoristic mode, is intensified. On these occasions it is as if his gaze would reconstitute the density of its object by ekphrastic and phenomenological elaboration. One surmises that in thus re-​mythologizing certain phenomena, in poetizing (as he puts it) certain images, Barthes seeks to redeem an efficacious social ritual, and to avoid leveling all things in a disenchanted universe. A weaker or narrowly academic writer might subdue such inclination so as to make the ideological project cohere, but here, as in notable instances of his later

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writing, Barthes follows his experience and his intuition frankly: not all objects are the same to him, and not even all mythological phenomena are subjugated to a single formula. He releases the critic’s semiotic hold, lets it falter before the body’s blatant spectacle—​as, most compellingly, in “The World of Wrestling” or before the beauty of a facial image. “The Face of Garbo” is the most celebrated instance of this. In these junctures the critical voice seems caught in a fascination, a desire, which it does not deny; it is where Barthes is compelled to acknowledge that some myths are so vital as to survive the analytic, demystifying project. The tension introduced here is diagnosed, already at this early stage, as an interference between the operations of a modernist consciousness, increasingly formalized in his structuralist semiology, and an irreducible sense of material, corporeal, and predominantly visual experience for which phenomenological description and poesis constitute the only adequate response. Among the iconic figures, theatrical artifice, ritual objects and practices that punctuate Barthes’s writings the mask and the death’s head call for our attention. Their figural values are not strictly formal or aesthetic but, especially in association with the cinema, they evolve as reflexive or second-​order mythological entities that bear special anthropological efficacy. Conjugated with such figures, the cinematic face does not parade as nature but declares its own duplicity, its deliberate artifice. It is important for Barthes that such consciousness—​ one that exposes the conditions of the culture and of the apparatuses that have given rise to such images in the first place—​does not take away from the power of the face, or from its pleasure.1 The cinema has, of course, produced and reproduced a wealth of mythological figures for the twentieth century. Does one really wish its power of enchantment to be rejected wholesale as retrograde or pernicious? We shall see how, exactly, Barthes picks and chooses, what image types he embraces as mythopoetic self-​projections of the culture—​figures that would assuage the alienating powers of late modernity. The cinema’s hybrid mediality, its yoking of art and commerce, of technology and magic, its slippages between the screen and the street, its iconic power as well as its permeation of the common culture, its popularity—​ all these lend the cinematic face its modern exemplarity. Barthes’s most famous vignette on “The Face of Garbo” intimates this, yet it remains an elliptical, enigmatic text. But his most extensive consideration of the face, prompted by the cinema, is in “Visages et figures”—​a nd both pieces together are nested in the broader context of Barthes’s thought on the image in his early writings. They reflect on the anthropological, discursive, and affective resonances of the face through its mid-​century historical transmutations. Greta Garbo was herself already retired—​had withdrawn her divine but now-​aging face from the screen and the public eye—​by the time that Barthes considers her mythology. It is in fact curious that her own controlled self-​mythification—​her retirement partakes, of course, in the cultivation of her ideal image—​does not enter as itself an easy target of Barthes’s demythifying project. Quite the contrary, even as he certainly understands the carefully composed myth of the Hollywood star, Barthes seems intent on preserving its vestiges. Across his numerous references to the world of cinema in the Mythologies, Barthes attacks only his contemporaries—​ Jean-​Louis Barrault, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Gérard Philipe—​in whom he diagnoses a false expressivity, a pernicious rhetoric of authenticity that he persistently demystifies. His 1  I rely here partly on Michael Moriarty’s introduction and Chapter 1 of his excellent Roland Barthes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).



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discussion of the classical stars suggests, on the other hand, that he appreciates the deliberate artifice of their mythological constitution, and he finds ways to redeem it: recessed into the past, dated, removed by motion-​picture stylistics of the 1920s and 30s, such artifice acquires what one might call a “patina of time.” My choice of metaphor should raise pictorial or sculptural connotations, involving those material processes, the deposits of time and decay that alter the image and seem to thicken it. It is not always clear whether such tarnish should be removed to recover some original or purer state of the image, for patina carries its own aesthetic, even auratic value—​at times it is even anticipated, and deliberately “written” into the picture. Such “patina of time” makes salient a particular perception of temporality: a mythological stratification bound up with the material historicity of the moving image. What is Barthes working to preserve in the image of Garbo? How, exactly, does he constitute, and redeem, a mythopoesis of her facial image? My consideration of this is informed by the earlier, longer essay, “Visages et figures.” Published in Esprit in July 1953, it precedes the original April 1955 publication of the Garbo vignette in Barthes’s Lettres nouvelles column, “Petite mythologie du mois.” “Visages et figures” is also where one finds Barthes’s most extensive and most positive discussion of the cinema, in full appreciation of its figural and anthropological efficacy, and in consideration of certain aspects of both still photography and the theater. The essay’s neglect in studies of Barthes’s relation to the image, still or moving, but mainly its richly speculative interlacing of historical, anthropological, and aesthetic observation, all warrant the extensive discussion I accord to it in the present chapter. Its publication in Esprit—​a left-​leaning Catholic monthly founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier, the leading voice of French personalism, a movement tied to phenomenology and existentialism—is itself of interest, in that André Bazin, too, was its regular contributor since the mid-​1940s. 2 Claude Lévi-​ Strauss—​developing in those same years his structural anthropology, itself directed toward the analysis of myth—​a lso contributed to Esprit, as did Edgar Morin. Although Barthes was not the devoted and systematic writer on film that Bazin and even Morin were, his contribution might be put in dialogue with their substantially anthropological aesthetics at that time. 3 2  Personalism, an eclectic philosophical movement that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, affirmed the centrality of “the person as the ultimate explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological principle of all reality… . It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person’s essentially relational or communitarian dimension.” In France also Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, contributed to personalist thought. The emphasis on the unique simultaneity of object and subject in the person is a mainstay of personalism: Barthes’s use of such terms with respect to the human face must be related to these ideas. See http://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​personalism/​, accessed November 11, 2014. 3  Roland Barthes, “Visages et figures,” Esprit 204 (July 1953): 1–​11. “Le visage de Garbo” was first published among a cluster of other mythologies in Lettres nouvelles, April 1955. Edgar Morin’s cinematic anthropology is expounded in his Cinema and the Imaginary Man (first published 1956), trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and then focalized in The Stars (first published 1957, contemporary with Barthes’s Mythologies), trans. Richard Howard (1960; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Bazin’s reviews of Morin’s work make apparent their affinity: see André Bazin, “L’Homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma,” France Observateur 331 (September 13, 1956): 17–​18, and “Le ‘Star-​s ystem’ est toujours vivant,” France Observateur 377 (August 1, 1957). Thanks, as ever, to Dudley Andrew for directing me to Bazin’s thoughts on so much that matters to us in the cinema. Andrew elaborates on the relation between Morin and Bazin in his entry on the former in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), 408–​21. He suggests a reciprocity between Morin and Barthes in this period, and that Barthes may have been aware of Morin’s sociology of the cinema early on through the debates of the “Institute de Filmologie” at the Sorbonne. In “1950s Popular Culture: Star-​Gazing and Myth-​M aking with Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin,”

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In fact “Visages et figures” precedes Morin’s major writings on the cinema and might well have inspired the latter’s discussion of the “imaginary man,” the double, and the star, as generative figures of myth in mass culture. In different degrees of elaboration, all these writers identified dimensions of cinematic art and experience that they construed as modern mythological systems: cinema’s technology of enchantment is understood to mediate social and psychic tensions, forms of identification, cathexis, and alienation that span the culture’s imaginary.4 Barthes had himself extracted one relatively simple fragment from “Visages et figures” in “The Harcourt Actor,” which became the third vignette of the Mythologies (in the original French edition). Yet the source essay is far more intricate, indeed it is fraught with inner tensions that are themselves quite telling. 5 It opens a wealth of possibilities for discussion of the facial image in this particular historical moment, and also offers key operative categories of the face, first as regarding the quandary of its visuality and its textuality.

EXCURSUS ON THE FACE IN LANGUAGE Barthes’s essay title immediately raises the question of the face in language. The previous chapter has already touched on this issue in the broad sense of the face’s margins of illegibility bound Stardom in Postwar France, eds. John Gaffney and Diana Holmes (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 26–​39, Susan Weiner lays out some of these debates. She notes Morin’s influence especially on Barthes’s account of the interplay of faces on-​and off-​screen at a time of social change. In juxtaposing Morin and Barthes, however, Weiner understands the latter to reject myth tout court, whereas I argue in the present chapter for Barthes’s productive ambivalence on just this point. 4  I borrow the notion of “technology of enchantment” from Alfred Gell, see in particular his “Technology and Magic” (1988), rpt. in The Best of Anthropology Today, ed. Jonathan Benthall (London: Routledge/​The Royal Anthropological Institute, 2002), 280–​7. I summarize Gell’s categories in Chapter One, note 24. 5  These tensions might also account for Barthes’s suppressing most of this essay, nor was it republished in any subsequent collections and only appeared again after his death in the Œuvres complètes, vol. I, 1942–1965 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993). Susan Weiner is one of the few who addresses it in “1950s Popular Culture.” Miriam Hansen cites it in a note to the closing pages of her Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 262 and 293. Since its translation to Italian the essay has caught the attention of several film scholars, most notably, Leonardo Quaresima in his introduction to Béla Balázs, L’uomo visibile, trans. Sara Terpin, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Turin: Lindau, 2008), and Francesco Pitassio in “Natali di stelle. Di qualche questione genetica e divistica,” Àgalma 22 (Oct. 2011): 48–​59. Among the numerous essays on Barthes’s relationship to the cinema, I have not found any detailed discussions of this essay, but have learned a great deal nevertheless from Jean-​M ichel Rabaté, ed., Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Steven Ungar, “Persistence of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to Film,” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, ed. Diana Knight (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 2000), 236–​49; Dana B. Polan, “Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,” October 18 (Autumn, 1981): 41–​6; Philip Watts, “Roland Barthes’s Cold-​War Cinema,” SubStance 34, no. 3, issue 108 (2005): 17–32; Philippe C. Dubois, “Barthes et l’image,” The French Review, 72, no. 4 (1999): 676–​86. Raymond Bellour’s work develops, both directly and indirectly, Barthes’s thought on the cinema, most famously in “The Unattainable Text,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 21–​7, and in “The Pensive Spectator” trans. Lynne Kirby, Wide Angle, 9, no. 1 (1987): 6–​10. See also Laura Mulvey’s commentary in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 181–​96. I remain perplexed why Philip Watts did not devote attention to “Visages et figures” in his book-​length study, recently published under the editorship of Dudley Andrew et. al., Roland Barthes’ Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). It is true that Watts’s work was interrupted, sadly, by his untimely death, but nothing in the book suggests that he considered the essay worthy of much attention.



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up with its visual excess—​t he ways in which expression and (we shall see in the next chapter) identity falter when forced into symbolic systems, comprising also legal, psychological, and narrative apparatuses. Just as Eisenstein used the difference between the English and the Russian appellations for the close-​up to explore stylistic distinctions, “Visages et figures,” too, prompts our considerations of the names of the face and its semantic instability. Weighty volumes are, in fact, devoted to this issue: it suffices to leaf through the two volumes (and over 700 pages) of Les Dénominations du visage en français et dans les autres langues romanes, to recognize the etymological variants, the shifting connotations, the semantic promiscuity of the face.6 Many languages seem to struggle to “hold” the face together, to pin it down, but its slipperiness should itself be understood as cultural symptom. While it is not the concern of the present study to analyze this instability fully from such perspectives, one might consider what light it sheds on the fortunes of the cinematic face. One would tend to translate Barthes’s title as “Faces and Figures,” yet figure is itself a French synonym for “face”—​somewhat less elevated than visage—​while also denoting body, form, image, and the rhetorical figure—​a ll of which English shares. By way of etymology visage makes salient the face’s frontality and visuality, while figure intimates—​as it did in this book’s Preface—​t he slippage between image and language, between corporeal entity, pictorial, and poetic image. “Image” is itself an almost too-​flexible term—​t his, too, the Preface has already acknowledged—​that invites leaps between poetic constructs, visual representations, and mental entities or projections of the imagination. Such leaps inform metaphor, especially, as the ur-​figure—​t he more or less deliberate instrument driving the creative proliferation of language as such.7 But what is a mental image, and what is a figure of the imagination? We shall see later how Barthes touches on this issue specifically with respect to the mental invocation or memory of the face. Since many of the face-​related terms we employ share the same Latinate roots and intersect in numerous contexts, it is edifying to note their provenance. And while French etymologies are, obviously, the most pertinent in Barthes’s critical tradition, some glimpses beyond will also inform our sense of the cultural range and intricacy of this nomenclature. Barthes does not, for instance, employ the French word “ face,” whose historical fluctuations in the language suggest, in fact, losses not suffered by the English “face.” In a study of diachronic semantics François Rastier dwells on the French denominations of face in juxtaposition with visage. The French figure (in the restricted meaning of “face”) emerges as the more neutral modern term while the French face and visage undergo more tumultuous changes that pull them apart in suggestive ways. Face is first attested in the 12th century with the meaning of ‘visage’ (figure). In fact, it means essentially the surface of the face and in particular the cheeks… . Yet, from 6  Jean Renson, Les Dénominations du visage en français et dans les autres langues romanes, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1962). 7 Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (first published by Gallimard in 1940) concerns itself with questions of the material image (the analogon, a term Barthes also employs later in his writings) and the mental image. While Barthes rarely spells out influences and sources, his thinking on the image must be indebted, in part, to Sartre’s book. Dudley Andrew has reflected on ways in which both Morin and Bazin’s conceptions of the photographic/​c inematographic image were indebted to L’Imaginaire; see his entry on Morin in the Routledge Companion. On metaphor as ur-​fi gure see special issue of Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978).

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the 13th to the 15th century, the number of contexts of face grows substantially, face meaning then, apart from the physical aspect of the figure, its expression (/​moral/​ feature)… . A new class of contexts appears with the use of face in the translations of the Bible (with the meaning of presence: la face de Dieu, which translates the Hebrew plural p’nim Elohim [sic]) and also of surface: la face de la terre (the face of the earth)… . Visage is more rarely found in religious contexts… . At the end of the [16th] century appears the expression face du Grand Turc, which designates a totally different body part [the buttocks]… . The ludicrous and discreetly blasphematory reverse of the divine face… . [Face] is now separated from ‘visage’ by an acceptability threshold. Now ‘visage’ covers the doxal zone, surrounded by two antipathetic and paradoxal acceptions of face, one religious and the other one infamous… . [This has benefited] figure, which, as soon as [sic] the middle of the 16th century, by a specialization of the meaning of ‘exterior shape’, was used for ‘shape of the human face’, and later, in the 17th century, was also used for the facial expression or look, and came to replace visage and face in the current usage. In today’s French, figure has become a neutral and generic term, liable to the most diverse uses; face keeps its /​pejorative/​feature, as shown by the insulting phrase face de. … Finally, visage, reserved to the written language or to an elevated spoken style, has gained a /​ameliorative/​feature (widely used in advertisements for cosmetic products).8

The historical secularization of culture, in tandem with a sublimating dissociation of the “noble” and the “base” parts of the body, might be related to these semantic shifts and to the host of connotations that inform the contemplation of the face and its image: surface, presence, expression—​t he face frequently seems split as a sign, or conglomerate of signs. What this bit of historical linguistics demonstrates is how quickly “face” tends to depart from its “literal” referent (although this, too, is clearly not a stable point of origin) and evolves, through a conflicting range of charged, high and low meanings, as an idea, as figure for something else—​be it the godhead, or the buttocks. These widely diverse entities acquire a face, and sometimes, indeed, a plurality of faces. The face comes to be construed as a figure of sublimation—​a cipher, a spiritualized figure of the gaze, a synecdoche or metaphor. At the same time, face instroduces a potentially blasphemous operation, subject to iconoclastic retaliation. The obscene connotations of face du Grand Turc (for the rear part, which also the English invests with “cheeks”) offers an imaginative twist to our consideration of the names and the figures of the face, and its amenability to reversal. The names of other body parts, such as arm or leg, are routinely borrowed for other objects (like armchairs), yet such metaphorical uses are far from being as fraught and as torn between oppositions as the face seems to be.9 Even as the names and verbal connotations attending to the face mediate the actual, physical entity, they also introduce tensions and interferences between the face and its languages.

8 François Rastier, “Cognitive Semantics and Diachronic Semantics:  the Values and Evolution of Classes,” Historical Semantics and Cognition, eds. Andreas Blank and Peter Koch (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), 109–​ 44; www.revue-​texto.net/​I nedits/​R astier/​R astier_​Cog-​sem.html, accessed July 5, 2016. I have reproduced in this quotation the linguistic markers given in the original article. 9  The Bible routinely uses anthropomorphic, body-​part metaphors in relation to God, as in “the arm of God,” to designate divine power or intervention, and so forth.



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Rastier’s parenthetical remark regarding the proliferation of facial connotations in translations of the Bible introduces a tangent that we shall, nevertheless, follow a bit further. Archaic Judeo-​Christian uses and inclinations manifest the exceptional status of the face and its stakes in representation—​t he concepts, images, rituals, and taboos that cast it as an exceptional yet paradigmatic image. Rastier singles out the Hebrew term for the face of God, p’nei Elohim—​h is mistaken transcription p’nim itself opens up an interesting point. P’nei—​l ike panim (literally, face) of which it is the genitive—​involves a morphologically inherent plural (pluralae tantum) characteristic of special entities that are not quite definable in closed, limited form, and cannot be counted but invoke, somehow, a totality: chaim (life) and elohim (God) are among them.10 Does this inherent plural run counter to our modern conception of the face as unique index of identity? Modern and cinematic cultures grapple with the singularity and the multiplicity of the face, its centripetal inclination and its proliferation, its disruption of inner and outer oppositions. Whatever plurality or variability is carried by the face is, surely, subsumed under some principle of continuity through change: innumerable expressions accumulate and cohere with the passage of time toward a sense of the person’s singularity, totality, identity. Yet another etymological puzzle concerns the root for panim, which is by most accounts shared with p’nim: specifically denoting interior in clear opposition to exterior or to surface. This near identity of face and interior in Hebrew lends itself to the idea of the face as a boundary (not to say, interface), or as port of entry, while also underscoring the face’s unique power to disrupt the inner and outer opposition—​hence its instability, its malleability, its porosity as an idea, and as image.11 P’nei Elohim, the face of God, carries the suggestion that being in the face of someone—​a nd the implication is of an important personage, like a minister, king, or a god—​binds the visual encounter with an idea of coming into a presence that is in no way trivial. Presence and presentness are terms whose spatio-​temporal, phenomenological resonance already informed our discussion in Chapter One; they will also inform Barthes’s valorization of a hieratic order of the cinematic face. Across several languages, being before someone enfolds, then, a temporal suggestion into the idea of spatial co-​presence in facing. Turning toward and turning away from are complementary movements partaking in the face’s theological power of incarnation and taboo in Judeo-​Christian cultures. As Rastier suggests, revelation and exposure, sacred and obscene, are flip sides of the face. The book of Exodus already enfolds this possibility:

10  Such words have no singular insofar as they apply to great, immeasurable or, again, total entities. The singular pan, relating to panim, does not designate a face in its anthropomorphic sense but, rather applies only to the broader sense of facet or abstract aspect. Like the English and the French “face,” panim may, however, apply—​as a dead, or is it undead metaphor—​to both animate and inanimate objects and surfaces, such as the face of the water or the earth, as encountered in the first chapter of Genesis, for instance. Finally, like the English, Hebrew has a closely related denominative verb, “panah”: to face, to turn. I rely in this excursus on my native Hebrew, on the etymological elaboration of The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992) under the entry Face in vol. 2, and on the Hebrew dictionary, ha-​Milon he-​hadash, vol. 5, ed. Avraham Even-​Shoshan (Jerusalem: Kiryat-​sefer, 1966–​1970), which offers numerous variations and uses of panim, and notes its etymological source in Ugaritic and in the Akkadian pānu; it acknowledges the relation to p’nim—​interior—​but does not elaborate on it, nor on the nature of the plural form. Thanks to Paul Mendes-​Flohr and to Itamar Francez for discussing this part of the chapter with me. 11  This echoes Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of the face against the notion of surface or image. A recent volume of conference papers assembled under the title Panim/​Pnim builds on the intersection, in the play of these terms, of Judaic thought, comparative literature and psychoanalytic discourse. See Céline Masson and Michel Gad Wolkowicz, eds., Panim/​P ’nim: L’Exil prend-​il au visage? (Sèvres, Fr.: Editions EDK, 2009).

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And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.12

It is not such great distance (or perhaps not a great difference) between God’s face and God’s behind: God’s hand is its measure. Whether a god has none or all of these, by some theological conceptions, the invocation of a dimensional body enfolding both fore and aft, concealment and exposure, iterates the double nature of God and the necessity of his withdrawal—​h is turning-​of-​t he-​back—​for the world’s coming into being. It is by such mythological intricacy that the face constitutes in so many cultures an iconic, ritual object, or a taboo—​so that it must be withdrawn, veiled, ornamented and otherwise altered, or masked. invested in deconsecrating altogether the notion of the face as such, even as he must be well aware that just such a project was carried out some years before, as part of a vociferous critique of idealism by Georges Bataille and his colleagues in the magazine Documents. There, in 1929—​against the backdrop of fascism’s rise in Europe—​a radical desublimation of the human face, seen as synonymous with an inflated notion of “self,” was elaborated by the College of Sociology and the Acéphale (both society and magazine), also in light of new approaches to anthropology in 1930s France. Bataille’s entry on the human face—“Figure humaine”—​is illustrated with fin-​de-​siècle photographs that ridicule any grandiose metaphysical investment in the human form (Fig. 2.1). For Bataille, the face does not seem to warrant any greater reverence than that accorded to any other body part—​the orientation is always downward. Even that most revered facial focus, the eye—​w indow of the soul, transporter of visions—​is dubbed, in other entries, a “cannibal delicacy,” thus violently pulled down to the realm of the other senses, to the mouth (itself defined as a bestial fleshy orifice), or even lower, as in the elaboration of these ideas in Bataille’s fiction. The facial image is ridiculed through both elevated and popular examples, photographic and cinematic. In abjuration of fixed hierarchies, the figure of the Acéphale—​as the term suggests and as drawn by André Masson—​is of a headless body with a death’s head hovering over or replacing the genitals. The Acéphale radicalizes the instability of the face-​as-​figure through the reversibility of the exalted and the debased, the sublime and the profane, the unique and the multiple.13 It is almost as if the face and the signs attending to it could never settle this way or that: always sliding up or down, betraying an inherent ambiguity and instability—​one which may well partake in our actual experience of faces. Must the face be separated from its own flesh, as it were, from its physical material base, to come into its own as a form of agency, as visual harbinger of the person? It is this power that BARTHES IS NOT

12  Exodus 33:20–​3, King James version. 13  See English translation of some entries and images reproduced from the Encyclopædia Acéphalica, ed. Georges Bataille, and related texts assembled and introduced by Alastair Brotchie, trans. Iain White et. al. (London: Atlas Press, 1995). I discuss the desublimating project of Documents as backdrop to Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949) and its turn against cinema’s optical aspirations of the 1920s in “Visuality and Viscera,” The Five Senses of Cinema, eds. Alice Autelitano et. al. (Udine, It.: Forum, 2005), 135–​5 4.



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FIGURE 2.1:  Illustration page for Bataille’s article “Figure humaine” in the journal Documents (1929). Reproduced from Georges Bataille, Documents, ed. Bernard Noël (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968).

modernity’s abstractions and constructions could never quite dispel, and to which the cinema returns at all critical historical junctures. most of his essay the more elevated term visage (which I routinely translate as “face”), turning to figure when seeking the sharper juxtaposition, at the essay’s conclusion, of rhetorical models for the face. Figure is also more prominent in “The Face of Garbo” and would seem to support there Barthes’s more formal, graphic consideration of contours and features. Navigating between the movie theater and the actual experience of the face in a range of social encounters, “Visages et figures” proposes an anthropology of the face that juxtaposes its cultural currencies through cinematic models in different film-​h istorical moments. But one can trace Barthes’s engagement with the figural intricacy of the face to the terms by which he approaches the pictorial portrait and the workings of the face on the popular stage. In “The World as Object,” an essay on Dutch portraiture published just BARTHES USES THROUGH

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FIGURE 2.2:  “These patricians rest upon you the full weight of their smooth, bare faces”: Franz Hals, The Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard (1616). Image courtesy of the Franz Hals Museum, Haarlem.

a month before “Visages et figures,” Barthes describes how morphological affinities relate members of a class across diverse paintings, and hold together a multiplicity of faces in the guild group portraits (Fig. 2.2). Socio-​economic class distinctions transpire in these portraits as if they were of a “carnal order… an identity of blood and food.” His account of diverse representations of flesh as class marker is not without irony: the amorphous faces of van Ostade’s peasants—​like those of creatures not yet fully formed—​a re juxtaposed with Verspronck’s young patricians, whose bourgeois identity is crystalized in characteristically fine shaping and texture of features, delicate coloration of hair, eyes, and lips (Figs. 2.3–2.4). These pictorial depictions of features and complexions, joined with the mimetic, even indexical claim of the portrait genre, rehearse the myth that class difference is a law of nature. This pseudo-​ natural, evolutionary genealogy is reversed in Barthes’s account: it is not biological morphology that is at the basis of class, but class that is interiorized by the body and inscribes itself in its representations. The anthropological and phenomenological implications of the collective gaze of the upper classes are underscored by a frontal, authoritative mode of address that comes to engulf the viewer, too, in its world order. Barthes’s astute observations are worth citing at some length: Dutch painting obviously deals with two anthropologies, as distinctly separated as Linnaeus’ zoological classes. It is no accident that the word “class” applies to both notions: there is the patrician class (homo patricius) and the peasant class (homo paganicus), and each encompasses human beings not only of the same social condition but also of the same morphology. Van Ostade’s peasants have abortive, shapeless faces; as if they were unfinished creatures, rough drafts of men… . [They are] deprived of the ultimate characteristics of humanity, those of the person. This subclass of men is never represented frontally, an attitude which presupposes at least a gaze: this privilege is reserved for the patrician or the cow, the Dutch totem animal and national provider. From the neck up, these peasants have only a blob which has not yet become a face… .



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FIGURE 2.3:  “Abortive, shapeless faces”: Adriaen van Ostade, The Merry Peasant (1630–​ 1650). Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

FIGURE 2.4:  A distinct “zoological class”: Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, Portrait of Maria van Strijp (1652). Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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All guild faces are somewhat isomorphic. Here, once again, is proof that the face is a social sign, that there is a possible history of faces, and that the most direct product of nature is as subject to process and to signification as the most socialized institutions… . A social class unequivocally defined by its economy (identity of commercial function, after all, justifies these guild paintings) is here presented in its anthropological aspect… . It is of a carnal order; it consists not of a community of intentions, but of an identity of blood and food; it is formed after a long sedimentation which has accumulated all the characteristics of a social particularity within a class: age, size, morphology, wrinkles, veins, the very order of biology separates the patrician caste from the functional substance (objects, peasants, landscapes) and imprisons it within its own authority… . Here the gaze is collective; these men, even these lady regents virilized by age and function, all these patricians rest upon you the full weight of their smooth, bare faces.14

The patrician faces of the guild portraits cohere morphologically. A cumulative “sedimentation” of social and economic life seems to have been deposited upon and then calcified in their features, and is then matched by a predominantly frontal attitude. All these join in the forging of an anthropological disposition which—​superseding any particular, differentiating qualities or passing expressions—​naturalizes and articulates a coherent social identity. What Barthes is describing here by way of facial-​pictorial formation, consistency, and disposition is, in effect, a mask-​l ike entity that joins morphological features with a repertoire of gestures or attitudes shared by the class, and corporeally assumed by each of its members. It is not a mask that covers or conceals the face but, rather, one that has sunk and calcified like a mineral geological sediment, formed with time, to yield a smooth, bare yet heavy facial surface. Class and culture are thus internalized, supplanting any particularity of features and expressions. Shared by the class as a whole, such a mask is distributed, as it were, between different members of the group. In this it performs an ethnographic role, as would an archaic ritual mask—​not meant to conceal but to externalize and to forge a communal social function, to render manifest and legible a social order within the larger mythology of the culture. Marcel Mauss had foreshadowed, in “Techniques of the Body” (1934), a comparable idea of the way in which social and cultural attitudes are internalized and congealed

14  Roland Barthes, “The World as Object,” Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 7–​11. “Le monde-​objet” was originally published June 1953 in Lettres nouvelles. Barthes’s emphasis on the ways in which the viewer partakes in the collective gaze of these guild portraits vaguely echoes Alois Riegl’s writing on the dynamic of attentiveness in The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902), trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt, introduction by Wolfgang Kemp (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). On quite another front, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance”—​a s distinguished from formal features and yet embedded as an aspect of objective form—​can perhaps be related to this. The face is a recurring example in Wittegenstein’s discussion of “aspect dawning.” In his dissertation, “The Philosophy of the Face and 20th Century Literature and Art” (University of Pennsylvania, 2005; accessed through ProQuest), Bernard J. Rhie discusses the interest of Wittegenstein’s concepts for a study of the face in art, and sees them epitomized in the Philosophical Investigations’ formulation: “meaning is a physiognomy.”



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in corporeal dispositions, gestures, and perceptions.15 Likewise, the Dutch “patrician caste” is objectified not merely as something acquired, intended, or worn (e.g., like certain verbal idioms, or hats, or jewelry); its authority is asserted not merely as conscious mannerism but, Barthes suggests, as an internalized, naturalized substance. Like a mineral sediment, it settles to become a constant ground, a base underlying differentiating features, shifts of expression and, ultimately, the definition of character and of the individual as such. Even as particular features, marks, and passing expressions can be altered, this shared ground has crystalized to constitute a morphological identity of the entire class and generation: in this function it is static and inalterable. The steady, assertive gaze of the class is itself predicated on this quality. Some of Barthes’s key terms in this discussion of Dutch portraiture, especially surrounding the notion of “sedimentation,” we shall retain toward a reading of “Visages et figures” and its development of the mask figure. As we approach this figure we pause, briefly, on Barthes’s very first and perhaps most brilliant mythology, originally published in Esprit in October 1952, “Le monde où l’on catche”—​k nown in English as both “The World of Wrestling” or “In the Ring.” Barthes maintains that, as distinct from boxing, wrestling is not a sport but a knowing, participatory ritual spectacle. It need not make use of actual masks (although sometimes it does), but its mode of address is mask-​l ike: firstly in that it masquerades as a sport, and secondly in that its formal use of gesticulation, exclamation, and generally externalized expression—​projected by very virtue of its excess—​i s comparable to “the great solar spectacles” of ancient theater (Fig. 2.5). The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from concealing, he accentuates and holds like a pedal point, corresponds to the mask of antiquity intended to signify the tragic tone of the spectacle… . Wrestling presents human suffering with all the amplification of the tragic masks.16

Barthes in fact compares this contemporary popular type of tragic drama to the ritual situation of an audience at a suburban cinema. In both cases, audiences are complicit in authoring the deliberate duplicity of the spectacle, its balance of participation and intelligibility which, like classical cinema’s persistent types and genre forms, affords it the productive, generative, communal powers of myth. In the wrestling match as in the movie theater, heightened mythological structures can become redemptive not when they parade as nature (as do pernicious myths), but when they figure bodies, relations, images for what they are: deliberate social forms, practiced and perceived as such.

15  Marcel Mauss’s “Les Techniques du corps,” a lecture of 1934, was published in the Journal de Psychologie, 32, nos. 3–4 (1936); see English translation “Techniques of the Body,” Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 454–77. Susanne Lüdemann discussed with me in this context also Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” which is informed by Mauss; see in particular his “Structure, Habitus, Practices” and “Belief and the Body,” in The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1990), 52–​79. 16  Roland Barthes, “In the Ring,” Mythologies, rev. ed., trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 5, 8. Other than Moriarty’s commentary on Barthes in this context see also Mary Bittner Wiseman, The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes (New York: Routledge, 1989).

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FIGURE 2.5:  “The amplification of the tragic masks”: L’Ange Blanc [The White Angel], French wrestler. Paris, September 1959. © Bernard Lipnitzki/Roger-​ Viollet. Image courtesy of Top Foto.

This perspective is matched by Barthes’s striking analysis of the face-​as-​mask in his essay on the Folies-​Bergère: his second so-​designated “Mythology” vignette after “The World of Wrestling,” also published in Esprit prior to “Visages et figures” and, like the latter, left out of the 1957 volume.17 Like the Dutch portrait essay, “Folies-​Bergère” evidences Barthes’s discerning eye for visual detail: his passages on color in this essay are nothing less than stunning, as is his ability to navigate a range of cultural phenomena toward social, aesthetic, and semiotic insight. In key passages he carefully distinguishes the spectacular disposition of the performers’ faces here from that of actual situations of social encounter (Fig. 2.6). The essay, launched as a parody of a provincial salesman or hat merchant’s perspective on a visit to Paris, initially posits les girls of the Folies-​Bergère as blatant currency, transfigured into haloes of feathers and rhinestone pubic coverings. But then, as he develops his connotations, Barthes moves toward an appreciation of the mythological frankness, the clarity of attitude in the sheer exteriority and frontality of the spectacle, one that crystalizes a fundamental truth of the human face. 17  Roland Barthes, “Folies-​Bergère” was published in February 1953, and reprinted in the Œuvre complètes, 193–​ 202; references are to this edition.



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FIGURE 2.6:  “This projected face, held up like a holy sacrament”: the Folies-​Bergère, Paris, 1937. © Gaston Paris/​Roger-​Viollet/ TopFoto. Image courtesy of The Image Works.

The mask is raised here as a formal and anthropological model that brings archaic, ritual powers into play in the modern spectacle. Even as the Folies-​Bergère performance involves, of course, present, living, moving performers—​les girls—​a principle of stasis, artifice, frontality, and radical exteriority prevails. A fabricated piece of artifice, the mask distorts the habitual experience of distance and proximity, abolishes any assumption of organic, integral relation of face and subject, and objectifies psychic and communal functions. In Barthes’s description, the mask not only formalizes expression and address, but unravels the cultural foundations and psychic effects of the human image, projecting a myth of origins on the one hand and, on the other, the destiny of the face as death’s head. Barthes’s analysis engages here phenomenological, economical, anthropological, and aesthetic coordinates in ways that resonate with his perception of the cinematic face. Daily life never brings a woman’s face so far toward me. All manner of artifice primps and sustains this projected face, held up like a holy sacrament, outcast to the very limits of its own surface and, as it were, pitched before me with an intent of total exteriority. Life routinely provides me with faces composed of unstable movements, but I can never grasp a face:  it withdraws, it vanishes, it fades-​in, is bodied forth. Never can I  hold it steady beneath my gaze; never can I endow it with the quality of an object, since it, too, gazes at me. Here, this theatrical face is a miracle of immobility; it is available because

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it is fixed, it offers me its permanence and I can finally possess it; it is composed without movement, composed only of parts without a gaze, parts obliterated like the holes in a mask; the mouth is held out to me at the farthest limit of the rouge, the eyes at the farthest limit of the lashes, the neck is like a slender pike offering me a sacrificed head. In truth, only Death can produce face-​as-​objects [visage-​objets] to this degree.18

In its extreme objectification the spectacular collective face of the Folies-​Bergère is available, intelligible, decipherable, classifiable, and multipliable—​like no face can ever be in ordinary lived encounter. Here are not the faces of individuals, but an archetype or—​as Barthes later formulates it in relation to Garbo—​a n Idea of the face. The extreme and deliberate artifice of the Folies-​Bergère, particularly as it envelops and embellishes the body, gives rise to the face as product, as manufactured object. It raises, thereby, the question of material source and process, or mode of fabrication, pointing to a mythological idea of origin that supplants any notion of spontaneous nature. All this connotes to Barthes “the conceptual substance of all faces: wax—​at once matrix, rawness, and funereal fragility.” While he might be thinking of Plato’s image of the wax tablet in the Theaetetus, or of Descartes’s thought experiment of the wax ball in the Second Meditation, to parse sensory from mental knowledge, Barthes turns, instead, to a less lofty context, the Musée Grévin—​t he Parisian wax museum that at the turn of the previous century also used to display fresh corpses.19 Wax—​ deployed to authenticate identity and authority in seals and stamps—​is a lowly, organic, pliable stuff, responsive to corporeal touch and to heat. Smelling of churches and funerals, it invokes here a rather pagan idea of the human image. Both wax-​museum effigies and those painted, wigged, bearded, and variously costumed figurines propped up on certain church altars appear at once more crude and more uncannily life-​l ike than high religious art. It is not impossible that Barthes would have also been familiar with Aby Warburg’s positing of wax effigies at the foundations of Renaissance portraiture in the fifteenth century: representations that articulated their bourgeois church donors’ desire for the survival of the person through the preservation of worldly likeness.20 Despite their low substance and their evidently ephemeral nature, such wax portrait figures acquired prestige and eventually served to legitimize the increasing incorporation of patron likenesses in church frescos of sacred scenes, as well as portraits on chapel walls—​no longer wedded to biblical narratives, but human effigies created and admired as such. These are the materials, models, dispositions, modes of address and of reception that subtend Barthes’s conception of the face at the Folies-​Bergère. The “inert and excessive make-​up,” the spectacular ritual universe of color and costume, the mask-​l ike wax faces of the performers 18  Barthes, “Folies-​Bergère,” 198. Unless otherwise noted, translations from this article as from “Visages et figures” are my own, with the help of Mark Cohen and David Jacobson. “Visage-​objet” is also the term that Barthes uses to describe Garbo’s face, although not with such explicit reference to death. 19 Gabriel Lear cited to me Plato’s image from the Theaetetus 191–​5, and Daniel Morgan cited Descartes’s Second Meditation—​I’m grateful for both of these philosophical metaphors. On the Musée Grévin see Vanessa Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-​de-​siècle Paris,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 297–​319. 20  See Aby Warburg’s 1902 essay, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 435–​50.



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unravel, to him, the mythic foundations of the face in the act of its fabrication. It rehearses a pagan-​d ivine act of creation: ​t he forging of human form out of the earth—​or out of the void: All these beautiful faces thus present me with an idea of fabrication that overwhelms me with evidence. Here, surpassing life, which only presents me with faces without origin or cause, I can simultaneously possess an image of beauty and the very process that has produced it. I have dispelled the most tenacious mystery of existence, that of another’s body. I  have brought the Adamic myth to the dimension of an operating technique; I  have replaced God. This human Visage, which routinely is but a presence, here finally manifests itself as a product, it can be purchased not only because it is an object that assumes all the postures of availability but, above all, because it is a constructed object, extracted from the void by mechanical procedures whose traces are still visible. 21

Not so much as presence, but as product, as token of its fabrication, the face that can be held in sight and can lend itself to one’s gaze as inert object is, finally, also a figure of death: the ossified death’s head lying in wait as the ultimate producer of all “face-​as-​objects.” Its artifice and plasticity efface, finally, the living face and render it “inhuman.” Between wax effigy, death’s head, and mask, Barthes seeks to crystalize the “conceptual substance” of the facial image, archaic but redrawn for its time—​a nd thus he enters the movie theater.

INTO THE MOVIE THEATER The cinema, Barthes states in “Visages et figures,” offers the most substantial modern archive for a “sociology of the human face,” quite distinct in its functions and uses from the traditional painted portrait which oscillates between a generalized “human essence” on the one hand, and the particular, “personal identity” on the other. Neither painting nor photography have developed a rich and authoritative typology equal in its range, its circulation, and its medial power—​ its capacity to navigate between the image and the street—​to that of the cinematic face. Barthes’s insistence on this supreme potential of the cinema is remarkable. Not yet struck by the power of photography—​which he celebrates years later in terms often similar to those we find in these early essays—​as the ultimate “art of the Person,” Barthes was perhaps not acquainted, in 1953, with August Sander’s “Faces of Our Time”—​much as this ethnographic typology represented what were, in fact, largely ​outdated professions and period styles on the verge of extinction.22 If the anachronism of Sander’s physiognomic gallery rhymed, somehow, with photography’s commemorative, even monumental vision of the past, the cinema, with its immense flexibility, by virtue of duration and movement, and with its mass appeal, is oriented differently: always responsive to detail and to change, adaptable to nuanced shifts not only in fashions, make-​up, 21 Barthes, Folies-​Bergère, 199. “Visage” here is capitalized in the original. 22  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); see p. 79 on the “art of the Person” and pp. 34–37 on Sander. Christine Mehring drew my attention to the staged anachronism of Sander’s portraits.

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and taste but in deportment, expression, gesture, affording the differentiation of so many faces, dispositions, and idiosyncrasies. Possibly it is not a representative archive that Barthes is after, but an active image repertoire, a fount affording a dynamic back-​a nd-​forth between the contemporary public and those human projections on the screen. The cinema always converses with time, and its array of faces and dispositions transpires as a more dynamic lexicon (or lexia) that mediates cultural milieux and social codes inflecting the twentieth century’s shifting practices of the face.23 Later we shall see that it is precisely the cinema’s variability, its dynamism, sense of proximity, immersion, and contemporaneity that also present a challenge to Barthes’s evaluation of the medium as cultural and aesthetic system. The “choices” offered by contemporary cinema are so many ways to mediate, sort, and adapt practices of the face as part of a social-​a nthropological practice: The isomorphism of certain faces of an era depends much more on elective than on innate elements. A sort of dialectic must be at work here whereby the individual selects his own head; since the cinema offers such excellent choices, he quickly rushes to shelter the uncertainty of his physical being behind an authoritative typology that releases him from ever again having to “think” his own face… . The cinema allows society to select its faces… . It is, then, only the cinema that will constitute the historical era in a sociology of the face: painting, even photography, have merely been its prehistory. 24

Again, it is not a superficial stylistic choice of make-​up and fashion that is at stake—​a lthough ways of crafting the face and embellishing glamour are, in fact, valorized by Barthes, as we have seen at the Folies-​Bergère. What he first discerns, however, are more deeply grafted class and social markers effecting facial attitudes and repertoires of expression. Interiorized, these give rise to the “isomorphism … of an era”—​as was the case with the morphological affinities he had appreciated in Dutch portraiture. In a kind of back and forth, what the cinema picks and chooses from among contemporary physiognomies the public, in turn, reproduces, rehearses, internalizes, and disseminates in everyday practice. Not only does the individual thus “elect” his or her own face out of a given repertoire but also learns, in the cinema, how to negotiate those “techniques of the face” in the encounter with others. We do not only assume and internalize, then, facial vocabularies, but our reading of faces, our everyday face-​to-​face, is acquired in the movie theater. A complex itinerary follows in Barthes’s contemplation of the way in which an idea of the face and its practices, its imaginary and its cultural bearing, are forged by the cinema. He asserts that “the first power of cinema is the intermittence of its presentations.”25 But is not

23 In S/​Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 13, Barthes defines lexia as “blocks of signification” or “units of reading,” each constituted by one or more of the Five Codes that join in the semiotic toolbox of S/​Z . Scott Durham’s response to my presentation of some of these ideas at the Chicago Film Seminar, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, February 2, 2012, helped me to think through some of these concepts. 24  Barthes, “Visages,” 2. Barthes routinely uses masculine pronoun for “the man in the street,” or the generalized viewer, reader, etc. It is not for us to “correct” this historical bias in translating from his text. 25  Barthes, “Visages,” 2.



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our actual social experience of faces similarly plagued by erratic impermanence and fragmentation? Barthes returns here to what had already cropped up in the “Folies-​Bergère” essay: the spectacular totality of the fundamentally impersonal “visage-​objet” that lends itself as a proper image, against the evasiveness of the face as mental or memory image in daily life. How is it that, especially with those closest, most intimate, most beloved persons—​say, our own mother’s features—​t he face remains essentially ungraspable, strangely unstable and fugitive. This Proustian experience intrigues Barthes; it comes to figure a tragic kernel at the heart of existence. Does the cinema compel us as it does because it responds to, and even compensates for, this basic lack of the imagination, offering instead a unique experience of vivid personal proximity and, at the same time, an enduring objective persistence of the facial image? Against this tragic impotence [to recall an intimate face]—​a n unremitting death located at the very center of that which we love the most—​is postulated the distressing virtuosity with which we can instantaneously picture in our mind a complete, stable, well-​ defined bodily image, equipped head to foot, of unknown men and women—​provided they are presented to us through the window of spectacle. Whereas I pursue in vain the face closest to me, I have no trouble, alas! no delay, in summoning up in my mind, at will, an inner photograph of Michèle Morgan, Paul Reynaud, the waiter at the Deux-​Magots, or the girl at my local post office. There is a sort of law here:  the face exists only at a distance, it exists only as mask. The movement that grips it in the cinema is a false movement; the face constantly seems to dissolve in the whirl of activities and passions, just as it does in life, but in fact it never changes; it is the face as a whole that roams through cinematographic time… . Its uses alter, but not its external bearing; it is sustained, it is paraded, its position is shifted but never its blood: it is always full, always well-​nurtured, gorged with itself, well-​tended so as to support without fail the power of emotions that it carries aloft. 26

Barthes draws an oblique comparison between the cinema’s “false movement” and the erratic quality of quotidian experience. Against it, he marvels at the “distressing virtuosity” with which he can conjure the face of strangers. Knowledge of the person interferes with the face-​ as-​image. The true facial image—​a permanent face underlying its various cases, expressions or transmutations—​is molded, then, by distance, or by loss, by separation, by death. This is no small matter but rather an existential symptom, epitomizing the gap between person and image, between being and representation. If it is to tap into a more potent image-​modality, the cinematic face must itself be, in a sense, already dead: it must ward off mutability—​t hat of the living body; that involved in the transmutations of a career and of age; and that which defines the very medium of motion pictures. Some twenty-​five years later Barthes will pursue the “essential” face of his mother among old family photographs. The “this has been” of photographic magic will not, in and of itself, guarantee to him anything equal to his knowledge of his mother (and her person) by which he, her son, relates to her face from the inside, as it were—​f rom within its orbit. The tragic inability

26  Barthes, “Visages,” 3. Paul Reynaud was a contemporary politician.

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to grasp and to hold—​precisely, as image—​t hose most intimate faces suggests to Barthes that, first, an effect of distance both spatial and temporal is a necessary condition for forging the facial image and, then, that such coalescing of the facial image from a distance may be likened to the stature, the clarity and stability that the great classical cinematic faces inspire—​surpassing the medium’s inherent technological fragmentation and fleetingness of the image in movement. Only insofar as it transcends mutability and fragmentation, both its own and those defining the medium—​across variable actions, expressions, and stylistic coordinates—​is the face reborn as image. In life as in the cinema, then, it must be defamiliarized, extracted from natural, illusionistic movement and change, from actions and passions, to emerge in an imaginary order. In these earliest writings on the image, focalized in his consideration of the cinematic face, Barthes seems to realize for the first time an aesthetic preference for the hieratic, silent, still, or stilled image, and the critical potential of suspending cinematic flow by distancing and by the operations of memory and affect. As in his later, post-​structuralist thought, his attention inclines toward the field of the spectator.27 “The face exists only at a distance, it exists only as mask.” What does this mean in the cinema, where the apotheosis of the human face, in its most subtle shifts, seems to be available to our perception in unprecedented ways in the close-​up? Barthes’s overlapping ideas of distance and mask would seem to invoke, rather, the world of the theater where, proverbially, only broader facial expressions and larger gestures traverse the abyss between actor and spectator, while language carries all the rest. The theater is not truly an image medium: its mode of address, its constitution of the human figure, the actor’s inhabiting of a role, the presence of actor and audience to each other—​a ll this is of a different order. Possibly it is when the mask comes into play, as in Barthes’s preferred theater types—​a ncient drama, Noh, Brecht, or else such popular ritual spectacles as, we have seen, wrestling or the Folies-​Bergère—​t hat the living actor and, in a sense, theatrical space as a whole, are converted into an image. The mask may be carried up high—​at times above the actor’s head to aggrandize the figure as a whole. The ways in which it may appear transformed in the course of a performance through juxtaposition with bodily attitudes provides an interesting link with cinematic montage to which we shall later return. The mask’s paradigmatically frontal, confrontational attitude projects across the space. Yet the distance of masks that Barthes invokes is not measured by the yard—​ and not one that can be closed. It is, rather, an effect of distance predicated on the frontality, exteriority, impenetrability, the defamiliarizing and forbidding address of the mask that wards off illusions of spontaneous realistic flow, of motivation and identification. It is within such distance that, Barthes suggests, the face can emerge as image: as such, it persists through movement and change, through roles and circumstances and, indeed, against natural expression, against contingency, against time. Following this line of thought one wonders if it is the case that the image in movement, by Barthes’s account, is then not really an image—​u nless, one way or another, a mask pervades it and alters its spatio-temporal texture. The denaturalizing of time and movement is among the cinema’s great powers—​Barthes brings it, in radical form, into the arena of the face. What begs to be considered here is a confrontational

27  This inclination is most evident in Barthes’s 1975 essay “Leaving the Movie Theater,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 345–​9.



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disposition inherent in the moving image—​a moving image haunted, however, by stasis, by negation. We shall explore it through Barthes’s eyes, but must first take some further photographic and theatrical detours. Petit-​bourgeois culture, which becomes his principal target in the Mythologies, plays a part in Barthes’s lightning-​quick history of the “domestication” of the face in the twentieth century. He considers that in its early years the cinema was, in fact, complicit with the theater in that both made use of the face as “thick” sign: character, motivation, emotion were all writ large. Somewhat as in his proto-​semiotic lacing of the “Folies-​Bergère” essay, where the supreme clarity and definition of faces, costumes, colors furnished a universe so precise and explicit that in it, “each object corresponds to nothing else but its name”—​so here, the face is described as occupied “by its own signification”—​“that is to say visible, but without enigma.” Its intelligibility manifests the economic logic of the “petit-​bourgeois explosion” of the early years of cinema. Possibly Barthes is thinking here of the broad expressivity of melodrama and comedy, traversing both stage and screen. His sense of the “thick” density of the face-​as-​sign can be further supported in light of the early film attractions—​t hose facial-​expression films made to educate or entertain and that, as Tom Gunning has shown, in exaggerating and even parodying the face’s availability to the movie camera, both appealed to and challenged legibility, ultimately performing “a saraband between seeing and knowing.”28 In Barthes’s overview of silent film narrative genres—​melodrama above all—​t he human face is, however, by and large overdetermined in signaling temperaments and passions geared toward the intelligibility of motivations. His discussion digresses at this point, bracketing the cinema to discuss photographic glamour portraits—​not, however, those Hollywood publicity photos that could be worked into the appraisal of movie stars that he is building in the essay, but rather those of stage actors, produced by the Parisian Studio Harcourt. This is the section of the essay that Barthes extracted for the Mythologies volume: standing on its own, it offers a sharp and unambiguous ideological debunking of the visual rhetoric of glamour when compared to the corporeal presence of the stage actor. 29 The Harcourt studio served, in fact, as it still does, both stage and screen stars, as well as other celebrities. It excelled in forging those elegantly poised and lit, polished black-​a nd-​white honorific photographic portraits decorating theater lobbies and circulated in a range of promotion venues (Figs. 2.7–2.8). Barthes sees in these a false, mythifying sublimation of the corporeal labor of the professional stage actor, “thick-​skinned under the greasepaint”: the physical reality of the acting body dissolves in the smooth, composed and relaxed photographic countenance. An “ideal visage” enveloped in passive, silent, and timeless repose, is “purged of all movement”—​f rom the machinations of the stage, the labor of acting, and the body’s earthly weight. Not only the actor’s physical reality, but also the communal, social meaning of the theatrical medium, is suppressed in the rarified photographic space of

28  Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/​ Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 2. 29  The digressive, self-​contained substance of the Harcourt segment of “Visages et figures” accounts, in part, for the unresolved nature of the essay as a whole. Might Barthes have done more than just extract this fragment and discard the rest to oblivion—​m ight he have produced two or even three vignettes out of the text we have before us? On Hollywood glamour photography see Patrick Keating, “From the Portrait to the Close-​Up: Gender and Technology in Still Photography and Hollywood Cinematography,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (2006): 90–​108.

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FIGURE 2.7:  Jean-​Louis Barrault. Photo Studio

FIGURE 2.8:  Gérard Philipe, 1951. Photo Studio

Harcourt. Photo card by SERP, Paris.

Harcourt. © RMN. Image courtesy of the Ministère de la Culture/Médiathèque du Patrimoine. Dist. RMN-​Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Harcourt. Yet it is just this glamour image that becomes the actor’s “guild diploma, his true professional carte d’identité”: This pure countenance is rendered utterly useless—​i.e., luxurious—​by the aberrant angle from which it is shot, as if Harcourt’s camera, privileged to capture this unearthly beauty, had had to take up its position in the most improbable zones of a rarified space… . The actor’s face seems to unite with his celestial home in an ascension without haste and without muscles, quite contrary to the onlooking humanity which, belonging to a different zoological class and capable of movement only by legwork (and not by face), must return to its residence on foot… . Every dream, every ideal image, every social preferment initially suppresses the legs, either by portrait or by automobile. 30

The Harcourt photo’s excising of the actor’s corporeal reality of labor from the ideality of the face is consistent with the conceptual opposition, reinforced by language and culture, of the corporeal versus the intellectual, the terrestrial versus the divine. 30  In citing from the segments devoted to the Harcourt photos in “Visages et figures,” I borrow from the English translation of this mythology, “The Harcourt Actor,” Mythologies, 15–18.



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Barthes’s witty association of the glamour portrait and the automobile points to this same historical segregation of the body’s “upper” and “lower” domains. The bourgeois portrait—​ like those Dutch paintings discussed in Barthes’s earlier essay—​t ypically frames the upper part of the body, condensing expression in the face and the hands at rest, investing the contemplative attitude with the depth-​impression of an inner life, thus privileging intellectual over physical activity. The presiding gaze issuing from these portraits situates the subject in its proper class: one that manifestly affords it the luxurious repose also endowed by the Harcourt photos. These glamour portraits are now likened to the modern vehicle of transportation: glossy photographic stasis and the effortless mobility of deluxe motorcars reinforce each other—​Barthes employs a similar nomenclature in the “The New Citroën” mythology. 31 The face’s subtle registers of motion are key to its distinctive status across traditions of representation: we have seen, in Chapter One, how both Georg Simmel and Béla Bálázs celebrated in just this way the unique mobility of the face, wherein the slightest movement, with the minimum expenditure of energy, produces the greatest effect. A similar facial economy, underscored in the glamour portrait, is associated here with modern technologies of transportation: both the Harcourt photo and the car “enframe” the face, projecting it across a distance: This rectangle which first reveals [the actor’s] ideal head, his intelligent, sensitive, or witty expression, depending on the role he offers to life, is the formal document by which the whole of society agrees to separate him from its own physical laws and assures him the perpetual revenue of a countenance which receives as a gift, on the day of this baptism, all the powers ordinarily denied, at least simultaneously, to ordinary flesh: a changeless splendor, a seduction pure of any wickedness, an intellectual power which is not the necessary accompaniment to the ordinary actor’s art or beauty. 32

Barthes’s astute discussion thus posits both perceptual and socio-​economic modernization as bound up with the sublimation of the face. In this formal, rhetorical, and economic logic of glamour, the commodity value of the face is bound up with its mythological cost. In suppressing the reality of labor from the actor’s face, the Harcourt portrait alienates the actor from the very efficacy of his or her art. This devastating demythification of the glamour portrait takes a turn, however, when Barthes approaches—​w ith some comparable vocabulary but altogether different connotations—​the great stars of the classical cinema. How to position the movie star with respect to the diametrical opposition he has set up between theatrical corporeality and the transcendent sublimation of the photographic glamour portrait? What does the cinematic face draw from the luminous, hieratic silence of the composed still photograph, and how to weld it to the cinema’s material and formal conditions: its deployment of duration and change, fragmentation and repetition? 31  Cf., Barthes, “The New Citroën,” Mythologies, 169–71. 32  Barthes, “Harcourt,” 17–18. Against the Harcourt portraits Barthes sets the photography of Thérèse Le Prat and Agnès Varda, whose work he sees as firmly grounded in material and social contexts. The photographs of stage actors by Le Prat that I’ve seen emphasize, indeed, the layering of make-​up and its weight upon the flesh: it is clear how Barthes sees here a demythifying, critical potential.

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One could describe the image of Rudolph Valentino—​t he central case in “Visages et figures”—​ as in some ways comparable to the Harcourt portrait. Yet Barthes construes Valentino’s mythological rhetoric quite differently, affording a passage from the image-​in-​movement to an “ideal” or “essential” order whose artifice is inversely constructed in the case of film. What is being compared here is not stage performance and photographic glamour, but the cinematic illusion of natural flow and change—​one that Barthes calls “false movement”—​a nd an effect of stasis, of arrest, of a gripping, mask-​l ike gaze that rises out of and is simultaneously turned against the cinema’s realistic illusion. To some extent Barthes’s approach to the image of Valentino shares certain traits with Parisian cinephile spectatorship: the legitimation of Hollywood cinema, the isolating of particular visual detail, caressed and cultivated in such a way as to shed narrative and arrest time while fixating on the fragment. His affective response is triggered, however, not by the contingent detail, but by a particular kind of image extracted, and even abstracted from the whole. Through it he explores the conditions for his adoration, attuned to the ways in which the experience of spectatorship informs the perception of faces generally and their deposit in our memory. Cushioning such privileged facial images are clusters of connotations that give rise to a potent mythological figure, one that can arrest the movie’s illusionistic flow on every level—​movement, narrative, psychological identification. While not specifying decades, historical landmarks, or film titles, the star era that Barthes privileges seems to extend from the late 1910s through the 1920s and early 1930s, and is juxtaposed with contemporary star types. As he goes on to argue, the cinema’s mythological exploitation of the human face can be and is, in fact, now more insidious than ever, but in its supreme instances the medium’s anthropological efficacy did afford the star’s glamorous visage a redemptive potential.

ULTRA-​FACE The classical star face must be, in Barthes’s vision, removed from any pretense of natural expressivity, the pretense of sharing in the reality of ordinary mortals—​the spectators. Even as his persona would seem to evolve through different roles—​more or less fantastical—​and even as it transpires as a moving image, Valentino thus remains fixed, ageless, unapproachable, unchanged. His image is distinguished by its extreme artifice: his fantastical garb is coterminous with a fantastical body—​by which we do not mean “more chic” or “better-​built” than the next person but rather, that face and body transpire as, themselves, already image. There is no pretense of spontaneous and mindless nature here: Valentino does not disguise his disguise; this is what endows his image with a doubly-mythological stature, which is ultimately also its aesthetic candor. This can be one way to redeem myth—​as Barthes then writes in “Myth Today”—​if one is not to flatten the world, to drain and disenchant art altogether. When the medium was still young, the cinematic fashioning, the massive multiplication and circulation of the beautiful face were themselves deemed miraculous: manifestly, the star was manufactured—​not “captured” directly from life. The precise manner of fabrication was part and parcel of the star’s properties and thus, like an archaic divinity, the star could be both collectively devoured (as luxury product) yet resurrected (by reproducibility). “Even in its beginnings, since the divinization of the



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actor was inevitable, the cinema could endow the fixity of faces with a tremendous, shattering character: the actor was god, and no harmless god.”33 It is, then, a forbidding hieratic image. Its assertive, confrontational artifice may seem to assault its beholders but, Barthes implies, it does not demean them—it makes no false promises, as it were. Even as it moves and acts in the unfolding spectacle of motion pictures, even as it is fragmented in the machinery of editing, framing, narration—​fi lm language in short—​and even as it is collectively devoured by an ecstatic public, the star face of the Valentino era is unaltered. An effect of stasis and permanence, even of distension—​as under the altered temporal order of ritual—​d istinguishes such an image from our day-​lit experience in mutability and contingency. It is an idea, and an ideal, of the face, re-​enchanted, that Barthes puts forth here, in a stunning eulogy on the face of Valentino (Figs. 2.9–2.12). This iconography of Valentino is magic; it abhors movement and strives for the concept. It is a pure face, a mask of hieratic beauty paraded along the film, an immobile, sacramental magnificence. The human face is utterly suffused with the unusual [insolite]; it is a astonishing just to see it be, one need not see it live, much less suffer, open itself, offer itself [souffrir, s’ouvrir, s’offrir—​Barthes’s prose is itself incantatory here]… . Valentino had all the powers of an ultra-​face. 34

The “ultra-​face” is a cult object: it embodies, externalizes, and channels the deepest tensions and archaic desires of a culture. The cinema’s imaginary powers resurrect here a potent myth of the human face, re-​fashioned as industrial product and available for mass consumption of that modernity which had sought to bury the face—​low or high, in the crowd, or in abstraction. Like the face that had once launched a thousand ships, the great cinematic face—​one that, in Barthes’s account, need do nothing in particular but just be—​spins into play the collective and conflicted forces of myth and history. Yet such face is not just a given, it does not sprout naturally in front of the camera. It is set apart as archetype: like the mythological forging of human shape by the gods, the distinct features of a civilization differentiate themselves here from nature to the extent that they are deliberately fashioned, consciously and artfully wrought in such a face. Just as the blunt fabrication of the face-​as-​mask in the Folies-​Bergère brought an “idea of the human face” as “Adamic myth to the dimension of an operating technique,” so here, the face epitomizes an idea of the human because it is made. Like a totemic figure it has the power to distill, relate, and address a multitude: it is socially efficacious, rousing, productive. Such is the mythological formation of the ultra-​face that Barthes identifies in the movie theater. Everything in this account of Valentino proclaims that here is a myth which Barthes embraces and cultivates. At this point he explicitly states that reflection on the cinematic iconography of the feminine face must be reserved for another occasion—​a nd indeed what we find in “The Face of Garbo” clearly corresponds to this earlier thought. His contemplation of the ultra-​face of the female star is only slightly modulated, and more brief, when compared with his willful absorption in the face of Valentino:

33  Barthes, “Visages,” 6. 34  Barthes, “Visages,” 7.

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  FIGURES 2.9–​2.12:  “It is a astonishing just to see it be”: Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (George Melford/​Famous Players-​L asky, 1921) –​frame enlargements.

Greta Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image as if in a philter, when the face constituted a sort of absolute state of the flesh which one could neither attain nor abandon. Some years earlier, Valentino’s face caused suicides; Garbo’s still participates in that same realm of amour courtois when the flesh develops certain mystical sentiments of perdition. It is without a doubt an admirable face-​as-​object. 35

In both these appreciations of Valentino and of Garbo, it is not, strictly, the cinematic close-​up in its spatial isolation and magnification that Barthes is addressing, nor even just these screen performers’ physical beauty that would account for the “ultra-​face.” The ideal facial image must exceed particularity: just as it stands out against the whirl of experience, so is it extracted from the flow of cinematic discourse. In the effort to formulate this ideality, Barthes deliberately pares down some common attributes of female glamour, identifying the face of Garbo and 35  Roland Barthes, “Le visage de Garbo,” Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 70. Translation in Barthes, “Garbo’s Face,” Mythologies, 73. All subsequent references to this vignette are from these editions. I do however often continue to refer in the text to the title of the Garbo vignette following Lavers’s earlier and most familiar translation as “The Face of Garbo.”



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FIGURES 2.13–​2.14:  Greta Garbo as figurehead in Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) –​frame enlargements.

Chaplin as iconographic correlatives. The ultra-​face is constituted, then, as an unspecified, nonparticular, transgendered, Platonic ideal of the face that precedes (as it were) individuation, experience, and the particulars of passing fashion and expression. Of course Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)—​t he one film cited by Barthes in this vignette—​famously narrativizes Garbo’s fluent turns from woman to cavalier and back again, a range that in any case informed her star persona. It is a variant of the subversive play that Miriam Hansen discussed in relation to Valentino, whose image afforded more flexible spaces of spectatorship—​particularly with regard to gender and sexuality—​t han public mores and morals of its time would openly admit to. 36 Barthes, for his part, invokes a more fundamental facial essence, or totality, that effaces difference in such a face. Its power derives, paradoxically, from its objecthood: the artifice of the “face-​as-​object” propels it to another, archaic order of images (Figs. 2.13–2.14). The star’s divine countenance is carried through the course of films, though movement and change—​a lways itself, unchanged but re-​enchanted, projecting across the distance of space and time, transfixing the spectator over again in its light. Despite its ideality it is, in part, its effect of recognizability—​t he uniqueness of the particular star persona—​t hat, unlike that of ordinary mortals in the crowd and unlike lesser screen performers, has the power to survive and prevail through so many situations, expressions, roles, and against the inevitable decline of life itself. Yet the iconic face of the star also exceeds the confines of identity: even as it is absolutely recognizable and unique, it is in a sense impersonal. Whatever human vitality and expressivity had nurtured it in this or that role, is finally deposited like a sediment—​recall Barthes’s description of the Dutch portraits—​to crystalize in mask-​l ike stasis and permanence. The hermetic glamour of Valentino and Garbo consists of just such facial artifice: surmounting contingency and change, it raises them as ritual figures. We recall (from Chapter One) how the grammar of “glamour” accrues its magical or occult connotations through the incantatory spell of repetition, self-​same across diverse contents, roles, narratives, and more potent than any particularities of features or changing expressions. Barthes implies that such power of the star face would bypass the individuating project of the humanist portrait and its attendant myths of bourgeois subjectivity, to achieve a more primal iconic modality of the face. De-​naturalized, traversing motion and stillness, fragment and whole, shedding roles, expressions and, in some 36 Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 245–​94.

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sense, its own abundantly familiar human features, the star face emerges in Barthes’s description like an impassive, cold, iridescent, ceremonial jewel: an iconic ritual object—​or mask. Valentino’s face is arcane, its inaccessible splendor is a “mask of hieratic beauty paraded along the film, an immobile, sacramental magnificence”; it is molded of an exquisite paste; but we know all too well that this cold gleaming of make-​up, this thin, dark line under the animal eye, this black mouth—​a ll these come from a mineral substance, a cruel statue which comes to life only to pierce. 37

Like Valentino’s, Garbo’s face bears the snowy density of a mask: it is not a painted face but a face in plaster, protected by the surface of its shadows and not by its lineaments … . Even in its extreme beauty, this face not drawn but instead sculptured in something smooth and friable, which is to say both perfect and ephemeral, matches somehow Chaplin’s flour-​white complexion, those vegetally dark eyes, his totemic visage. Now the temptation of the total mask (the mask of antiquity, for example) may imply less the theme of secrecy (as is the case with Italian half mask) than that of an archetype of the human face. 38

Sliding from painted image to the mask as sculpted object, Barthes’s struggle to define a certain in-​between dimensionality of Garbo’s mask-​face resonates with the surface-​depth duality of the moving image. Despite his inclination to speak of the cinematic image as if it were extractable from context and flow, what Barthes describes here is not the fixity and pastness of a still photograph but a presentness and corporeality that movement, even if only the most minimal movement of film, sustains. As in the striking description of Valentino, the cultic star face seems to acquire exquisite plasticity that joins the immobile and the ephemeral in the unique temporal inclination of its beauty. Barthes’s parsing of connotations, between Valentino’s hard, shimmering, precious jewel-​l ike mineral substance on the one hand, and Garbo’s “snowy density,” her brittle, chalky, comparatively low plaster substance on the other is, despite cultural gender-​logic, curious. While her complexion—​in Queen Christina as in other films—​ surely connotes nothing less than alabaster, Barthes sees in her something more vulnerable and ephemeral—​something that can dissolve or crumble. Temporality is curiously formalized in Garbo’s face. Not quite a natural, living body but a surface, whose smoothness transcends expressive lines and features; not quite a painted surface either but one cast or molded, somewhat like a relief, Garbo’s face is also a “total mask.” Carved, sculptured or cast, it is truly a graven image, impressed

37  Barthes, “Visages,” 7. Paolo Barlera pointed out to me that if we were to single out the one actor in our own time closest in disposition to Valentino, it would be Johnny Depp, whose made-​up face and seductive play of features are sustained even through his self-​parodying, particularly in his role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. 38  Barthes, “Garbo’s Face,” 73–​4. Garbo, whose career extended into a later period, exhibited more subtle use of make-​up than Valentino. Still, her extraordinary complexion, the carefully made-​up eyes and stylized brows—all meeting the cinematographic qualities of her close-​ups—still carry for Barthes a mask-​effect.



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in the facial surface. The extent to which the words impression and expression (shared of course with the French) connote plasticity, tactility, and physical manipulation is often forgotten in our routine psychological application of the terms. If “expression” could suggest the forcing of juice, as from a fruit, from the inside out, “impression” invokes an indenting of the surface from without, as by pressure from a stamp or mold, and is perhaps better aligned with the mask-​face that Barthes forges here. 39 Its connotations are varied. The mask is a physical barrier: it does not invite its beholder to peer into or behind its surface; it does not, in Barthes’s description, contain or conceal but supplants the living face. While one encounters in comedies and melodramas, high and low, on both stage and screen, the mask as prop in narratives of unmasking—of secrets to be revealed and origins exposed—Barthes is interested not in such dramatic turns but, rather, in the stability and permanence of the mask as facial model. Even in transforming herself from queen to cavalier to woman in Queen Christina, Garbo does not change. Her “total mask” is deeply grafted, persisting through changes of fortune, through plots and roles, through cinematic movement and time. In some ways it is an ideal and mythical extraction that is posited here. One now joins it with Barthes’s notion of the sedimental deposits of history interiorized in the Dutch portraits to form a solid ground—​a shared morphological identity. It qualifies the sort of mythological entity that is being set up here. The Garbo or Valentino mask might thereby be construed as an emblematic image: not the face in the street but, in some deeper sense, the face of their time.

EXCURSUS ON THE MASK Across cultures it is almost impossible to think about faces without invoking some function of the mask—​t heatrical, decorative, funerary, cultic. The types and uses of masks are so numerous, they constitute such a vast domain, on which so much has been said and done throughout the arts and disciplines, that one must limit one’s terms to retain the mask as a useful and vivid figure—​which we do in Barthes’s footsteps. But where does the face end and the mask begin? And where does the mask end and the portrait begin? Such questions, posited both formally and anthropologically, emerge from Barthes’s reflection on the differentiation and efficacy of cinematic face types vis-​à-​v is faces in the crowd—​i n contemporary, everyday, Parisian life. The frontality of the mask—​which it shares with ancient and imperial portraiture, as with the Byzantine icon—​is central in Barthes’s discussion. Frontality, bound up with the gaze, establishes the operative space in which the viewer must meet it: perspectival extension and interiority—​not only of the image but, in a sense, of the person—​a re negated in the mask. Frontality, stability and clarity of orientation endow it with a sense of presentness and, thereby, a magical embodiment and a performative agency that carries, as well, a sense of mystery, of the hidden. A yoking of the personal (as in, of the person) and the impersonal accounts, in part, for the mask’s social-​communal and religious charge. It is also in this joining of the personal and the impersonal, of subject and object, that it crystalizes, for Barthes, an idea of the human face. 39  The Biblical “graven image,” the target of the second commandment’s prohibition of idolatry, translates jointly pessel and massekha in the Hebrew text. In modern Hebrew these would mean statue and mask, respectively, but the distinction might have originally specified pessel for carved image (as from wood or stone) and the wrought, or cast molten metals for massekha. See The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2, under “Graven image.”

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A mask may cover the face, may replace the face, and may also be separated from it. When a face is itself frontally oriented, made-​up and ornamented, it becomes a sort of mask or painting. The modern portrait, Hans Belting argues, might itself be seen as “in essence a mask that has lost its dependence on the body and moved on to a different carrier medium.”40 Tracing some genealogies of these image paradigms, Belting further notes that the most ancient Neolithic masks were physically constructed over an actual skeletal base: the bones of the dead—​a nonymous remains that survived the organic processes of life and decay—​t hus recover a face and, with it, an identity, a name, and a history that can now extend in a new temporal order. The mask thus brings questions of time into the arena of the facial image. Belting’s anthropological model can inform the idea of altered temporalities in the cinematic image: between the living experience of time and the ritual time of masks—one thus posits time as somehow controlled and even fabricated, time that can repeat, can pause and open up to shifting perceptions, and time that can fold back upon itself and re-​i nform historical consciousness. One might consider it not only through forms of editing, cinematography, and narrative, but through the cinema’s facial forms of address. While anthropologies of the image must bring into account the human organization of time and its transformations across a range of practices and media, Belting addresses this issue only brief ly with regard to photography and, when considering the moving image, he shares Barthes’s tendency to either arrest or dissolve it into the domains of memory and imagination. But well beyond the temporal play of narrative discourse the cinema provides a wealth of devices by which to stage, analyze, and transfigure human time in ways that can be considered anthropologically. In this way, too, the cinema joins the modern with the archaic, mythopoetic imagination. The mask traverses, then, archaic and modern connotations: its fixity and reduction of natural and nuanced expression, its redoubling and displacement of surfaces disjoin expression from motivation, signifier from referent, outer from inner—​or it removes the inner altogether. In dissociating and redoubling, the mask unsettles individuation, recognition, and identification: under its power, one is both less and more than oneself, one is separated from oneself, or is no longer a self. A mediator of boundaries thick or thin, the mask is itself boundary between obverse worlds, visible and invisible, human and animal, the living and the dead. It sets the solid surface against change, against time. In its frontal, outward address, the mask can be seen as divine or monstrous. Like the Gorgon, its sheer frontal display is synonymous with its gaze, which assaults and petrifies the viewer—​t urning the viewer, too, into an image.41 Medusa’s horror figures a way in which the strong image—​t he ultra-​face—​has the

40  Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 24; see also 22–​5, 51–​6, 90–​4, 154–​7. Belting’s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), remains the best model for anthropological considerations of the image even for contemporary arts and media. 41  On the Gorgon, see Jean-​P ierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes” and “In the Mirror of Medusa” excerpted from Mortals and Immortals in “Frontality and Monstrosity,” trans. Thomas Curley and Froma I. Zeitlin, The Medusa Reader, eds. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003), 210–​31. I also learned from Artemis Willis’s research on the Medusa image in iconographies of the magic lantern.



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power to capture its viewer, and its embrace can be far from benevolent. Eliminating movement and change, halting the workaday experience of time—​or the naturalized time of cinematic illusion—​a mplifying the gaze, bracketing life itself, the mask’s “conceptual substance,” as Claude Lévi-​Strauss put it, is like that of myth: “not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what it chooses not to represent… . what it excludes.”42 Ultimately, the mask confronts its beholders with their own aspect-​a s-​i mage. Clearly, the mask need not resemble its wearer—​a nd the wearer is not routinely the agency being represented in the mask. Nor is the mask an ornament or simple appendage to the actor, like other props and pieces of costume. It is not an invitation to peer behind appearance and surface, for behind the mask the person disappears and the mask, in its ritual role, takes up its place and claims its own agency.43 This anthropological perspective informs our sense of an other power lurking in the facial image. The face itself can be perceived as a mask—​a feeling that hinges on a fine balance of agency and alienation. Even from within our secular modernity, and while we do not believe in ghosts or gods incarnate in it, any encounter with the mask jolts our habitual expectation of a blissfully unmediated face-​to-​f ace with others. In part this is bound up with an uncanny sense of doubling, of an alien self in the other, which threatens our own integrity and self-​identity. The mask is, then, not simply a representation, but more of a surrogate, a medium, a power. And even more than a Christological icon—that might be revered as a holy personage, might be expected to perform miracles, to weep or to bleed—the mask has a versatile relationship to the living, present body: it might seem to change, to assume various expressions, to be animated by the body that wears it. But it may also detach itself altogether from its wearer or bearer and claim a life and a power of its own. The mask can be read across a wide horizon of experiences and practices and all through the history of the facial image. A principal modernist touchstone in this history is its migration from the ethnographic museum to the art gallery—​a narrative that informs quite well Barthes’s approach to the image. Plagued by uncertainty in his work on Gertrude Stein’s facial features even after some ninety sittings, Picasso finally painted over the entire head and adopted an Iberian mask as model for this celebrated 1905–​0 6 portrait (Figs. 2.15–2.16). This choice turned on its head the implication of a natural, simple ratio between face and image, any fictions of integrity in the expressive registers of subjectivity and interiority in the portrait, and all questions of agency, motivation, and causality in the triangulation of artist, sitter, and painting. Picasso famously declared that, even if the portrait does not now seem to resemble Stein, she is sure, with time, to come to resemble it. This anecdote is intriguing also for its implication of temporality in the mask portrait: with its reversal of subject-​portrait hierarchy and causality, it is now the image that—​according

42  Claude Lévi-​Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 1982), 144. 43 My summary of some of the attributes and effects of the mask is informed by A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). See also Françoise Frontisi-​Ducroux, Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

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FIGURE 2.15:  Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s portrait, 1922, photograph by Man Ray. Vintage gelatin silver print from the Richard and Ellen Sandor Art Foundation.

FIGURE 2.16:  Iberian sculpture of a female head from El Santuario del Cerro de los Santos (200 ad). Image courtesy of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Spain.

to Picasso—​g ives rise to the person. Whence the addendum in which Picasso, happening some years later to find Stein’s hair trimmed short, sternly reprimanded her: “And my portrait?” The story of Stein destined to eventually, magically, resemble or to become her portrait—​e ven as its focal point, her face, had been replaced by a mask, and since the mask must be obeyed—​ref lects Picasso’s projection of a future time held in suspense within the



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portrait. Within that time, which is anything but natural, the person is ultimately realized as image.44 Dwelling on Picasso’s “battle with likeness,” Yve-​ A lain Bois follows Daniel-​ Henry Kahnweiler’s lesson to read Picasso’s subsequent passage from the Iberian mask to the revelation of the Grebo mask on the eve of cubism in 1912 (Fig. 2.17).45 He translates to semiotic terms Kahnweiler’s early insights on the implications of this move from one working model to another. Bois sees in the Grebo mask a far more radical displacement of morphological and mimetic principles by a system of arbitrary signs. Kahnweiler had in fact identified Picasso’s first application of the Grebo mask not in a facial image but in the Guitare (Fig. 2.18). This still-​life relief conveys immediately the ways in which parts of the work are only legible in relation to each other, when they are put into circulation within a signifying structure, like a language-​system based on semiotic principles of arbitrariness, difference, combination, and function. If the eyes in the Grebo mask are represented by two cylinders jutting forward, likewise the hollow of Picasso’s guitar is marked by a projecting lead cylinder. Namely, even though these jutting forms do not in themselves resemble eyes in the former, or a guitar hole in the latter, they function and are legible as eyes, and as guitar hole, within the structure. From this also follows that facial features and inanimate objects, anthropomorphic and aniconic forms can become interchangeable. Mimesis is bracketed, as is the motivating tie between model and representation—​the suggestion of the person’s corporeal imprint in the image—​which is nevertheless figural. Bois’s reading of the conceptual genealogy of masks suppresses Kahnweiler’s phenomenological emphasis and attempts to resolve in a semiotic formula the “problem of the person” in modern art. Bois, who was Barthes’s student, is generally sensitive to the negotiation of phenomenological and semiotic coordinates, and to the back and forth between aesthetic and more broadly anthropological domains, but he seems wary here.46 Since the reversal of volumes in this example renders sculpture vulnerable to being “swallowed up in the space of real objects”—​ also the space of the viewer—​Bois channels Picasso’s modernist breakthrough away from such snares and diverts it toward a semiotic structuring of (arbitrary) parts. Whatever anxiety is produced by sculptural volumes that would invade and unsettle actual corporeal space is sublimated in Bois’s reading by this translation to signs.47 For instance, rather than a mimetic 44 Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas narrates this and related anecdotes, historical and mythical, see Selected Writings of Gertude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946), 11, 38–​9, 48. A variety of critics have returned to this anecdote, eg. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I, 1881–​1906 (New York: Random House, 1991), 403, 455–​6; Pierre Daix, “Portraiture in Picasso’s Primitivism and Cubism,” Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 259–​68. 45  Yve-​A lain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” Representations 18 (Spring, 1987), pp. 33–​68. Kahnweiler was Picasso’s dealer, critic, and sitter for the great cubist portrait now at the Art Institute of Chicago. In “Masks and puppets: Metamorphosis and depersonalization in European avant-​garde art criticism, 1915–​1939,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago; retrieved November 16, 2010 from Proquest UMI, Joyce Cheng analyzes the experience of depersonalization as the main preoccupation of avant-​garde art and criticism in interwar Europe, and its turn to ethnographies of childhood on the one hand, and to African, Melanesian and Japanese art on the other by way of working through this process. 46  I learned of Bois’s apprenticeship with Barthes from Bois’s own former student, Christine Mehring. 47  See Bois 40 and 54. Particularly in her introduction and first chapter of The Parisian Avant-​Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–​1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), Jennifer Wild associates aspects of Picasso’s modernist frontality with a cinematic mode of address, exploring ways in which the theatrical use of rear projection underscores the confrontational orientation of film toward the space of the spectator.

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FIGURE 2.17:  Grebo mask from Ivory Coast or Liberia, bought by Picasso in 1912. Wood, paint, vegetable fibers. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Musée Picasso, Paris. Licensed by RMN-​Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo by Beatrice Hatala.

FIGURE 2.18:  Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar (variant state). Paris, October 1912. Cardboard, string, and wire. © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/​Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/​Art Resource, NY.

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rendering of an eye for an eye (as it were), this unique organ—​at once vulnerable and forbidding, and which has for centuries challenged its own rendering in art—​seems to drown in the guitar hole that replaces it as a cavity, a negative form. But does there not persist even here, in the emasculated semiotic construct subjugated to a system of differences, the uncanny bottomless gaze of the mask, spinning our own gaze in its vortex? Our gaze drowns in the ocular cavities, as of a gouged-​out eye, to meet the horror of mutilation—​but it is also reversed. Even as it is not, obviously, the mask itself that sees, one senses its gaze: uncanny mask eyes, like the black hollows of pupils, follow us everywhere—​into our nightmares. The reversibility of the gaze that masks put into play is bound up with their transformative agency, of which Lévi-​Strauss speaks. The mask confounds the orientation of hollows and volumes, flipping concave and convex, inside and out. This bursting reversal of indented surfaces activates the space in front of (or, in the face of) the mask, as if its gaze, its address to the beholder, is itself embodied in physical impact. In its relief ​d imensionality—​not quite the optical-​pictorial image surface, nor quite an autonomous body—​t he Grebo mask, too, involves a reversal of volumes. Lévi-​Strauss’s juxtaposition of mask types of the Pacific northwest compels us to wonder which is the mask that sees, which one is blind and which is blinding—for these outward protrusions extend the mask’s gaze, and its eyes invade our space (Figs. 2.19–2.20). Facial space is turned inside out here, so that the mask can be said to assault its beholder—​to graft itself onto our space, and even onto our person. Resurrected from archaic worlds, prohibiting mimesis and identification, interiority both physical and metaphysical might be destroyed, but the power of masks is not altogether sublimated in a system of differences where anything can stand for anything else. A semiotic horizon persists as a solid measure and as constant reminder but it, too, is a threat: the utter leveling of the world in featureless disenchantment. Neither Picasso’s archaic qua modernist mask nor the hieratic mask of the movie star is reassuring. Their gaze at once pierces and lures, draws us in, breaking through the surfaces of the everyday, assaulting the viewer and destabilizing the subject. There is terror in this.48 It is often said that the particular category of the death mask, t​ hat definitive final mold of the face that has lived out its life, a​ nd its complementary figure, the death’s head, the skeleton that remains after all else has disintegrated, hover in every portrait. They are paradigms that inform different media—​painting, relief, sculpture, photography—​a nd underlie even secular facial representation, invoking what are at once the most concretely material, or haptic, and the magical foundations of the image.49 They sometimes appear as explicit allegorical figures—​t he grinning skull, the memento mori lurking in the bourgeois portrait—​to remind us that art is longer than life, and to implicate the survival of some aspect or effigy of the person in the portrait, 48  The dramatic struggle between mask and person can be read through such diverse films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), Hiroshi Tashigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980), and others. My way of working through the phenomenological operation of masks may not be irrelevant to such narratives, sometimes in the horror genre proper, where mask or mask-​l ike entites graft themselves upon and dominate the subject. 49  In “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (Autumn 1995): 45–73, Antonia Lant traces the relation between optical and haptical dimensions of experience in early cinema, invoking the role of Egyptian art in this distinction as it was formulated by art historians in that period, and also relating to it Picasso and Braque’s “radical reordering of artistic planes and spaces in 1908” (51). Laura U. Marks engages with these issues in the context of post-​colonial cinema and Deleuzian philosophy in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

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FIGURE 2.19:  Cowichan Swaihwé mask with protrusions for eyes and tongue, discussed by Claude Lévi-​Strauss in The Way of the Masks. Image from Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian (1907–1930; 2003). Image Courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.

past the sitter’s own moment in time (Figs. 2.21–2.22). Both Barthes and Bazin, as well as Eisenstein, would see this archaic anthropological function (and trope) survive in the photographic media. 50 Not just by way of likeness, then, but like a mold captured by light off of the optical surface, the death mask can be said to insinuate itself into even the most beautiful, sensitive, filmic face of the star. 50  Antonio Somaini has recently demonstrated this surprising affinity between Bazin and Eisenstein in a paper presented in my panel on Anthropologies of the Moving Image at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Montreal (March, 2015). Somaini drew on Sergei Eisenstein’s 1946–​4 8 Notes for a General History of Cinema, the English translation of which is edited by Naum Kleiman and Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).



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FIGURE 2.20:  Kwakiutl Dzonokwa mask with hinged eyes and jaw, discussed by Claude Lévi-​Strauss in The Way of the Masks. Photographed by Derek Tan. Courtesy UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada.

It is in this juncture of contact and the projection of temporality that Georges Didi-​ Huberman also identified the death mask as paradigmatic to his category of the contact image that precedes representation, and carries evidentiary, legal, and symbolic authority. As “image matrix,” it is suppressed by the history of art—​t he discursive edifice erected upon this foundation—​a history that sublimates the physical contact of identity’s imprint, privileging the relatively sublimated category of resemblance, optical perspective, and the discursive operations of iconography and representation. The facial imprint of the past in the present, and the imprint of the present as fixed and extending into the future, involve, then, both a suspension and a layering of temporalities in death masks and life masks alike. Extending beyond the singular instance of presence and contact, the attributes of the death mask as a paradigmatic facial image thus invades other masks, whether unique or mass-​produced—​t he distinction is almost elided. 51 51  See Georges Didi-​Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Minuit, 2000), especially 59–​8 3; see also his exhibition catalog L’Empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 64, and its elaboration in La Ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme, et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008).

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FIGURE 2.21:  Franz Hals, Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (1610–​1614). Image courtesy of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, UK.

FIGURE 2.22:  Andy Warhol, Self-​ Portrait with Skull (1977) © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./​Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS).

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One recognizes here the archaic precedent to photographic temporality that Barthes eventually defines as “this has been.” Photographic portraiture especially underscores the existential conclusion of this precept: “this will die.” But Didi-​Huberman’s own formulation seems even more apt for the experience of a continued present in motion pictures: “still alive and already dead.” In its archaic and depersonalizing effects, the mask bypasses realist and expressive fallacies. It can be construed as one way to retain the facial image in modernism, and particularly in those media—​the performing arts, photography, and in the cinema—​so bound up with the human figure. Discussing Kuleshov’s intervention in the history of montage, Mikhail Yampolsky thus differentiates between “mask face” and “machine face.”52 Since the face is the most complex but least mechanical and least controlled visible part of the body, one way to subjugate it in avant-​g arde practice would be in accordance with the laws of the mechanized body: the training of nerves and muscles toward a willful command of the parts. Deliberately severed from psychological motivation, the face—​i ncluding the eyes—​c an then be deployed in conformity with mechanical-​c orporeal standards, like the precise movements of a gymnast, or of the movie camera. Yampolsky also cites the plaster-​c ast mask face as cinematographic model for theoreticians as different as Louis Delluc and Valentin Turkin, and lending itself to actors as distinct as Chaplin and Conrad Veidt, among others. The mask-​l ike joining of an expressionless face with either the rest of the body—​a s in Chaplin or Keaton’s practice—​or via reverse or counter shots so that it is related by eyeline matches to other objects within the implied contiguity of space, lends itself to cinematic structuring in line with modernist-​semiotic systems, which Kuleshov’s experiments demonstrated in broad strokes. The trajectory of Chaplin’s long career covers this range and can be charted according to the seismographic register of his eyes: from the “totemic visage” in Chaplin’s deliberate effacing of facial nuance that went hand in hand with the predominance of long shots, as in the incomparable One A.M. (1917), all the way to the close-​up apotheosis of subjectivity that his eyes achieve in the climactic moment of recognition by the f lower-​g irl in City Lights (1931). The mask, ubiquitous in the first avant-​gardes, was thus already appropriated across a wide range of film practices when Sergei Eisenstein adopted it first for his theater of attractions and then as model for montage. The mask partakes in his displacement of the face by strategies of foregrounding and intensification (discussed in Chapter One) and is subsumed in his varied and ever-​expanding conception of montage. Exceeding the limited application of the Kuleshovian “neutral” face that gains its expression through editing, Eisenstein grasps the mask as a dynamic compositional and expressive principle across the arts, and in any strong image, still or moving (Figs. 2.23–2.24). He might have recognized his affinities with Picasso at least on this front. Eisenstein’s inventive, evolving use of the mask throughout his career richly exploits the range—​a nd the tensions—​between semiotic/​montage conceptions on the one hand and, on the other, a voracious engagement with the corporeal, ecstatic, quasi-​r itualistic potency of the cinematic image.

52  Mikhail Yampolsky, “Mask Face and Machine Face” in TDR 38, no. 3 (1994): 60–​74; DOI: 10.2307/1146380, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146380, accessed July 11, 2016.

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FIGURE 2.23:  The cinematic device—​superimposition—​as mask: Strike (S. M. Eisenstein, 1924) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 2.24:  Make-​up, lighting, and gesture as mask: Ivan the Terrible, part 2 (S. M. Eisenstein, banned 1946; premiered 1958) –​frame enlargement.

BARTHES’S VISION OF the

classical star face invokes a mythical temporality that bypasses both the contingency of the detail in its infinite nuances, and modern, mechanical time. It transfigures the illusion of movement and extends visuality as an effect of distance—​ no matter how close-​up a face might be—​luring the look and returning the gaze: an auratic projection of sorts. Looking back at film history, he re-​mythologize the star face at the peak



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of its classical glamour; his very description seems to caress, wrap, and deliver it as mask. It is to a retrospective vision of faces past, swiftly receding in a mutating cinema history, that Barthes grants such poetic-​l icense-​to-​myth—​t he exception to the rule of the Mythologies—​ in these writings. The category of the mask allows him to conjugate a sensory appreciation of the movie star, the cultic powers of the ultra-​face, the historical circumstances of the technological image, and his own, budding semiotician’s, modernist consciousness. Even as the mask can be deployed as semiotic instrument to dissociate inner and outer, and to lay bare the play of signifiers, its daemonic address—​u nderscored by Barthes—​interferes with the critical activity. But he allows for such interference to complicate his inquiry and open it up in suprising ways. Valentino’s ultra-​face shimmers, radiates, “comes to life only to pierce” its stunned beholder. We now cannot but read such language in light of Barthes’s later, evolved thought on photography’s power to trigger an embodied subjectivity, and to de-​ stabilize it: de-​naturalizing temporality in the instant; opening the present onto the past, and projecting this past’s future, only to glimpse the imminent death’s head which haunts every photograph. This is the juncture where the punctum of the detail is overtaken by the consciousness of time-​ as-​punctum: surpassing questions of form and iconography, swerving from the quotidian flow of experience, eluding the rules and habits of reading, it is where Barthes intimates a sense of subjectivity pierced face-to-face with a strong image. 53 One sees plainly here just how early in his career Barthes recognized the precarious power of images: their disarming return of the gaze, their intimation of agency that addresses itself to the field of the viewer. Indeed, the critical role of portrait photography in Camera Lucida—especially in the sub-genre of the family album—​can be seen to build on these earlier writings on the facial image. “Visages et figures” suggests that Barthes conceived of such field, early on, in the movie theater. 54 Valentino’s face is molded of an “exquisite paste”; its cold “mineral substance,” the “black mouth” and “dark line” of the eye are of a piece with the film’s stylistic and material substrate—​ not only the ornate lighting and high-​contrast make-​up, but also the effects of orthochromatic film stock of the 1910s and 1920s. Physiognomy and cinematography join in forging the entity that Barthes is describing: it is like a Mesopotamian or Egyptian deity, carved idol or totem, possessing at once a fixed filmic body and an agile, animal-​l ike motive power—​a nthropomorphic but not quite human. 55 Such range of connotations was in fact also associated with Garbo, as in the celebrated publicity image of her face on the sphinx (Fig. 2.25). Its effect of layering

53  Camera Lucida, 94–​7. In fact, Barthes opposes the erratic punctum of the detail with the mask of photographic portraiture, more deeply informed by time-as-punctum, and ​a close relative of the hieratic faces of classical cinema. 54  A clear trajectory links Barthes’s discussion of the power of images in “Visages et figures” with such texts as “Shock Photo” (1957) in Mythologies, 116–18; the idea of “pure denotation” in “The Photographic Message” (1961) and the “obtuse,” or “Third Meaning” (1968) both in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3–​2 0, 41–​62; Camera Lucida (1979); “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975). See Elena Oxman’s useful discussion of this trajectory in “Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual,” SubStance 39, no. 2, issue 122 (2010): 71–​9 0. 55  On Barthes’s exploration of ways in which residues of the sacred persist in everyday life even in the age of mass culture see Naomi Schor’s reading of the Mythologies as a refutation of Hegel in her “Desublimation: Roland Barthes’s Aesthetics,” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, ed. Knight, 219–​35.

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FIGURE 2.25:  “The Swedish Sphinx,” Garbo publicity photo by Clarence Sinclair Bull (1931). Clarence Sinclair Bull/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images.

and spatial emergence approaches the haptic visuality of mask-​like relief, which Antonia Lant has described so well: Surely the urge to superimpose Greta Garbo’s face on a sphinx lay in its power to express so succinctly the combined impacts of her close-​up, overwhelming in its scale, silence, and enigmatic sensibility. But the act of superimposition also produced a kind of bas-​relief. The accurate registration of the photomontage, combined with the retention of the sphinx’s characteristic nemes silhouette, suggested that Garbo’s head did not replace the sphinx but rather covered it in a new, film-​star skin, one layer over the other. 56

56  Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” 60–​1.



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The powdery whiteness or plaster-​t hickness of the make-​up, the smoothness effected by lens diffusion, the eyes and mouth enhanced by make-​up whose blackness responds to an optical-​fi lmic quality—​a ll these do not simply embellish the face itself but, in meeting the image surface, they become homologous with the apparatus. The face meets the cinematographic or photographic support and coalesces with it, yielding the strange filmic mask set against the realistic inclination of the medium. The face almost seems to emerge, in Barthes’s description, as a transmorphed, surrogate apparatus. Optical, cinematographic, and more broadly stylistic traits that Barthes notices in earlier-​classical films thus impart a material solidity to the image. As its realist, illusionistic, values recede, the image asserts its own body, its own face, traversing the many different faces delivered to us from that earlier era. Compounding the sedimentation of the culture in the facial image is, then, this superadded stylistic-​c inematographic deposit of the historicity of the apparatus itself. This may be why in so many star portraits, photographic or filmic, Chaplin and Keaton, Garbo and Dietrich—or Barthes’s more original association of Garbo and Chaplin—among others, seem molded by the same substance (stylistic/​cosmetic and optical) and wrapped by the same shroud of time. Already in 1932 a Vanity Fair item titled “Then Came Garbo” associated forms of cinematic “metamorphosis” with a pervasive Garbo-​ effect: “Anthropologists of the future, when bending their beards over cinema archives, are going to unearth a perplexing phenomenon… . About 1931–​32, they suddenly all began to look alike” (Fig. 2.26). 57 Removed from the particular expressive and narrative circumstances of types, roles, genres and genders—​parameters that would elicit juxtaposition on other levels—​t he star’s individuation is effaced and a shared terrain, like the interiorized sedimental mask of Dutch portraiture, prevails. Although he does not offer much formal description as such—​B arthes rarely does in his numerous writings on the image, proceeding mostly by phenomenological exploration and elaborating connotations—​h is discussion exalts a sense of suspension and temporal distension that underscores the “total mask” of Valentino and Garbo. The ultra-​f ace departs from illusionistic and narrative time, and approaches a mythical—​c yclical, ritualistic, phantasmic—​t emporality. 58 It is, as well, the temporality of desire, of yearning: the memory of ghostly faces that, excavated from earlier strata of film history, resisted somehow the individuation of features, the tracing and shifting of expression, the effects of movement, the wonders of cinematographic contingency—​the wealth of detail and nuance that observers so marveled at since the beginning of motion pictures and the rise of the close-​up. Another historical predicament is at work here, for the star era that Barthes privileges is brief, and its very pastness—​or datedness—​inf lects Barthes’s appreciation. One

57  No author indicated, “Then Came Garbo,” Vanity Fair (November 1932). 58  Throughout her book, Death 24x a Second, especially pp. 22–​3 and 163, and in reference to Barthes’s work on photography in Camera Lucida, Mulvey refines the idea of a cinephiliac aesthetic of delay and the “stilling” of time, grasping the cinematic close-​up as not only a spatial but temporal articulation. She parses different ways in which such perception can be propelled by the film itself, by the spectator or critic, or can “be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology.” We now see Barthes intimating such ideas twenty-​five years earlier, and in direct reference to the cinema.

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Image courtesy Mount Mercy University, Cedar Rapids, IA.

FIGURE 2.26:  “Then Came Garbo,” Vanity Fair (November, 1932).

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considers here (without explaining away his observations), the actual conditions under which Barthes must have been seeing these early-​c lassical movies: surely they are revivals of Garbo, Valentino, or Chaplin films at the Cinématheque or Parisian second-​r un theaters and movie clubs. Most likely they involved old prints—some on 16​m m film, or “dupes” that polarized black and white to effect that shimmery, somewhat ghostly look, that perhaps inspires his description—while many of the restored prints as well as superior digital versions available to us today would exhibit a more nuanced and, as some viewers might prefer, more realistic gray scale. 59 The decay of prints—​l ike the patina on old master paintings and monuments—​h as had a sublimating, indeed mythifying, role in film history alongside other distancing devices. Diffused lighting, shallow-​focus lenses that isolate the figure against the ground, soft filters and gauzes that inform the stylistic conventions of medium and close shots in classical cinema, themselves, seem palpably ornate, even quaint, to us. The artifice of often-​outdated devices in these films is as salient as are earlier acting styles, mien and mannerism, not to mention costumes, hairstyles, make-​up and other elements of fashion. Technologies of glamour are still employed, of course, in the 1950s, and to our time, but to Barthes and his contemporaries these must have seemed more “natural” or even transparent. “Visages et figures” thus approaches the star’s face as anthropological object-​image, with the mask as its privileged artifact: this is not an image contemplated in tranquility, but one whose power can only be appreciated from within its orbit, in the movie theater. Barthes’s text works to preserve, not to undo it, and even at some risk: as resplendent image to adore, to re-​ enchant, to poeticize. Its “hieroglyphic” and “theomorphic” attributes—​these are Barthes’s adjectives—​would bridge the gap between the technological mass art and an archaic-​auratic order, between the hieratic distance of the star’s mask-​face, and its piercing, daemonic agency.60 Might its archaic charge—​conjured as mythological entity, mediated as entertainment or art—​ assuage the modern anxiety of objectification by the camera, by mass production and circulation? The bridging of archaic and modern, histories apart, in the cinematic face would bypass, in Barthes’s account, bourgeois, romantic, and contemporary psychological myths of subjectivity. The threat of mechanization, commodification and emptying-​out is countered by this ritual loss and recovery, the masking play of personal and impersonal of the ultra-​face on film, eliciting its spectator’s own oscillation of alienation and absorption, individual and communal in the movie theater.

59  On these effects in old film prints see Kristin Thompson’s chapter, “Major Technological Changes of the 1920s” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1985), 281–​93. How prints are restored and digital transfers produced, sometimes to satisfy contemporary tastes, is itself a contested area analogous in some respects to debates on restoration of earlier art-​h istorical monuments and art objects. 60  Cf. William Pietz’s work on the fetish as product of the meeting of radically different cultures in the age of Portuguese colonization of West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The power of the fetish coalesces, precisely, in the space of encounter between cultures—​a rchaic and modern—​at a time when technologies of enchantment, comprising forms of circulation and reception, are undergoing profound change. Such analysis of the cult object in the context of a transitional phase may well apply to shifts in the media of communication and representation, permeating all aspects of modern life. See “The Problem of the Fetish,” Part 1, Res 9 (1985): 5–​17.

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FROM CULT TO CHARM: FUNNY FACE Yet one must contend with history: while Valentino’s career was short and heroic, suspended at its peak, Garbo’s was extended a bit further and was differently inclined. Having first granted her such ideal plenitude, Barthes goes on to redefine Garbo as, in fact, a transitional figure whose career “reconciles two iconographic ages”: archaic divinity and modern experience, a quasi-​sacral mythological system and secularized individuation. Surely in her last and wonderfully comedic roles in Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) and in Two-​Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941) such iconographic transition is dramatized quite explicitly—​though Barthes does not cite them directly. Her mask powers are eclipsed here by the particularity and multiplicity of the modern, historical face, in that “fragile moment when cinema is about to extract an existential beauty from an essential beauty, when the archetype will be inflected toward the fascination of perishable figures, when the clarity of carnal essences will give way to a lyric expression of Woman.”61 A similar cultural process is laid out far more mercilessly in “Visages et figures,” with respect to French male stars—​Henry Garat, Jean Murat, Charles Boyer—​i n the lead in a 1933 contest for the “Prince Charming of French cinema.” Theirs are “regular, friendly faces, neither intellectual nor sensitive but conveying, through some easy-​to-​use nuances… the common concern of an accessible, national, democratic figure… . In one fell swoop the human face is secularized, and at the lowest possible level.”62 Valentino’s “theomorphic” face thus gives way to swift commodification in Barthes’s rise-​a nd-​fall narrative, where the star face is increasingly tamed, socialized, domesticated for public consumption. These are no longer the cultic “face-​as-​objects” of an earlier classical peak, but secular, particular, localized, partaking in the everyday social scene of 1930s France. Barthes’s periodizing locates the beginning of yet another phase in 1946. While he does not cite explicitly at this point the broader historical setting, we shall see how, at the essay’s close, this context does show between the seams. 63 For now, he defines the post-war era’s facial iconography as governed by new myths of interiority, which sustain the “perfectly commercial” visages-​beauté of a “new zoological class.” The faces of Gérard Philipe and Jean-​L ouis Barrault epitomize this “intellectual plasticity” [une plastique d’intellectualité], as physical virtue and as an expressive repertoire of “all the signs of thought.”64 While Barrault’s famous, painted mime-​f ace might first invoke for movie goers an order of masks, one also conjectures that it is precisely against his Pierrot mask, quickly declining into commercial kitsch, that Barrault’s exceedingly sensitive, responsive, tormented, features are, in fact, so memorably drawn in Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) (Fig. 2.27). Indeed, Barthes’s 61  Barthes, “Garbo’s Face,” 74. 62  Barthes, “Visages,” 7–​8 . 63  Barthes’s references to historical contexts in the Mythologies generally are confined to current events, with allusions to French colonialism and the revival of the nationalist and populist right in that era. Also in his essays on photography—​where the idea of traumatic denotation recurs—​t here is little mention of what was after all a very recent past: the occupation, collaboration, deportation, the violence and atrocities of the World War, yet these must have hovered on his horizon. More direct references surface in Barthes’s literary criticism, specifically his essay on Jean Cayrol, although one would have hoped to know his response to Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), for one. 64  Barthes, “Visages,” 8. See, again, Figs. 2.7–2.8, above.



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FIGURE 2.27:  Jean-​Louis Barrault, expressive right through his Pierrot mask in Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) –​frame enlargement.

contemporary theater reviews attack Barrault repeatedly as an actor who flatters the bourgeoisie under the faux garb of an avant-​garde. 65 Barthes loathes Barrault’s self-​posturing as “the first intelligent actor.” One surmises that a similar aversion to Marcel Carné’s great melodrama on the life of actors—​its nostalgic mode soon absorbed and inflated in the cinéma de papá—​i nforms Barthes’s rejection. Such “air of intellectuality” is bound up with an existential and sentimental concept of youth that—​Barthes reflects—​might have been, previously, an implicit condition of the face but not its major attribute. He describes it as the exact opposite of Valentino’s mineral mask-face, and sees it proliferate on screen and in the street, claiming to offer itself “from within,” as it were. The face is certainly no longer the mineral body of yore, marvelously fallen from the actors’ planet, a sort of impenetrable object, inaccessible and condemned to its trajectory of pure spectacle; it now becomes the open site of possible relations, the inception of a dialectic of sentiments that can finally exceed the mythical solitude of the sexes.66

The fall from the classical stars’ ultra-​face to a low-mythological order of accessible interiority coincides, in this account, with cinema’s representation of the historical emancipation of women. Modernized, secularized, particularized, the starlet—​d istinct from the Diva, or the Divine—​is no longer a forbidding, hieratic image. The woman now emerges from her “pre-​h istory” and is reborn as modern sociological subject. The perceptible signs of experience and of age “de-​conceptualize” her earlier mythical stature: no longer pure “Idea,” but accorded both the “privileges and the obligations, a mélange of freedom and fate proper to a truly human society.”67 “Visages et figures” does not elaborate on this new feminine existential iconography, but one

65  On Barrault, see especially Roland Barthes, “L’Arlésienne du catholicisme” (1953), “La vaccine de l’avant-​garde” and “Dialogue à propos de J.-​L . Barrault” (1955), Œuvre complètes, vol. I. 66  Barthes, “Visages,” 9. 67  Barthes, “Visages,” 10.

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immediately recognizes its correlative in the Garbo vignette: the emphatically contemporary starlet, gamine, fashion and media celebrity, Audrey Hepburn. The terms amassed in Barthes’s juxtaposition of Garbo—​herself mutated from “mythical” to “lyrical”—​a nd Hepburn are polarized and grandiose: Platonic essence versus existential charm, divine and absolute versus individuated and complex, hermetic unity and totality versus multiplicity and contingency. “As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of a conceptual order, Audrey Hepburn’s of a substantial order.” In this quasi-​Saussurian distinction “substance” would be the signifier’s material base subordinated to the differential values of the semiotic system. These values give rise to signs and concepts, affording legibility. Yet Garbo’s order of the “concept” sustains, for Barthes, a primal essence or archetype, pre-​individualized, and preceding the differentiations of language as of gender. “The face of Garbo is Idea, that of Hepburn is Event.” My own translation of this concluding sentence should make clear what is, I feel, the drift of Barthes’s original, “Le visage de Garbo est Idée, celui de Hepburn est Evénement,” while both published English translations, Lavers’s and Howard’s, employ the indefinite article—​which may be more correct English but somewhat diffuses the stateliness of Barthes’s formulation, also underscored by the capitalization of the terms.68 “Idea” here should precede and be altogether independent of any sequence of circumstances and “events,” any inference or causal chain, narrative or historical. “Idea” is indeed mythical, while “Event” is historical: the myth of Garbo is promoted over and against history in this vignette. But is it not also the case that in 1953 Garbo was history? Bound up with absence and loss, aura envelops the past in ways that might have well been precluded when that past was present. From within such a retrospective view, from a condition of negation, and from a distance, Benjamin defined the auratic cult object and its daemonic capacity to return the gaze.69 Following Miriam Hansen’s philological gloss of the concept we have concurred, in the Preface and Chapter One, that such exchange of the gaze that would mingle subject and object might be recovered even in the technological image. But even as this affords the cinema a redemptive potentiality, the modern cult of the movie star is more roughly wrapped in a simulated aura, with “the putrid magic of its own commodity character.” But what differentiation could one make, in principle, between the effect of an authentic and a simulated cult value—​who is to judge and by what measure? Can such value accrue, and alter—​w ith pastness, with a patina of time? Even as no formula can be fixed, no “recipe” distributed for an aura—​a ll promotional, exploitative powers of the industry being even—​something about the reflexive structuring of experience and its temporal constitution might be intimately bound up with auratic potentiality. No particular cinematic device or form can guarantee it, but time itself magnetizes its objects. Chapter Four of this book is focused on some ways in which deliberate attention to a cinematic face, suspended in time, might release it from the hold of the most industrial, commercial, 68  Barthes, “Le visage de Garbo,” 71 and “Garbo’s Face,” 75. On “concept” versus “substance,” my discussion refers to Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Chartles Bally et. al., trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-​H ill/​The Philosophical Library, 1966), especially pp. 111–​9. Louis Hjelmslev, one of Barthes’s favorite semiotician, acknowledged even more fully the role of substance in signification. 69  It is, as Benjamin formulates it, that “strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” See his “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 518.



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instrumental applications of the apparatus. Caught in that “strange weave of space and time,” the singular human face, a unique object par excellence—especially when contemplated at length by the movie camera, which endows it with the capacity to return the gaze—might recover some auratic remnants. It is not unlikely that Barthes had read, by this time, Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay in its original 1936 French publication (translated by Pierre Klossowski), for in the Garbo vignette he seems to be transposing Benjamin’s paradigmatic juxtaposition of pre-​modern aura and its post-​sacral simulation one step forward in time, to allow for distinctions from within an accelerated late-​modern vantage point, struggling to come to terms with mass culture now that cinema itself has aged in tandem with modernity. Namely, what is now being considered is no longer the broadly defined (Renaissance and after) technological image against an authentic cult object of an archaic, sacred order but, rather, the present state of the culture vis-​à-​v is an earlier moment (one step back, as it were) of the technology. As Rosalind Krauss suggests, “Benjamin’s contemplation of photography was also cast in the mold of his retrospective attitude, which is to say his sense that, as a fossil of its birth, the outmoded stage of a given technological form might betray the redemptive obverse of that technology itself.”70 Benjamin himself, as we have seen in the Preface, had intimated such transposition when discerning in early photographic portraits—​particularly in those outdated processes necessitating extended poses and long exposure—​a beckoning of the aura. Similarly, a retrospective contemplation of an earlier facial era recalibrates the scale of cult values in Barthes’s cinematic history of the face. He cannot, however, accommodate the contemporary facial repertoire of the post-​classical stars and perceive its own mythopoetic potential. Nor, even as he is thinking about the cinema, can he identify a temporality of the facial image independent of retrospective conditions: only an earlier moment in the image technology, only the pastness of an image, can invest the face with the cultic value worthy of his attention. One does, nevertheless, historicize, and must read Barthes’s celebrated aphorism, juxtaposing Idea and Event, in the context of post-​war commodity culture and the post-​classical circumstances of film history with which he is confronted: the intensified consumer and media culture of the 1950s, when the studio system is shaken, when color, changing screen dimensions and situations of spectatorship are at work and play in the fields of cinema, or close by—​on television. Whether intended or not, Barthes’s notion of “Event” signals the dynamic temporality of quickly shifting glossy surfaces of media events that overtake cinema—​which has itself gone past its prime. Reflective as mirror, bouncing every look, committing to none, commodity is writ large and read fast in the media event. Its preferred medium in the 1950s must be the tabloid snapshot—​a relative of the advertising image, and addressed in the Mythologies—​t hat captures and hurtles celebrities into, precisely, “events”: e​ xerted and exhausted in the instant, 70  While Benjamin’s essay was certainly not, in the 1950s, the ubiquitous reference that it is today, it is not unlikely—​a s Miriam Hansen pointed out to me—​t hat Barthes would have known its original 1936 French publication: ​a n only slightly abridged translation of the second version now considered as Benjamin’s ur-​text. See Miriam Hansen, “Room for Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Michael W. Jennings et al., eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), referring especially to pp. 33 and 27, respectively. See Rosalind Krauss’s commentary on Benjamin in “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-​Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 46.

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FIGURE 2.28:  Richard Avedon, fashion photographer and technical director, advising Fred Astaire on his role as a photographer, on the set of Funny Face. The Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1956. © David Seymour/ Magnum Photos.

leaving one breathless, exhilarated in pursuit. In place of the divine or fatal Garbo persona, a figure like Audrey Hepburn epitomizes, for Barthes, the dynamic unfolding of a commercialized existential ethos: from authenticity to charm, and from charm to fashion. When Barthes was wrapping up his Mythologies volume, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957) was in production, partly in Paris (Fig. 2.28). Here Fred Astaire plays the role of a fashion magazine photographer and Richard Avedon surrogate: a Pygmalion-​like figure who carries the adolescently bookish and unselfconsciously lovely Audrey Hepburn—​in the role of a Greenwich Village bookshop clerk—​ off to Paris where she can meet her existentialist



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philosopher idol on the condition that she models for the magazine’s extravagant fashion shoot. Avedon clearly inspired and himself contributed to the look of Donen’s production, spanning from the lustrous, calculated fashion-​qua-​snapshot rhetoric that so well exploits contingency within the elaborately staged, crafted, selected still, to the confrontational, bare, over-​exposed black-and-white portraiture that made him famous. Astaire, for his part—​enfolding the roles of father/​educator, artist, sprightly lover, and surrogate filmmaker—​brought into the film the aura of an earlier Hollywood experience, bequeathed upon his young progeny. The romantic-​ comedic narrative traces the ways in which both photographer and model reconcile conflicted aspects of their personae—​a rtistic/​intellectual and commercial—​by which Astaire/​Avedon’s character, Dick Avery, institutes Hepburn’s character, Jo Stockton, as the thinking fashion model. Whatever conceits or compromises might be intimated in the conciliatory narrative dissolve in the film’s prevailing irony, from the cynical workings of the fashion magazine to the staging and inhabiting of experience through changes of costume and pose, and from the photographic process with its emphatic (quasi-​pop) play of color, black-and-white, still and movement, to the happy ending sequence—​itself a traditionally conclusive bridal shoot of sorts—​whose iconography and pastel color palette is reminiscent of animated Disney fairytales. As in some of the best Hollywood films of that era, no simple opposition of art and commerce, surface and depth, sincerity and play is settled in the film’s unfolding of all dimensions and tensions through its human subjects, complex mise-en-scène and movement.71 The working-​t hrough of one through the other—​mass commodities and advanced art—​achieves, of course, its fully conscious synthesis in the following decade with Andy Warhol, to whom Barthes himself attends in a late essay, and with whom we engage in Chapter Four. Years later Barthes comes to see in Avedon’s portraiture the mythological power of the photographic mask at its best: again, not a prop or concealment of the face but the mask as idea of the face, carved by photography as the consummate “art of the Person.” 72 Avedon’s famous portraits, close-​up or half-​length in frontal confrontational framing, are typically staged in a non-​space—​nothing but the photographic backdrop, namely their space is purely and integrally photographic.73 They seem to shed all adornment and circumstance, all social or material setting—​to dispense with the old rituals of protracted veiling and deferral of “interiority” o​ r, rather, “interiority” unfolds as a photographic-​surface effect. Everything seems available at once under the strong light that seems to expose, but at times bleaches smooth the facial surface, iconifying it by means opposite the old diffusing mode. In this intriguing Marilyn portrait, Avedon’s ingenious rhetoric is based on the way in which an effect of “the unarmed celebrity 71  I have in mind here some closely related color films of that era engaged, perhaps even more rigorously, with the dialogue of art and commerce:  Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), or Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955), among others. 72 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. Other citation in this paragraph are from Roland Barthes, “Right in the Eyes” (1977), in The Responsibility of Forms, 240; my emphases. In Camera Lucida pp. 34–​6 and 111, Barthes reiterates his discussion of the Avedon mask-​gaze. His appraisal of Hepburn’s face in Mythologies precedes, of course, these later reflections on photography. While I read her face in light of the Avedon image here, Barthes may not have associated the two at any point. On Avedon I have also consulted Max Kozloff, The Theater of the Face (Phaidon, 2007), 193–​5. 73  A subgenre of Avedon’s fashion photography, some of his images made for magazine covers are also set in such non-​space that allows for a play of scales and dimensions. This endows even such fashion images with a quasi-​ monumentality, exceeding the local and ephemeral connotations of his fashion-​snapshot mode, which I discuss further below.

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FIGURE 2.29:  Marilyn Monroe, actress, New York City, May 6, 1957. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

stripped bare” is drawn against the accoutrements of the mask/​pose (Fig. 2.29). The blank backdrop allows the contingency of the unselfconscious, distracted instant to stand out. If a sense of archaic-​iconic impassivity transpires in some of Avedon’s photographic portraits, it is effected, perhaps, by the sheer exhaustion of the subjects, always seeming to have been caught after a sleepless night. But this may also describe Avedon’s educing cracks in his subject’s surface shells. Their gaze, when addressed to the lens, itself seems to be stripped bare. But as Barthes put it, we know very well that this gaze cannot get through or past the lens, so this blockage acts “as the very organ of truth: its space of action is located beyond appearance.” Working back again from this late formulation to his discussion (some 25 years earlier) of the authority of the gaze in the Dutch guild portraits, and relating it as well to the present discussion of the mask’s frontal address, we might conjecture that the “beyond” of which Barthes speaks is not some metaphysical beyond, nor some interiority behind these faces in high-​contrast lighting, gaping at the lens. Their operative space lies, rather, before the image: this is the iconic force of their gaze that bounces against the viewer’s own, and grafts itself as mask. Barthes may be saying that the mask is this barrier that cannot be crossed, separating the space of the image and that of the viewer: the confrontational sharpness of Avedon’s gaze makes it apparent. This, for Barthes’s, is photography’s truth, to exhibit the mask for what it is—​“truer than what is simply shown”—​ namely, that Avedon might be masking more than he exposes; that the direct look blocks as much as it might seem to reveal; that the work thus puts on display its own strategies that mask



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the very thing they seem to expose. This type of gaze is the pose of Avedon’s portraits—​a nd it is the mask.74 Barthes’s eventual equation (in Camera Lucida) of the mask with mythological efficacy is posited, in fact, as a special achievement of photography when it manifestly surpasses life’s ordinary yet illusory mutability and holds in check the contingency of the detail and of the instant: “the great portrait photographers are great mythologists.” 75 Avedon’s post-​war fashion photography—​w ith its staged fictions of fun and longing, energy and absorption, embellishing fantasies of Americans in Europe in that era—​is, perforce, a ​mythification of a different sort (Figs. 2.30–2.31). Parading as snapshots or cinematic freeze-​frames, in dynamic though perfectly framed compositions of bodies and faces caught in a whirl of experience, t​ he models mostly ignore the camera and, when their look does “happen to be” caught by the lens, it is often in mock-​surprise—​“an expression of an expression” also staged in the fashion shoots of Funny Face. No gaze will go past the lens; being there only on display (and on sale), it is a mere prop; it pretends to hold back nothing, to be “simply shown,” as are those pernicious myths of mass culture that Barthes’s reading demystifies, and of which advertising is a prime example (e.g., “Soap-​Powders and Detergents”). When advertising image and poetic image are intertwined and sometimes indistinguishable, mythification can drown them both—​or can they in any way float?76 Such vacillating movement, or dance, between art and commerce is staged in Funny Face. Hepburn’s early portrait snapped by Astaire is shown to be doubly processed—​a photograph of a photograph—​yet it presents itself as a proof and as point of origin: an iconic, revelatory image (Figs. 2.32–2.33). The features seem to hover on the photographic surface—​as on Veronica’s veil—​pure and open, as if in a free, boundless skin-​space, not yet circumscribed, staged, nor dressed for magazine display. Surpassing the body-​as-​mannequin vision of the model—​parodied in the opening sequence by real-​l ife super-​model Dovima—​t he “pure photo” of the facial features is paraded as a signifier of Hepburn’s essential (read: inner) beauty, a beauty extracted from her “funny face” and revealed when equated with the photographic surface.77 The photographer’s art brings to light in this fiction the “essential truth” of the face, but the sequence also unfolds this “truth” as the product of a manufactured, doubly processed technological image, produced within the hermetic space of the studio-​fashion system. Having snapped this ur-​image of Hepburn, caught in his darkroom, the inspired Astaire breaks into the “I love your funny face” musical number. The song and dance, the photographic

74  Surely, not every sitter’s look directly at the lens would automatically achieve such power of address. Conversely the power of the cinematic star-​mask is clearly not predicated on such a look, taboo in classical narrative cinema. The interest of the Marilyn portrait resides in its suspension between bare frontality and the diverted look. 75  Camera Lucida, 34. 76  In “The Advertising Message” (1963), The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 173–​8, Barthes draws a comparison between advertising and poetic language: this association was surely more likely by that time—​t he height of pop art—​t han in the 1950s. Also by the early 1960s both the French New Wave, as well as such auteur superspectacles as Fellini’s La dolce vita, find new ways to “poeticize” the world of advertising and media events for European intellectuals. 77  This portrait of Hepburn directly cites Avedon’s contemporary photograph of Dovima for Harper’s Bazaar—​her self-​parodying in the opening of Funny Face as the dumb model who cannot hold her own when posing next to a work of art notwithstanding. Dovima’s elegance, which Avedon made famous, in fact recedes in this portrait, certainly when compared to the similar image but surely different technique applied to Hepburn: Dovima’s mouth is scissored into the image in lip-​biting contortion—​i n-between deliberate photo-​collage effect and mock expression.

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FIGURE 2.30:  Dorian Leigh with bicycle racer, dress by Dior, Champs-​Elysées, Paris, August 1949. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

FIGURE 2.31:  Doe Avedon, coat by Dior, Paris, August 1947. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

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FIGURES 2.32–​2.33:  Model, and portrait, inspired by the artist’s hand, in the dancer’s arms: Hepburn and Astaire in Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957) –​frame enlargements.

process and labor, and falling in love are confluent. It is as if the graceful choreography of bodies in movement under the red safelight of the darkroom-​turned-​stage, itself inspires the revelation of the photographic image. While Hepburn first seems quite plain in the portrait as snapped, she is soon transfigured before our eyes. Astaire cuts out a hole in a sheet of paper—​it is in the measure of her face—​and uses it in the enlarging process to efface the outline, leaving only her eyes, nose and mouth to stand out in high contrast against the bleached-​out substrate of the complexion in the resulting print. The features seem to escape here the model’s encompassing facial contour, to shed all corporeal weight and bodily limits and float in the free space of the image, only limited by its frame. Face, photograph, and a mask-​like entity seem joined in this quintessential image that we see materialize in the process of its fabrication. It conveys, to me, just the feeling that Astaire’s musical numbers often do—​the seemingly effortless, responsive and sweeping flow of his body/​non-​body transporting his partner through inexplicably erotic enchantment. Only through Astaire’s supremely cinematic song and dance can we see the creative gesture (even in technological art), love, and the face itself join in such clear and radiant expression. The skillfully processed photographic portrait—​whose processing, itself, partakes of the “pose”—​the wonder of Hepburn’s face-​as-​image is engulfed in the film and becomes cinematically articulate: between

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FIGURES 2.34–2.36:  Fictions of authenticity: fashion-​events in Funny Face –​frame enlargements.

the darkroom and the Paris shoots, between her world of books and her falling in love, Event may be said to develop into Idea. In his dancing-​loving-​qua-​photographing of Hepburn’s funny face, Astaire inspires his subject—​he opens her face, as it were, and lets it project forth, animating her image. Freed of volume, texture, and body, Hepburn’s face thus emerges as pure image, an optical phenomenon and, sparked by the artist’s eyes and touch, his intuition and his skill, it also surpasses the opposition of still and movement. In this witty but not unambitious realization of the face-​as-​image, it is no longer just “funny”—​it is “art.” Mythologically, one might call this an achievement of metamorphosis. From this revelation of Hepburn’s face-​as-​i mage to the Paris shoots—​spectacularly set, and underwritten by the fashion industry, advertising, and tourism, the distance is not vast, and a Hollywood movie can negotiate it very well. The staging of encounters, separations—​or, in short, events—​in the fashion shoots is designed not only to display luxury clothing in prominent settings but also to trigger Hepburn’s expressive range (Figs. 2.34–2.36). In some images she poses openly, happily facing the camera. In others her attention is directed past the frame, so that her expression truly becomes an event, legible as part of a staged fiction. The still, and stilled, event of her face is sported and modeled like any article of fashion. What does it mean that interiority, or intellect, is to be elicited in a fashion shoot and captured as optical surface? How is it like, and unlike, the workings of (and through) thought in the cinema? These sequences of Hepburn as the “thinking model” correspond to the would-​be unmediated and existential air of the sentimental and adolescent intellectuality that Barthes sarcastically dismisses in “Visages et figures.” Years later, Jean-​Luc Godard and Jean-​Pierre Gorin’s militant diatribe against the famous press photo of Jane Fonda in Letter to Jane (1972) echoes a very similar critique: “this [Hanoi Jane’s] expression has been borrowed, principle and interest, from the free trade mark of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In fact it’s an expression of an expression” (Fig. 2.37). What Godard and Gorin reject is the fallacy that a facial expression, caught as if spontaneously by the camera,



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FIGURE 2.37:  Expression of an expression? Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (Jean-​Luc Godard and Jean-​ Pierre Gorin, 1972) –​frame enlargement.

can testify to some empathetic and “deep thought.” By contrast they posit an earlier moment (deemed more “materialist”) of film history, in which “thought” was manifestly the product of the conditions and the processes of filmmaking, joined with the actor’s body and labor.78 Hepburn’s range of expressions, and expressions-​of-​expressions, likewise partake in the myth of immediacy and availability: her responsive, pliable features are staged at times as charmingly eccentric, at times as comfortingly predictable, and are just as easily disposed or interchangeable. But does not the film’s play with color and movement, with staging and posing—​a nd their manifest bringing-​about of thought and feeling—​lay bare the process? Without histrionics, Hepburn holds nothing back, and holds no mystery either—​even if occasionally, and at will, she seems to wear mystery on her sleeve. Her facial legibility is tantamount to the staged events of which it partakes: her success hinges on her ability to extend, suspend, and repeat expressions that carry anything from Anna Karenina to An American in Paris. Givenchy couture and the inner life offer themselves equally and are thereby equated on the photographic surface. As Sarah Naftalis put it, “intellect is not reduced to an aesthetic here, but revealed as one”—​which I take to mean that surface is not trivial but can transpire, in the cinema, as a form of thought.79 Hepburn’s face offers neither the resistance or the distance of masks, nor the complex intrigue of truly daring surrender.80 It is her beguiling openness that Barthes seems 78  Jean-​Luc Godard and Jean-​Pierre Gorin consider that the material consciousness of star faces until the early 1930s allowed for differentiation, while the cinematic faces after the New Deal all share “the same knowing look.” I discuss Letter to Jane in a short essay that was the original kernel of the present chapter: “Ages of the Face: Barthes, Godard, Warhol,” The Ages of Cinema: Criteria and Models for the Construction of Historical Periods, eds. Enrico Biasin et al. (Udine, It.: Forum, 2008), 125–​3 4. 79  Sarah Naftalis formulated this among many insights in the excellent paper, “Funny Face:  The Substance of Surface,” which she wrote for my seminar on the Face at Stanford University, Fall 2014. 80  As in those narratives of the Garbo films cited earlier, which appear to have been developed in unison with the shifts in their star’s persona—​epitomized with the discovery and narrativizing of her capacity for laughter in Ninotchka—​some of Hepburn’s films likewise dramatize quite explicitly the “physiognomic” disposition of their star. Not only Funny Face can be read along these lines but also Roman Holiday, among others.

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FIGURE 2.38:  “Enforced mythification”: Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 20, 1967. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

to pounce on in the Garbo vignette when he writes “woman as child, woman as cat.” Any of Hepburn’s expressions and poses, “constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions,” can give her away, this way or that—​but is this not what is explicitly staged in Funny Face? When French existentialism unfolds as fashion, and fashion unfolds as thought, their dynamic interlacing can be imagined as musical movie spectacle. It is, to my mind, more gracefully and vitally explored as such than the use that Avedon himself made of Hepburn’s face in his more ambitious artistic portrait of her: in an overwrought mythological concoction, he had some Hepburn faces cut out and inserted in a photo-​collage of a five-​headed Hydra (Fig. 2.38). This one is not even funny. Robbing her of the face that she does have, it corroborates Benjamin Buchloh’s view that, for Avedon, “all operations (photography for fashion and advertisement, and the ‘artistic’ ambitions of the master) partake of the same logic of enforced mythification.”81 Is this what Barthes’s conclusion—in implicit bemoaning of the secularization of the contemporary woman’s image in the cinema—​a mounts to? BUT “VISAGES ET FIGURES”  presses further, taking its last step down to the street for a striking encounter. A passing reference to the weary, resigned face of Vittorio De Sica’s pensioner, Umberto D., from the eponymous film of 1952, suffices to anchor the essay’s last move in neorealism’s contribution to the facial repertoire of that era (Fig. 2.39). With startling pathos—​a touch altogether unique in the essay—​Barthes focuses here on one anonymous face in the crowd: a heavy-​laden working-​class woman on a train, leafing through a movie magazine. The description could indeed read like the opening or concluding shot of a De Sica film, 81 See Hepburn’s portraits in Richard Avedon, Evidence 1944–​1994 (New  York:  Random House, Eastman Kodak Professional Photography Division, 1994). Benjamin Buchloh’s judgement of Avedon is in “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” Face-​O ff: The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994), 53–69.



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FIGURE 2.39:  “This terrestrial face”: Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) –​frame enlargement.

but it describes, in fact, a contemporary spectator, turning to the movies after her day’s work. Her face, at once distinct and typical, seems humanized by age and by quotidian wear and tear. Impassive, resigned, it is confronted with the “nylon masks” of contemporary starlets: Barthes’s epithet for the facial gear of those “painted, empty, beautiful insects” that crowd the movie magazines is merciless. While his metaphors here are a tad mixed, it is, of course, the image of nylon stockings, the emblematic post-​war commodity, that is most striking. Almost without substance, “nylon masks” offer nothing like the ritual artifice of those classical movie faces—only a cheap semblance of flesh. He contrasts them with the funerary old linen of the old woman’s face, humanized by daily laundering, and the mineral density of her true mask, sunk under her skin: The other day I saw in a suburban train an old woman; she had with her a tattered cardboard suitcase; quite dazed, she was looking in a movie magazine, her poor visage set without protest against the glossy iconography of her Masters suspended behind the vamp or the gigolo—​it is they who possessed all the mobility of expression afforded by those who are idle and over-​nourished. The camera, if turned away from its Olympus and fixed for once on this terrestrial face, would not capture the pathos of her fatigue or her poverty. Realism is really foolish in exhibiting faces-​i n-​t he-​g rip-​of-​suffering. The truth was beyond expression: it was under the skin, in the actual density of this tired face, brought about by the prolonged sedimentation of her troubles into a state of obstinate substance, unalterable except by death. No compassion was displayed by this all-​too-​ human face, but it sufficed to confront it with its luxury counterpart to understand that man has been robbed of his own visage. 82

Just as, in the Dutch portraits, it is not “having” but “being,” not “attribute” but “substance,” not “passion” but existence that commands and embodies identity in the facial image, so here, the “obstinate substance” of the old woman’s unglamorous but unforgettable face stands opposed 82  “Visages,” 11; my emphases.

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to the all-​too-​accessible and flexible expressivity—​the shifting spectacles of an “inner life”—​in the face of the contemporary starlet.83 Such expressivity is understood to be an exploitative economic asset, indeed a luxury that this poor woman cannot afford. The sedimentary density, the gravity of her face is constituted, instead, by the deep imprint of her class and milieu—​and with it her age, her labors, her troubles. It is very like the facies hippocratica that Walter Benjamin invokes as the physiognomy of human time arrested and crystalized “beyond beauty.” Benjamin’s figure is not the death mask qua plaster artifice, but the actual sunken countenance by which the physician recognizes the patient’s impending death. The physiognomy of time in the facies hippocratica is what sinks, precisely, “under the skin,” towards its inevitable conclusion in the skeletal death’s head—​the petrified allegorical expression of history.84 On our side of the screen, this figure of death is, perhaps, the true counterpart to the ultra-​face of the great classical movie star. If we now excavate, following Barthes’s cue, the deposits of neorealism itself in the post-​war facial image described here, we might begin to weigh its particular mythological charge. What might be staged in this mournful conclusion to “Visages et figures” is the effacement of age-​old rural and popular working-​class cultures and the decline of regionally marked habitus—​Barthes mourns it elsewhere in his writings—​before the self-​naturalizing myths of petit-​bourgeois consumer culture. Pier Paolo Pasolini (much admired by Barthes) would explore some years later, across his writings and his films, just such socio-​cultural shifts—​working through his ideas in emphatically physiognomic terms. In his understanding, the neorealist resistance myth, following in the wake of a failed revolution, already foreshadowed its own demise. Pasolini would come to call the anthropological shift that ensued—​perhaps more swiftly in Italy than in France—​a form of genocide, as he saw it, since an entire people would basically disappear from the face of Europe in the grip of consumer culture, with television as its most powerful and deadly instrument. If we agree with Barthes’s observation in the Mythologies that revolution is the most potent remedy to myth, and if both French and Italian working-​class culture has been emphatically associated, up until this point, with the legacy of left-​w ing Resistance, we surmise that this is also the moment when the left is giving up on revolution and seeing itself defeated.85 It lapses into a self-​mythologizing mode that overtakes revolutionary energy. The Resistance myth, as articulated in neorealism, was perhaps still vital through the early-​1950s, but Barthes sees it dying, or already spent here, leaving behind its own death’s head. At the conclusion to the Mythologies, Barthes self-​consciously reflects on his project and wonders whether “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.” Demythification, he concludes, is a predicament that compels the critic “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize.”86 This conclusion, sometimes forgotten in discussion 83  Cf. “The World As Object,” 10. 84  Walter Banjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn (London: NLB, 1977), 166 and 177–​8 . 85  “There is therefore one language which is not mythical, it is the language of man as a producer: wherever man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image… myth is impossible.” Barthes explicitly observed that myth rises in socialism only when the left gives up on revolution and, for one reason or other, tries to cover itself, and thereby  “distorts itself into ‘Nature.’” Barthes, Mythologies, 259–60. 86 Barthes, Mythologies, 246–7 and 274, respectively; emphases in the original.



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of the Mythologies, can be understood as a striking early formulation of Barthes’s predicament throughout his oeuvre. One considers it now in relation to his raising of the mask as a potent figure, mediating the anthropological functions and the poetic inclinations of the image. Even as the sedimentation and crystalizing of social reality in the particular physiognomy is a mythical operation, it may be that no idea of the face could lend itself to the visual—​t hat no strong portraiture, perhaps no image is possible—​w ithout some such mythopoetic perception. The layered artifice of a double mythology enfolds the image in time’s patina, eliciting the spectator’s knowing recognition; only then might it serve to subvert the system that had produced it in the first place. Even as Hollywood cinema is mythical through and through, its great masks are construed as cult objects, at once personal and impersonal, crystalizing their culture in the reflective artifice of plastic form, in their dense layering of surface that the spectator must confront as such: with no reassurance of expressive transparency and autonomous subjectivity. The face on film offers itself here for what it is: a mask, an effigy, a graven image. Cinema’s swift history, with its condensed iconographical eras, affords Barthes’s differentiation of mythical strata. His anthropology of the cinematic face betrays an anxiety and a continued desire of the human countenance in a quickly shifting visual and media culture. After Valentino and Garbo, after classical Hollywood, after the devastation of war, the hope of the Resistance and its demise in consumer culture—​what is, in early 1950s Europe, the face of its time? When authenticity is itself a commodity—​a marketing image wrapped in nylon stockings—​when the working class is “robbed of its own visage,” how can the cinema still live through its faces? Some writers devoted to the cinema in this era—​Bazin, Godard—​were able to see the signs of struggle and the consciousness of loss eloquently dramatized through the confrontation of the human face, at once singular and mythical, with the intensified, and reflective, powers of the apparatus.87 In subsequent chapters I suggest that such confrontation, and such intensity, are worked through sometimes tragic scenarios, but that these tap into vital myths of the person’s incarnation in their image, and find them inexhaustible.

87  It is Stanley Cavell’s insight, formulated in response to De Sica and Bresson in particular, but with wider implication, that the cinema can show that there is “something of the type in us all, something of the singular and the mythical.” The movie star realizes, and projects, this “myth of singularity” most fully. See The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 180, 35 respectively.

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CHAPTER 3

FACE-​TO-​FACE (WITH THE WRONG MAN)

WHAT GODARD SAW In a celebrated review of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) in the Cahiers du cinéma, a review titled “The Cinema and its Double,” (“Le Cinéma et son double,” after Artaud), Jean-​Luc Godard focuses upon certain close-​ups of Henry Fonda, early in the film. Such images of the human face epitomize cinema’s capacity, greater than philosophy or the novel of our time, says Godard—​on the eve on his own advent into filmmaking—​“to convey the basic data of consciousness.” The contemplation afforded by such close-​ups, he suggests, binds revelation with mystery: that singular entity which is the human face—​one distinct from other objects, one that compels as subject—​is also the privileged arena of the cinema, whereby the visual surface enfolds a promise of interiority (Fig. 3.1). Aesthetic and ethic intersect in Godard’s ekphrastic feat—​h is effort to convey the wonders of the human countenance in motion pictures. Reaction shot and long close-​up of Henry Fonda staring abstractedly, pondering, thinking, being… . The beauty of each of these close-​ups, with their searching attention to the passage of time, comes from the sense that necessity is intruding on triviality, essence on existence. The beauty of Henry Fonda’s face during this extraordinary second which becomes interminable is comparable to that of the young Alcibiades described by Plato in The Banquet. Its only criterion is the exact truth. We are watching the most fantastic of adventures because we are watching the most perfect, the most exemplary, of documentaries.1

1  “Le Cinéma et son double: Alfred Hitchcock, Le faux coupable (The Wrong Man),” original review in Cahiers du cinéma 72 (June 1957); republished in Alain Bergala, ed., Jean-​Luc Godard par Jean-​Luc Godard (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1985), 101–​8; English translation in “The Wrong Man,” Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, eds., Godard on Godard (1972; rep. New York: Da Capo, 1986), 49. One can surely make more of Godard’s reference to Antonin Artaud’s idea of the magical functions of theatrical spectacle: its appeal to the imagination, its proximity to ritual in the use of gesture and sensory impact. Hitchcock might have himself been interested in Artaud’s ideas on the “theater of cruelty.”

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FIGURE 3.1:  Fonda thinking, being: The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) –​frame enlargement.

A sheer duration of looking, of thinking, of being—​no weightier than repose, not yet contracted to action—​transpires in Hitchcock’s exposition of everydayness that precedes Fonda’s entry, in the role of Christopher Emmanuel Balestraro, into the inexorable machinations of the insurance agency, the police, the law, of psychiatric institutions, and of narrative itself.2 As Godard also notes, time and space are fairly abstracted in these early close-​ups. This is what allows for the face to be experienced as whole—​we have explored, in Chapter One, a similar idea in film theories of the 1920s, especially as discussed by Béla Balázs, for whom “microphysiognomic” perception, afforded particularly by the facial close-​up, can transport the viewer beyond spatio-​temporal coordinates, beyond conceptual codes and mediations, and propel her into an altered dimension of thought, affect, subjectivity. 3 While these early shots in Hitchcock’s film already partake, to be sure, in the routine operations of film language—​they function in part as reaction-​and shot-​ reverse shots to the newspaper racing pages, to Vera Miles in bed, and so forth—​they also achieve a measure of free-​standing integrity. Godard’s seeing in them a “searching attention to the passage of time” is not in response to any exceptional duration, but to the ways in which even a brief instance of nuanced attention to the human countenance can dilate perceptual experience such that time’s very passage through the face conveys a sense of searching interiority in which we share. While such close-​ups can simply be said to “characterize” the protagonist whose star-​face is, in any case, abundantly familiar, they also register as self-​sufficient contemplation in a dimension—​so Godard considers—​of necessity and freedom, the distraction and luminous perfection of apparently unselfconscious being. Such images can strike us with the force of recognition: we are face-​to-​face with subjectivity, irreducible to a name or a sign. In such moments as these—​punctuating even a filmmaking as controlled as Hitchcock’s—​ the face may be said to counter the threat of fragmentation embedded in the workings of 2  I take the common liberty to dub the protagonist of The Wrong Man Fonda, since the star’s fame transpires so clearly through his role, while minor parts are often more securely designated by their screen roles. Calling Dreyer’s protagonist Joan, in Chapter One is that special case in which the actor is altogether identified with her role: for most of us, Falconetti is Joan of Arc. 3  See Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), especially pp. 100–​2 .

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cinema, most obviously in framing and editing, as in the work of the actor. Godard further suggests that such images pierce, as it were, the fabric of cinematic fiction, as one senses here the indexical/​documentary registration of contingency serving as guarantor of authenticity: an “exact truth.” The “accidental” or “trivial” detail, the subtlest facial movements transpiring in time, point toward that singular, irreducible inwardness even as no film (and no representation, tout court) can claim to quite contain it or spell it out. Hitchcock’s well-​k nown preference for the neutral face, for the actor’s capacity to be and to act (in the sense of sheer action) rather than to emote or deliberately express allows, on the one hand, a certain flexibility to the uses of the shot in the cinematic fabric and, on the other, a free, disengaged space and duration in which the face, free of the forced labor of any particular expression, might be simply sensed to be. The recognition of such being cannot be reduced to any feature or gesture: it is only signaled from a certain distance, it is always a searching, a becoming—​or a deferral. The facial image can in this way elicit a privileged mode of attention: it affords Godard’s leap from acting to being, from functional communication or narrative work-​tool to ineffable inwardness, from the instance to the interminable, from optic to ethic. In the humble realist universe of The Wrong Man—​a vision of post-​war America in which, as Hitchcock asserts in the film’s prologue, nothing is invented—​Godard perceives the repository of vital myths, values inherited from Western idealist traditions and crystalized in the bourgeois humanist portrait as emblematic site for the constitution of the modern subject. The humanist portrait projects an aesthetic vision of the individual as a free agent, possessing an integral identity that coheres with, and is confirmed by, the social sphere. The portrait also rehearsed the negotiation of selective and cumulative values, claiming a qualitative leap from circumstance to character, from temporal appearances to human essence, from visual surface to inner truth. While relying on morphological, mimetic, iconic, and even indexical ties to appearance, the claim of surface form as figure of interiority and identity—​transcending the merely inductive, referential values of the detail—​has endowed the art of the portrait with its great force and prestige. Where Roland Barthes—​polarizing “Idea” and “Event”—​aggrandized a mask-​like anthropological efficacy of the classical ultra-​faces of Valentino, Chaplin, and Garbo, juxtaposing it, we have seen in the previous chapter, with the rhetoric of authenticity that he derides in contemporary movie stars, Godard negotiates his terms differently. The close-​up that he exalts leaps from the temporal or accidental to the essential, from perception to knowledge and to the limits of knowledge. His account harks back to metaphysical foundations in that earlier phase of modernity—​epitomized, many would agree, in Rembrandt’s astonishing portraits—​in which the human visage still held a privileged, stable post in a humanist hierarchy of representation. It imbues the natural, intuitive, distracted disposition, caught on film, with a sense of absorption and interiority—​nonetheless exteriorized. States of consciousness, qualities of mind—​ innocence, goodness, humanity as such—​are projected in the instant and seen to give rise to an epiphany of self.4 Godard’s exalting of the close-​up would resurrect those auratic values that—​far from

4  I learned from T. J. Clark’s “World of Faces,” reviewing a show of Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery, London, and published in the London Review of Books and the London Review Podcast, http://​w ww.lrb.co.uk/​ v36/​n 23/​t j- ​c lark/​world- ​of-​f aces?utm_ ​source=newsletter&utm_ ​medium=email&utm_ ​c ampaign=3623&hq_​ e=el&hq_ ​m=3515025&hq_ ​l=5&hq_​v =b2f6571151, accessed November 27, 2014. Clark cites Jean Genet’s short essay on Rembrandt’s Self-​Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669), published in L’Express in 1958, and reflecting on a human quality of “goodness” that Genet saw as brought into being by Rembrandt’s act of painting.



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outdated in the context of a movie review—​play a privileged role in a film that, in fact, stages a drama of identity and misidentification in late-​modern, urban America. Certainly, we again remind ourselves, not every occurrence of the face in the cinema (nor every close-​up) makes such claims: insofar as the face can be also used to establish a space and a set of relations—​as across the trajectory of the glance, within or between shots—​to communicate and support processes of narration and reading, it is in fact used for the most part as instrument. But it is just such dramatization of the predicament of a subject whose face is grasped as object within a range of modern institutions, comprising the cinema itself, that is played out in The Wrong Man. Godard’s vocabulary of “being” and “essence” aspires to exceed, or precede, any particular content of thought, any paraphrasable expression or communication. But even without his Platonic terms one might concur—​as I have already proposed in previous chapters—​t hat it is a condition of the great cinematic face to signal subjectivity in epiphanic terms that defy the legible signs of expression, or its wholesale translation to textual currency. Fleeting, unstable, never conclusive, an “epiphany of the face”—​not an experience that one can entirely plan for, guarantee, or control—​m ight erupt in areas of illegibility (or excision, or reticence) in the film: in-​between actions or gestures, or in the gap between thought and expression, when one recognizes the nonobjective quality of the face, and thus find oneself attending to something not fully demonstrable or present in the image. In such terms Joseph Koerner attends to the question of “reading” the face and its image, which he brings to bear in a discussion of Rembrandt’s Moses with the Tablets of the Law (1660) (Fig. 3.2). In this marvelous painting—​a nd it is in fact adequate to our engagement with narrative fiction film that it is not really a portrait but, rather, the countenance of a mythical character caught in a dramatic turn—​t he compelling hesitation or inwardness of expression has given rise to an art-​h istorical debate on the naming of the painting: does it depict the instance in which Moses first and radiantly displays the tablets to the Israelites, or does it depict the subsequent crisis when, having noted the Israelites worship the golden calf, the despairing Moses is just about to smash the tablets? Koerner’s discussion brings both the narrative and the critical predicament to bear very clearly on questions of the facial image. How can one determine which of these two moments, which are of course utterly in conflict, is being depicted, or expressed? How can one see and determine such things in a facial expression or a facial image? In the very story that Rembrandt’s astonishing painting presents, in its iconoclastic thematics, in its ambiguous iconography and its odd, almost abstract spatiality where different dimensions collide, in its enigmatic facial expression, and in the symbolic play of disparate elements—​juxtaposing the letters of the Law and the inspired but illegible face—​Rembrandt’s painting presents a supreme instance (or even an allegory) of the “epiphany of the face.” Koerner’s terms here, inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, circle the face’s nonobjective quality as built into the image: its ambiguity and its mystery, its promise of inwardness is certainly not in making expression legible but hinges, rather, on its irreducibility to iconographic paraphrase, on its resistance to the command of coded interpretation, on its refusal to be contained in the visual. 5 5  See Joseph Leo Koerner, “Rembrandt and the Epiphany of the Face,” Res 12 (Autumn 1986): 5–​32. Koerner’s acknowledgement of Levinas’s inspiration in this interpretation is consistent with my own sense of the philosopher’s usefulness in discussion of visual arts—​namely, somewhat in an elliptical or negative mode. As I  suggest in the Preface, the “use” of Levinas might begin and end with such brief if necessary acknowledgements, since his rejection

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FIGURE 3.2:  Rembrandt van Rijn, Moses with the Tablets of the Law (1659), Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Joerg P. Anders.

In essence, what Godard valorizes in the early close-​ups of The Wrong Man—​t he indeterminacy and ineffability of the human face—​is comparable to the issues that Koerner confronts in the Rembrandt painting, albeit in more modest form, and a far more mundane setting. In one precious instance of repose, Fonda’s face encompasses nevertheless, in Godard’s view, a sense of freedom and of necessity, of innocence and knowledge. The relaxed and open features, the unspecific expression as if caught unaware at a private moment, inspires our faith in the protagonist’s innocence. It becomes the premise (already a sort of alibi) against which we demarcate our outrage by the violence done to this person in what follows. What matters here, then, is Hitchcock’s gesturing toward a margin of illegibility, or inaccessibility, toward the hidden. In

of the face-​a s-​i mage—​which is opposed to the face as he really means it—​is as devastating as the second commandment. One might also note here how the art historian’s discussion of a painting, or a still photograph—​even when responding to an indeterminacy of expression—​can perhaps rely more securely on illustration than I can in reproducing frame enlargements to discuss the unfolding of expression in the moving image. While this film-​critical problem is well commented upon (most prominently by Raymond Bellour), it is especially salient, I feel, with the themes addressed in this book.



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Hitchcock’s economy, this does not require any extravagant detour from the narrative exposition—​for it is not even a particularly extended long take of Fonda’s distracted, contemplative attitude that is at stake. What Hitchcock offers in an instant of pause just suffices: the temporality of epiphanies is brief or (thinking of Joyce) would allow for the instant to project outward of time altogether—​but also to return to it. Within a cinematic regime so controlled and contained as Hitchcock’s such a revelatory portrait shot remains brief, subtle, but crucial: a promise of authentic interiority transpires through a contingent articulation of surface, opening up in the image a dimension of thought—​even as it is soon to be submerged in the various machineries and institutions, inflecting the diegesis and the movie apparatus. Since the film so strongly thematizes the inability to definitively locate, prove, demonstrate, or read the face as co-​terminus with “identity,” we look back to the epiphany of these early close-​ups in place of an objective alibi. In the absence of absolute correlations or objective guarantees, since no particular feature or instant can be encompassed, defined, or anchored in past events, and with the failures of legibility and coherence, contingency itself emerges as a necessary if not always sufficient condition of subjecthood. Since no “soul” is there to be grasped, fixed, made visible—​ for that would render it as mere objective form—​a layering of surfaces, a “searching attention,” indices of temporality and change evolving in contingency, might signal interiority without actually fixing or forcing it into legibility. Such density of layerings holds legibility at bay, yet the structure and relations of these layers are all important: they must not be seamless, they must be seen to contain and project but only to a point; they rehearse the delicate play of outer/​inner, visible/​invisible, legible/​i llegible, address and reticence. Their equivocation is what founds the epiphany of the face. One might ask how to match such engagement with the resonant inwardness claimed by the human visage for generations of visual representation with the gray quotidian world of this film. What are the stakes, in post-​war American cinema, of such engagement with the singular entity which is the human face, what special privilege can it still claim in motion pictures—​ and what is its significance for film history, not least in light of Godard’s reverent response? For both the film and this response are drawn, after all, in the context of a transitional post-​ classical situation when cinematic systems are being reconfigured in a dizzying mass-​media spin of image circulation, consumption, and exploitation. What space remains for the face and what value might it still retain that would not be hopelessly anachronistic in the all-​consuming advertising and broadcast ubiquity of toothpaste commercials and talking heads? Certainly an intensified, hyperbolic image culture offered no reassurances; on the contrary, it rendered the visual surface—​in art as in life—​even more vulnerable to contention. Frederick Dolan suggests how this state of things can also be understood in light of lingering Puritan anxieties over the relationship between the visible and invisible churches—​t he one available and manifest, and the other hidden, and of the “spirit.”6 How indeed can one see through the quickly shifting, anxious surfaces of modern life? The growing presence of immigrants in the mid-​century urban crowd—​German, Jew, Japanese, Russian, Italian—​made for an ethnic complexity that redoubled the already nervous attitudes regarding the incorporation and control of African 6  On the issues discussed throughout this paragraph I have learned from the chapter “Cold War Metaphysics” in Frederick M. Dolan, Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 60–113.

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Americans—​questions never fully settled in the white-​A merican psyche.7 In obvious ways the presence of immigrants, minorities, and aliens—​not always clearly “marked” by way of surface physiognomy—​gave rise to particularly paranoid scenarios. A sense of separation and duplicity of the manifest and hidden, outer and inner, thus permeated the increasing experience of the various image media, and was also allegorized in those movies that would make you suspect the ordinary neighbor who is in fact a mole and a spy or else an alien, the husband who is a monster or a criminal, the father who is not himself but in some ways possessed, or intoxicated, or psychotic. Just below the surface, identities crumble in these much-​d iscussed films of that époque: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), or Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life (1956), among many others. Tests of sincerity and proofs of faith could be institutionalized, as they were in Puritan settings, and with the National Security Act of 1947, which responded not only to the presumed threat by military attack from without, but by conspiracy within. Clearly, no such measures could definitively resolve the fundamental uncertainty underlying all such metaphysic-​ideological systems. The preoccupation with distinguishing the real, or authentic, and the fake identity corresponded with the sense of duplicity, the simulated allure of the mass image media themselves. Thus, even as the mass media were in practice widely, irresistibly embraced, fundamental perceptual uncertainties latched onto the anxieties that they invoked even preceding any particular contents. The multiplicity, ubiquity, and surface gloss of the evolving image culture cast suspicion and doubt on any possibility of authenticity and sincerity, on the differentiation between levels of simulation and identity—​on any certainty of differentiation between the right and the wrong man. How to bridge a widening gap between private and public identities? Who is a real American—​a nd who is even “real” in an age of simulacra? Hitchcock’s thematizing of the human visage and Godard’s special homage to this effort suggest a deliberate response to this civic and social world—​some of whose cracks they also paper over—​and to its image ​culture. Although the iconography and the new glossy color surfaces of commercial, urban, late modernity, certainly circulate through Hitchcock’s work as it does in Godard’s, and although both filmmakers learn to poeticize this culture in various ways, it appears that in the critical period between the first post-​war recovery and the onslaught of the 1960s they hold in abeyance any hasty embrace of its seductions. A great deal of Hitchcock’s American work can be considered in this light, setting the face in a new world of objects and tracing its passage through the historical, cultural, and existential predicaments of its time. As Joe McElhaney has shown, this concern can already be traced in the previous decade with Hitchcock’s close-​ups of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946).8 It re-​emerges, in different intensities, in the color films To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), Marnie (1964) and beyond, but it finds one of its most direct and despairing articulations in the black-and-white prefecture of The Wrong Man.

7  Robert Stam observed to me, in conversation, how one is struck in The Wrong Man by the fact that “the man in the street,” or in jail for that matter, is overwhelmingly white. Yet ethnicity does enter the back door of the film, not simply via the protagonist’s Italian family, but through the broader questions of perception and media articulated above. 8  Joe McElhaney, “The Object and the Face: Notorious, Bergman, and the Close-​Up,” Hitchcock: Past and Future, eds. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-​Gonzales (London: Routledge, 2004), 64–​8 4. McElhaney cites Godard’s shift from the humanist elegy of the review cited about, to his 1998 emphasis on Hitchcock as director of the object, which McElhaney contests.



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With the decline of classical cinema, an upwelling of cinephilia also informs Godard’s appreciation of the facial close-​ up in this review. It is laced with idealist remnants and Enlightenment concerns that Godard goes on to explore in his own filmmaking, early and late. How would such investment in cinematic expressivity that links up with modes and values of representation in the traditional arts be preserved, or is it altogether outdated and ideologically suspect? In Godard’s best work the answer is never simple, and the parting from such earlier values is a painful process, and never complete. For Godard, too—​like Hitchcock when stripped of outer layers of defensive irony—​struggles to assert the possibility of art and, I dare say, the possibility of love, of life in contemporary mass culture. This order of concerns, articulated already in this review partakes, finally, in Godard’s broader project of legitimizing cinema—​a project that has changed gears at different points in his career as both critic/​polemicist and as filmmaker.9 Yet it is also curious that such poetic excursus on the ineffable beauty of the cinematic image would be occasioned by a work such as The Wrong Man, whose bleak realism—​a rguably the most severe in Hitchcock’s œuvre—​offers no relief in its adaptation of a journalistic investigation of a case of mistaken identity over an accusation of petty crime. With little or no glamour, or humor, for compensation, The Wrong Man squarely dwells on the assault of mass modernity upon the human face as an unstable yet persistent marker of identity, caught in the urban crowd and in the grids of incarceration and other oppressive institutional spaces. When compared with the reflective, shattering forces of Hitchcock’s following film, Vertigo—​t he mad love, the reinhabiting of roles and of desires, the woman whose very visage is haunted, twice over, by that of another—​The Wrong Man appears as a minor, unresolved (or perhaps rather strangely resolved), disenchanted work. There is a way, however, in which it appeals to similarly haunting experiences, the trauma of being misrecognized, the splitting and loss of self, the devastations of doubt, and the contaminating power of guilt. The two films can be seen as complementary studies of identity’s transmutations and the survival—​even if at great cost, devastation, tragic victory—​of the face itself under the pressure of the look.10 If mistaken identity is a running trope through both comedic and melodramatic modernity—​w ith variants in Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Dickens, and Kafka—​its entry into the cinema propelled it from dramatic catalyst and occasion for hectic and masking play, to the proper regime of the image. How does

9  Godard temporarily suppresses such engagement in his militant phase: Letter to Jane (Jean-​Luc Godard & Jean-​ Pierre Gorin, 1972), with its emphasis on the construction of facial expression, stands in perfect juxtaposition here. The film’s motto can be construed from its voice-​over commentary: “Today it is not possible to take a picture of someone thinking of something.” But even after his radical phase of political refutations, Godard returns to the question of idealist, Enlightenment and romantic deposits in a great deal of his work. In her foreword to Godard on Godard Annette Michelson describes the invocation of Plato in this review as Godard’s legitimizing gesture. On Godard’s further exploration of such ideas with a sharper consciousness of philosophical aesthetics see Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 10  The pairing of the two films would have been even more explicit were Hitchcock to end up with Vera Miles in Vertigo’s lead, as was his original plan—​sabotaged by Miles’s pregnancy (of course it is now impossible to imagine Vertigo with anyone but Kim Novak). On the films’ joint bridging of Hitchcock’s “character-​centered films of the 1940s and 1950s and the character-​effacing films of the 1960s and 1970s,” see Paula Marantz Cohen, “Hitchcock’s Revised American Vision: The Wrong Man and Vertigo,” in Hitchcock’s America, eds. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 155–​72. In conversation, Michael Kerbel of the Film Study Center at Yale University drew an interesting comparison between the sanatorium visits in these two films, and I am particularly tempted to see the ending of Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1952) also echoed in these scenes.

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the duration of the look amplify contingency and difference in this regard? What forms of knowledge and deception does the moving image tease out of this thematic field, and how does it probe the gap between the shifting visual surface and the transmutations of identity? The equivocation between self-​evidence and doubt in confronting the facial image, thematized and narrativized in The Wrong Man, is elaborated by Hitchcock in properly cinematic registers. Certainly other Hitchcock films—​Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Paradine Case (1947)—​focus on the mirror-​reflexiveness and reversals of guilt and innocence as resting upon a person’s unknowability epitomized in the face, indeed in the beautiful face of the star confronting us as a dense surface. Central to the workings of these films is the camera’s unraveling, as well as its complicity, in one protagonist’s glance upon the other. In this way Hitchcock makes apparent the repressive pitfalls of the objectification of the look: a look that would delimit and presume to read the other’s inwardness—​t he unknowability that sustains it as subject. Loving, desiring, fascinated, repelled—​the camera promotes in all these ways our appreciation of the face’s ineffability, which is also its beauty. Joan Fontaine’s look upon Cary Grant (Suspicion), Teresa Wright’s look upon Joseph Cotten (Shadow of a Doubt), Gregory Peck’s look upon Alida Valli (The Paradine Case)—​the illegibility of the face in these films forms a dialectic of concealment and revelation, of privacy and identity. The face is thus complicated and deepened in an intensive, narrativized perception oscillating between innocent self-​evidence and disconcerting opacity, between recoiling desire and faithless love. No expression is fully readable or exhaustible in these films, which thus train our own look, our attention, even as their narrative conclusions would appear to contract and fix identity—​innocence or guilt may be a shorthand—​as befits their genre. Yet they persist in casting doubt on any such reductions: on inductive physiognomies, on the availability of subjectivity to circumscribed visual scrutiny and coding. The spectator’s shifting relation to the protagonist-​beholder’s look constitutes a pivotal point around which the films revolve and bend, and from which they derive their suspense, their irony, their force, their pathos—​emphatically played out in the arena of the face. In these, as in Hitchcock’s later films, the reciprocity of guilt and innocence, the Christian, or existential implication of the greater within the minor crime, the slippages from (bureaucratic) identification to identity, and from identity to self, the loss and recovery of self, or of a face in the crowd, the sense of an abyss still gaping even after ostensible plot resolutions—​t hese respond eloquently to post-​war and Cold War anxieties. Splitting and doubling, as themes and structures, are famously foregrounded in Hitchcock’s work throughout that era. The Wrong Man—​informed, as the credits tell, by state institutions and the technical advice of the police—​offers the most rigorous dramatization of the subjugation of the individual to social and institutional scrutiny, of the threat to identity and its self-​a lienation under the oppressive gaze of all such apparatuses. Finally, the workings of cinema itself are insinuated in these measures of defining and containing the person: they are drawn against—​a nd face-​to-​face with—​just such radiant facial close-​up as eulogized by Godard. One weighs the dialectic of ineffability, availability and, therefore, vulnerability of the face against a particular kind of legibility: one predicated on systemic scrutiny, on the modern organization of the look, on fragmentation and codification of the visual, on its use as evidence within coded systems of identification. Much as the cinema’s capacity to endow the world with a face has been lauded in certain moments of film history and theory, as we have seen in Chapter One, so we now see that the cinema also has the power to take the face away, in a manner of speaking. I dwell, specifically,



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on Hitchcock’s heightening of a basic cinematic articulation, the shot-​reverse shot regime, as a way of confronting our habits of seeing—​i nside and out of the movie theater—​a way of reflecting on the gap between seeing and knowing. One takes the workings of the face in the cinema for granted, but the stakes are high: what does it mean that the cinema “produces” the face as, indeed, a product; how much can it be controlled, confined, or effaced, as a syntactic token, and at what cost? While the symbolic structuring and ideology of such techniques have been the much-​debated topic of semiotically-oriented theories from Lev Kuleshov to Daniel Dayan and after, it is the predicament and the resistance of the face—​it is, after all, an actual human face, everything else being even—​that we are concerned with. Without attaching absolute value to any single technique or stylistic device, I explore how certain articulations of the face on film can be shaped for various ends without presuming to prove or disprove one grand theory or another. The narrative circumstances and settings of The Wrong Man invite an association between the techniques and articulations of film language and anthropometric apparatuses—​t hose measuring and classificatory devices by which the human figure has been so massively represented and delimited in a modern visual culture. Photography and cinematography have directly contributed to and become inextricable from anthropometric culture, whose logic is in many ways extended in the digital era. Allan Sekula has shown how indexical and archiving functions underlie such anthropometric measures in repressive uses of photography, which he juxtaposes with the medium’s distinct perpetuation of an honorific portrait tradition. While the latter has contributed to the evolving conception of the bourgeois self the former, instrumental use of photography would brand, or level, the face in processes of classification—​resulting in a generalized typological gaze and an over-​coding of features and of identity itself, in tandem with the decentering or emptying-​out of the human subject in certain modernist strands.11 Although indexical imprints of the individual body in the photographic or cinematographic image might also serve to authenticate and confirm the uniqueness of identity, the processing, systematizing, and circulation of such images all tend to reinforce the oppressive gaze of state institutions. By stressing the circulatory and the narrative forces that incorporate and control the photographic/​cinematographic image and “discipline” its contingency, Tom Gunning demonstrated the extent to which the individual body and its identifying marks thus become absorbed in scenarios of surveillance, guilt, and paranoia. Gunning cites a range of detective narratives—​comprising early films—​that divulge the power of the non-​human, objective and objectifying apparatus to both authenticate evidence and to absorb it in systems whose institutional logic might supplant, and risks abusing, the subject at hand.12 11  Allan Sekula shows specifically how anthropometric photography is turned repressive when it comes “to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look—​t he typology—​a nd the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology” (italics in the original). See “The Body and the Archive,” The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Boston: MIT Press, 1989), 345. Sekula’s essay, first published early in the digital age, incorporates sharp criticism of the computerized composite portraiture by Nancy Burson. Sekula reads a genealogical relationship between photographic anthropometrics and digital processing of the human figure and demands, rightly I think, that a consciousness of such genealogies must inform the digital artist and her responsibility to the medium. The present ubiquity of digital processing of the human figure might seem to make Sekula’s demand somewhat exaggerated, but does not mean that artists need no longer be conscious of the historical and ethical dimensions of such practices. 12  Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body:  Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1995), 15–​45.

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Against such implementation of anthropometric measures, one commends the resonant, unfolding close-​up, paced to open up the image to different forms of attention, to the uncertainty of meaning, to the potentiality of contingency as freedom. Even against the better objectives of all apparatuses and institutions, it is as if the uniqueness of the person—​encapsulated in both the beauty of the human face and in its imperfections—​must be resuscitated in this way time and again. The attentive, sympathetic viewer, somewhat like the inspired diagnostician, will recognize how her own perception of the face must hang in the balance between intuition and doubt, how its openness or, indeed, its freedom is also its vulnerability. In The Wrong Man, Fonda’s face, inscrutable to some of his interlocutors, constitutes in this way a sort of fracture, a negative entity that cannot sustain him in a mechanistic universe where identification requires the clarity of diametrical terms: is he, or is he not, the particular criminal who did such and such? This quality of his face is likened, I suggested, to the unverifiable alibi. Yet this self-​same indeterminacy of the not-​f ully-​legible face also informs Fonda’s innocence for the viewer over and against the rigid apparatuses of the police. How does all this this translate into a cinematic grammar, at once so powerful and so subtle, in Hitchcock’s hands? A close shot-​by-​shot analysis of a scene should help, in this case, to parse the elements.13

WHAT THE CLERK SAW Consider approximately one minute of film, an economical shot-​reverse shot segment that constitutes the first and critical misidentification of the protagonist, taken to be a hold-​up man, in the offices of a life insurance agency. This is not a spectacular Hitchcock sequence, but it is important precisely for its apparent ordinariness in the cinematic fabric, where it nevertheless functions as the pivotal instant of the plot.14 A clerk at the counter of the insurance agency notices him. What she thinks she sees propels Fonda’s every move, every gesture from here onward through a machinery that incriminates everything it touches. But we, too, are in some sense made complicit in the dynamics of this process simply by virtue of seeing and comprehending the transfiguration of the look upon Fonda in the segment. The brief, devastating twenty-​shot sub-​sequence wherein all this takes place follows establishing location views of a crowded downtown arcade, then Fonda’s passage through the office building corridor. The segment may be divided into two parts: the first (shots 1–​15) is characterized by an escalating emphasis on the dynamic of looking and of (mis-​)recognition; it is the core of my concern in this analysis. Importantly, the use of point-of-view configurations, punctuated with Kuleshovian effects presents, in the first part, an exceptionally rigid, frontal system of expression, response, and (mis-​)identification. The second part of the segment (shots 16–​20), while still dominated in 13  Hitchcock’s way of intensifying and pushing certain cinematic articulations to their limit must be the principal reason that sequences of his work have often been deemed exemplary for shot-​by-​shot analysis. The most spectacular instance is, of course, Raymond Bellour’s “Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest),” The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 77–​192. 14  I discuss in Chapter One Jacques Aumont’s concept of the “ordinary face”—​one that carries the charge of enunciation, narration, and identification in classical cinema. One of its principal articulations is the shot-​reverse shot as a broadly communicative function that puts it to the greatest social, syntactic, and legible use. See Aumont’s Du visage au cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/​Cahiers du cinéma, 1992), 59–​6 0.



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great part by shot-​reverse shot variants, settles into a more fluid style that opens onto the rest of the sequence at the insurance office. (Shot numbers below, corresponding to the sub-​sequence as just defined, should not be confused with the figure numbers. The durations of shots are only indicated roughly and where they are of special interest for the discussion.) Shot 1—​Sidelong view of Fonda entering the insurance office and waiting. Shot 2—​Establishing shot that approximates Fonda’s point-of-view of the office space: in the foreground a clerk is busy with a client, and we now surmise that Shot 1 was on the axis of the clerk’s viewpoint. Other office workers are busy in the background, between the confines of the counter and the large windows. Shot 3—​From approximately the same axis of the previous shot but on a different scale: medium shot of the clerk whose name, “Miss Dennerly” (Peggy Webber), is printed at her window. The office background is no longer focused; against it, the sharp lines and contrasts of Miss Dennerly’s dark hair, brows, and lipstick on her large mouth, all stand out (Hitchcock would not put a blond in this position). Her dark knit top against the rigid white collar contributes to the graphic contrasts of the image, amplified by the bars of her window. While the client signs a document, the clerk wrings her hands and looks up, and we gather that she catches a first glimpse of Fonda. Shot 4—​Similar to Shot 1 but from further left, is now explicitly the clerk’s point-of-view, as also reinforced by the intrusion of the bars onto the image. Beyond the first client Fonda is standing stiffly, enframed from above the knees, right hand in his coat pocket. Possibly in response to the clerk’s strong glance, now inhabited by the camera, he averts his eyes to look around the office. Shot 5—​Shots are now shorter as tension builds in this two-​second medium close-​up of the clerk from the axis of Fonda’s point-of-view, although closer. She, too, averts her eyes, giving the impression that she is thinking, remembering: all this is quite fleeting in the brief shot that nevertheless clearly conveys the contours of a highly coded face-​to-​face interaction. Only a subtle disturbance marks here the serviceable, functional politeness that dictates the clerk’s disposition in its corporate setting. The dark vertical bars at her window now almost fill the frame, matching other verticals in the background—​cabinets, windows—​so perfectly that it seems as if Miss Dennerly’s first proper “portrait” here is utterly defined by this geometrically organized space. Her anxious face appears quite enclosed between two bars, which are synonymous with where her cheekbones meet her hair, while another bar in the middle of the frame divides her face vertically just off-​center. Shot 6—​A bout one second—​clerk’s point-of-view, as in shot 4. The client in the foreground speaks, but we do not attend to her nor to what she says since the burden of the shot-​ reverse shot already lays heavily upon Miss Dennerly’s attention to the stranger, Fonda, in the wings—​motionless but the pronounced focus of attention. Shot 7—​Fonda’s point-of-view axis, as in Shot 5. After flashing a parting smile to the first client—​a smile that, despite its largeness at the mouth, inflects no other part of her face—​ the clerk steals another glimpse at Fonda. Shot 8—​Clerk’s point-of-view, as in Shot 4. As the client leaves, Fonda steps forward. We note how contained and stiff his expression is: perhaps the discomfort of the rigid bureaucratic context for a man—​a bass-​fiddle musician in economic difficulty—​who must apply for

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FIGURE 3.3:  Shot 9: The clerk’s face caught as a distortion within the rigid geometry of the office space. The Wrong Man –​frame enlargement.

a loan. We can sense how his impassivity, or inexpressiveness, can be interpreted by the clerk as ambiguity, and may thus appear suspicious or even hostile. In noticing this we are, however unwillingly, putting ourselves in the clerk’s shoes, although we do not yet know the full meaning of her nervous look. Although Fonda has already been characterized in the film—​in terms of his circumstances that bring him to this office, and through those beautiful close-​ups that bind transparent innocence with ineffability—​we cannot help but see what the clerk sees, quite simply, and this renders him the object of perusal. Shot 9 (Fig. 3.3)—​Approximately one-second reverse shot, set up like Shot 5: Miss Dennerly is completely still, petrified. Due to the angle or slight tilt of her head, the bar dividing her face is not quite centered about the nose and mouth, while it is dead-​center at her collar. Because of this, as well as the fall of light, a pronounced dissymmetry appears between the two halves of her face. The angle and lighting are not sufficiently distortive, however (as might be an expressionist/​noir lighting style), to create a truly dramatic counter-​pattern against her face, which would have possibly afforded a clearer statement (on this point juxtapose with Figures 3.10 and 3.11 discussed below)—​we are, after all, only set in the realist banality of daily interaction. The distortion that nevertheless emerges is subtle and therefore uncanny, making each side of the clerk’s face appear to be directed at a slightly different angle—​the mouth at a different height on each side of the bar. It is almost as if each half of the face bears a somewhat different expression, while it also becomes increasingly evident that Miss Dennerly is making an effort to contain her sense of recognition and dread behind a polite mask. Namely, even as we are made to sense an ambiguity that Miss Dennerly is perceiving in Fonda’s impassive person, we also note that it is her face that appears more deeply—​almost schizophrenically—​marked by it than his.15 15  Russell Merritt shared with me the thought that these “portrait” shots of the woman with the bars dividing the face and challenging symmetry, are strangely reminiscent of certain Picasso portraits of Dora Maar. This idea might be interesting to follow through, not so much on the level of deliberate pictorial allusion on Hitchcock’s part—although​like any artist of the twentieth century he must have given some thought to Picasso—​but for the possibility of certain frames of reference that these artists might share (albeit at different historical moments) in relation to the implications of anthropometric culture, to the facial image after Bertillon, to visual identification procedures vis-​à-​ vis deeper questions of identity in the facial image, etc.



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FIGURE 3.4:  Shot 10: Fonda as if halted by the clerk’s gaze. The Wrong Man –​frame enlargement.

Shot 10 (Fig. 3.4)—Clerk’s point-of-view, slightly tilted up to accommodate Fonda who is approaching the counter, his tall stature appearing exaggerated (​ also thanks to the bars),​ his left hand reaching into his breast pocket and pausing there for a brief but palpable instant just before the cut. Hitchcock’s inscription of doubt into the fabric of the scene is intriguing, for we cannot be certain how to interpret this pause: whether it occurs in the world of the story or in the discourse (histoire or récit). The former—​t he character Manny’s half-​conscious hesitation before the clerk’s intense look—​would be signified by the latter. But an almost palpable sense of artificial punctuation in this pause suggests that this might also be an empty signifier of sorts, only registering frozen, dilated, and properly cinematic time to underscore the gesture as emphatic object of perception (and misreading) in the reaction shot that follows. Shot 11 (Fig. 3.5)—A one-​second shot, back to Fonda’s point-of-view axis, but closer. The staccato brevity and stillness of shots here effect a mechanical rhythmic thrust that peaks at this point. Miss Dennerly is static except that she now lowers her glance from what would be Fonda’s face toward his chest. The vertical bar is quite centered on her mouth and nose but less so between the eyes, so the dissymmetry shifts to the upper part of her face. The background is almost lost in this close-​up. Such focalizing and decontextualizing is what so often suggests a shift of spatial order in a close-​up shot, radically dissociating the detail, which thereby claims a life of its own. It also has the power to displace the spectator (as Eisenstein understood very well) from a realistic to a conjectural psychic space of quite a different order, however, from the floating inwardness of the close-​ups praised by Godard. Pascal Bonitzer would say that at this point the gaze truly takes over the look, delimiting its objects under a repressive psychic order.16

16  Cf. Pascal Bonitzer, “Hitchcockian Suspense,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1992), 15–​30. Bonitzer reminds us here, in reference to other Hitchcock close-​ups, of the lesson of Lacanian film theory: that in its passage to consciousness, which sets the narrative going, the look falls from a sort of primal innocence that might have characterized it in early cinema. In its fall it is stained: it becomes a gaze. While the broad historical truth that Bonitzer invests in this this observation—​ applying it to the shift from early to classical narrative cinema—​is debatable, it remains useful in tracing the psychic imbrication of the look in a sequence such as this.

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FIGURE 3.5:  Shot 11: Stasis and dissymmetry in a one-​ second shot. The Wrong Man –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 3.6:  Shot 12: Reaching for a gun? The Wrong Man –​frame enlargement.

Shot 12 (Fig. 3.6)—​I n this one-​second shot, too close to be an accurate optical rendering of the clerk’s point-of-view, Fonda’s face is cropped while the frame is almost entirely occupied by his chest as displaced object of the clerk’s anxious attention. The emphatically foregrounded bars amplify the impression of a hyperbolic subjective perception. Fonda’s left hand reaches into his breast pocket to continue the halted motion of Shot 10. The artifice of temporal distention between Shots 10 and 12 is what lets us recognize here, retroactively, the empty yet charged time of the clerk’s gaze in Shot 11, like a wedge effecting spatial and temporal pressure around it. Shot 13—​Two-​second shot identical to Shot 11: the clerk stares as if petrified. The stasis, brevity, and accumulation of these shots seems to halt the release of time and action. The shot-​reverse shot draws out here in linear succession what, one infers, is a dense simultaneity in the diegetic world. The fluidity of the shot-​reverse shot in the classical transparent style recedes before a more rigid mechanistic quality of the back and forth between the clerk’s reaction shots and the object of her anxiety. We can trace here the super-​added workings of a Kuleshovian effect: ascribing a specific, legible expression to the face vis-​à-​v is the adjacent shot. While the clerk’s face is not altogether neutral, her expression is amplified and specified vis-​ à-​ v is Fonda’s chest, headless, itself objectified to an extreme. Clearly exceeding what the acting or expression per se offers,



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we now read dread in her face, whose verbal equivalent is, quite clearly, “this man is reaching for a gun.” Shot 14—​Fonda’s chest again:  his left hand pulls out a document and offers it to the clerk. Shot 15—​Two-​second shot identical in organization to Shots 11 and 13; the clerk looks up again. We note partial relief in her look, as if she now breathes again after a halt. But these changes in her disposition are so subtle and her face so tense that one might ascribe them, again, to a Kuleshov-​effect: an expression that we read as bouncing from the object of her look, back onto her face. Namely, because we have already put ourselves in her shoes, yet a folded piece of paper rather than a gun has been produced, we read relief in her face. In such insinuation of our reading process into the mechanism of the shots—​this despite the fact that we knew full well that there is no need to fear guns or aggression on Fonda’s part—​the draconian workings of the sequence are set in motion. We cannot but participate in its production of meaning and follow the clerk’s reading, even as we know it to be false. Shot 16—​A shift of registers marks the second part of the segment, noted via a sidelong two-​shot from inside the clerk’s space, and containing both her and Fonda. The conversation finally begins, so the shots are not quite so brief as they previously were. With this breakup of the tight frontal alternation, there is a sense of spatial relief from the confined point-of-view restriction of the face-​to-​face, and shift to a more fluid, over-​t he-​shoulder exchange. Shot 17—​O ver Fonda’s shoulder as the clerk responds; the office background now becomes distinct again as the space is less tight—​t he slightly higher angle releases at the top of the frame an area free of bars. Shot 18—​O ver the clerk’s shoulder, lower angle view of Fonda as he talks. Shot 19—​Same configuration as Shot 17: Miss Dennerly talks. Shot 20​(Figs. 3.7–3.9)—Here follows a longer, mobile, more complicated take that marks the end of my segment and connects to the remainder of the sequence wherein Miss Dennerly spreads her suspicions among her colleagues. The shot starts off like Shot 18; the clerk then turns around to face the camera, which shifts to accommodate her movement. The pause she takes before moving further is long enough to allow for a clear trajectory of altering expressions. This is our first view of Miss Dennerly’s face without the bars, yet her face still appears somewhat distorted as the lighting casts unf lattering shadows over her brow, nose, and lower lip. We see her expression now definitively change from what had been the self-​contained polite disposition she presented to Fonda, to a private expression that blends dread, exhaustion, and even sorrow or suffering. She closes her eyes while she takes a breath and opens them again to a clear expression of determination, which she acts upon by walking into the depth of the office toward one of her colleagues; the camera pans left to follow her movement. Basically, this shot covers an entire range of thought, emotion, expression, and action, clearly narrativized and carried to a conclusion: the clerk asserts her (mis-​)identification, which will now be shared and strengthened by social coercion—​or simply, contagion. The entire group of insurance clerks join in Miss Dennerly’s distorted perception, whose structure is closely knit in this sub-​sequence with the logic of the shot-​reverse shot.

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FIGURES 3.7–3.9:  Shot 20a–​b –​c: The clerk makes up her mind. The Wrong Man –​frame enlargements.

THE SHOT-​R EVERSE SHOT   regime

evokes two distinct but related domains: firstly, on the level of representation, quotidian face-​to-​face interaction within a given context; secondly, the spectator’s disposition vis-​à-​v is the screen, bound up but not always synonymous with the unfolding of identification, knowledge, complicity in the filmic interaction. The face-​to-​face habits and rituals of daily life sustain the basic condition of sociality: the face is a token whose expressive order one sustains, Ervin Goffman observed, as “an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes.”17 But we only take the face as such token insofar as it can be incorporated within a discursive system. The order of expression in this domain, therefore, is not “from the inside out” (namely, not really expressive even if accepted as such), but transpires along a horizontal, syntactic plane of exchange. Our habits of recognition, interpretation, and response at this public, social level surely inform the cinematic articulation of shot-​reverse shot

17  Ervin Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-​to-Face Behavior (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 5.



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as of the reaction shot: both the cinematic face-​to-​face and face-​to-​object are mediated by formal structures of identification, quite codified and conventionalized. These modes of articulation have to some extent trained viewers in reading the face within given parameters, thus offering reassurances of containment and knowledge. They channel facial expression, subordinating it to the manipulations of cognitive, narrative, and discursive contexts; they render it relatively clear and functional; the range of responses they afford can vary but is not vast or threateningly indefinite, in that it sublimates and contains the face’s excess—​its impenetrability, its threat to legibility and transparency. The idea of the Kuleshov experiment is bound up—​a s we have seen in Chapter One—​ with such operations of reading the face, delimiting its meaning by context and across the cut, and controlling its potential ambiguity. Just what makes for an ambiguous (or, as per Pudovkin’s report on the Kuleshov experiment, a neutral) expression—​whether one slides from ineffable, to inscrutable, to potentially threatening face, and how any of these would compare with the relaxed features of the early close-​ups of Fonda—​is, of course a question one addresses to a number of physiognomic lexicons.18 The Kuleshov effect postulates that the face does not make its claim directly and does not project expression in the immediacy of the shot. The supposed neutrality of the face in this experiment—​how, exactly, it lends itself to such systems of perception and meaning in the first place—​is matched by an investment, on the part of Kuleshov and his followers, in the representative type (social, regional, professional, etc.) that amplifies a clarity of classification and at the same time an amenability to constructed meaning. The syntactic operation of montage is also read, then, within an implicit or explicit lexicon of characterology, itself comparable to more or less elaborate physiognomic systems. Yuri Tsivian further contextualizes the experiment in relation to a range of efforts to control cinematic experience and legibility, via the unity and boundary of frame, scale, shot, and the duration of the film itself since its earliest days. These efforts, Tsivian shows, responded to film viewing experience, and informed the cultural adaptability of film language as expressed in the Kuleshov experiments, which presented ways to “correct” the ambiguity that haunts the close-​up.19 The staccato face-​to-​face of such scenes as I describe above is inflected, finally, by the succession of corporeal-​gestural elements focalized in increasing proximity. And, as we see, not only the framing, pacing, and editing of the shots are at work here but also elements of the mise-​en-​scéne—​like the cold, hard materials 18  V. I. Pudovkin’s account of the experiment is in Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. Ivor Montagu (New York: Bonanza Books, 1949), 137–45. Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley interpret accounts of the actor Mosjukhin’s face in the experiment as “neutral” to mean ambiguous: see “The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classical Experiment,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 59–​75. Of course I invoke throughout this books various forms of ambiguity or indeterminacy of the face, but how we experience an “expressionless” face is itself—​a s Bresson’s work demonstrates—​no simple matter. Consider, for instance, the potentiality of a supposedly neutral expression of the relaxed face of a sleeper which, even as it is open and available to our view, might connote a powerfully mysterious, suggestive, even uncanny sense of the face. 19  Yuri Tsivian, “Some Historical Footnotes to the Kuleshov Experiment,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London:  British Film Institute, 1990), 247–​55. In “Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor, Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 45–​67, Mikhail Yampolsky maps the adoption of physiognomic models in acting techniques that informed the organization of the actor’s body and face in the Kuleshov experiment, as part of other Soviet artistic tradition of the early 1920s.

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and geometrical configurations of the setting—​both when focalized like the bars in the foreground, but even when falling out of focus. All these inflect the expressive workings of faces and bodies and the connotative dimensions of the scene as a whole. According to Pudovkin’s account of Kuleshov’s experiment, the reading of expression is in fact retroactive, predicated on a succession of relays. Facial expression, identification, identity, are understood thereby as second-​level operations read into the baseline image—​a n image of an impassive face—​t hat precedes, in such account, articulation proper. This implies a split between the face and its expression: the latter is syntactically added to the former, and with a delay, so that succession in time—​rather than instantaneity or a more fluid duration—​defines the system of production that would yield the meaningfully expressive face. The produced expression overwhelms, presumably, all given features, qualities, lighting, deliberate or unconscious nuances in the shot—​a lthough it is obvious that in actual film practice (rather than the “laboratory conditions” of the experiment) these too must enter into the equation. It is primarily in the deliberate joining of at least two distinct images—​one of which is not, by definition, that of the subject but that of another face or object—​t hat, according to Kuleshov’s teaching, expression transpires. The Kuleshov effect is predicated upon a calculated misreading of the “neutral face” by virtue of a contiguous image that absorbs it into a discursive system, fusing and producing it as expression. The retroactive nature of this operation—​Mosjukhin’s face was neutral, or ambiguous at most, then the reverse shot stepped in to adjust and determine its expression—​i mplicates, in effect, that some form of misrecognition is built into the production of the face’s meaning, into its identity, which brings us back to The Wrong Man. Although both the early segment of the contemplative close-​ups described by Godard and the process of the clerk’s misidentification can be classified in terms of shot-​reverse shot, it is against this shared and most basic editorial conceit that their differences stand out. The fast-​paced shot-​reverse shot in the insurance agency sequence shifts and controls our attention and reading, even as we become conscious, at the same time, of the unfolding of the clerk’s own misrecognition as a critical issue. 20 The point-of-view camera placements along a rigid 180-​degree axis, rather than the more relaxed, classical three-quarters view of the face in social exchange; the punctuation of Kuleshov effects, specifically the clerk’s response to Fonda’s hand movement, and then his palpable hesitation that endows the image with an extra temporal beat—​a ll dictate quite emphatically our reading of the clerk’s thoughts as we inhabit her misrecognition. The sequence demonstrates clearly the assertive powers of film language when so masterfully controlled by Hitchcock. Indeed we cannot but read what it dictates, even as it comprises ambiguity, error, or dimensions of thought and expression exceeding the characters’ own implied consciousness at various points—​as with Fonda’s discomfort. Miss Dennerly thinks she recognizes something in Fonda, and our recognition of this makes us complicit in her suspicious and anxious stare—​we see what she sees and can easily put ourselves in her shoes. At the same time, the way in which we see her seeing while taken up, technically, from 20  Gilles Deleuze classifies the shot-​reverse shot as “affection image”—​namely a mental relation between faces or between persons and objects—​d istinguishing it from the alternation of shots that constitute the goal-​oriented “action image.” The insurance agency sequence may be said, in some sense, to collapse the two and perhaps in this way further support Deleuze’s understanding of Hitchcock as a transitional figure in film history. See Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 107, 203.



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Fonda’s point-of-view, exceeds what he perceives or comprehends (on the diegetic level). Even if he may seem somewhat nervous or perplexed by her intense look, he is still ignorant of the suspicion that we already see tainting him, glaringly legible in the objectifying displacement of the look from face to chest, where the idea of a gun has been raised and cannot be put to rest. It is interesting to note how Fonda’s features maintain through much of the film that impassive evenness, a constitutional disposition that shields him, to some extent, throughout his ordeal. To do nothing and do it well is Hitchcock’s measure of the ideal actor. In fact, expression seems to bounce off of Fonda and ricochet onto others, marking them instead—​t he clerk and, most distinctly, the wife. The turning point occurs in the latter’s devastated experience when she throws a hairbrush at Fonda, first hitting his forehead, then a mirror. Not so much his expression per se, but the mirror’s broken reflection of his countenance, as if duplicating and magnifying the cut on the forehead, finally appears to register, in removed optical doubling, the unfolding crisis (Fig. 3.10). We shall return to the question of Vera Miles’s face in due course. However, the camera itself registers the rebounding of expression off of Fonda’s impassive surface, as in the famous revolving shot over his face, that seems to hang in—​i f not be decapitated by—​t he shadows of his jail cell (Fig. 3.11). Godard points out how such camera work in its abstract optical notation takes up Fonda’s consciousness from the outside, as it were, turning it into expressive motion while leaving the actor’s face relatively free of emoting or forced expressivity. Indeed one witnesses here a radical outcome of Hitchcock’s treatment

FIGURE 3.10:  The face doubled and broken, reflected and split in The Wrong Man –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 3.11:  Hanging in the shadows: The Wrong Man –​ frame enlargement.

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of Fonda: a splitting between actor and action, between face and expression, and their overtly synthetic re-​joining as predicated exclusively, and explicitly, on optical and cinematic devices. Perhaps it is in implicit reference to Fonda’s “original face” as a sort of baseline condition—​i n repose, as in the early close-​ups—​t hat this subsequent sense of splitting and self-​a lienation becomes so pronounced. In the course of the sub-​sequence analyzed here we noted, at the same time, that the clerk’s own face is rendered progressively distorted. While a tenseness of features may be simply part of the actress’s physique that Hitchcock needed in this role, an increasing sense of distortion on her face is surely amplified by the harsh editing rhythm and formal parameters of the shots. Within the technocratic setting of the office with its mechanical typing sounds, Miss Dennerly’s countenance evolves under duress, as if she herself were being interrogated and tortured under the lighting, the shallow focus, and the sharp graphic contrasts—​a s if, ultimately, she herself is affected by her own misreading of the other. All these aspects endow the shots with an almost cartoon-​like f latness, further dominated by the bars traversing the entire frame, like a grid without beginning and without end, seeming to pertain as much to the filmmaking apparatus that controls the space as to the realistic setting (see again Fig. 3.5). The clerk’s face is set in what we may well describe as an anthropometric configuration, a grid-​l ike system that makes subtle dissymmetries stand out, rendering every shadow, shift, or nuance as distortion and error vis-​à-​v is a rigid spatio-​temporal framework. Despite its basic symmetry—​a traditional parameter of wholeness and harmony—​t he human face is not a geometrical or robotic entity: facial images split in half, duplicated and rejoined in mirror symmetry almost always strike us as uncanny. Namely the face does not lend itself without cost to such rigid measures—​techniques that subjugate the otherwise nuanced, impressionable dimension of the face as it stands out among objects and settings.

EXCURSUS ON ANTHROPOMETRICS A correspondence is suggested here between Hitchcock’s organization of the clerk’s face in a grid-​like formal containment that arrests and distorts its unique mobility of living expression, and the restrictive, highly regimented shot-​reverse shot (including the maneuvering of Kuleshov effects) in the sequence. Jointly they posit a cinematic application of anthropometric practice: the tradition of regulatory and measuring apparatuses meant to contain the evasive qualities of contingency and singularity in the human form and to subjugate it to systemic scrutiny and institutional organization and control. A principal landmark in the long visual culture of anthropometric systems is the emergence of “the modern subject”: the idea of the individual equal by objective value to all other individuals as defined across national, juridical, philosophical, and a range of representational systems. Specifically in response to René Descartes’s Les Passions de l’âme of 1649, Charles Le Brun devised a visual lexicon of facial expressions, ingeniously organized in a closed system of differences vis-​à-​v is a fixed grid. A neutral expression of the average European male, in “tranquility,” forms a baseline disposition and serves to chart along the lines of principal facial coordinates—​chin, mouth, pupils, brows in repose—​t he basic horizontals and verticals of the grid. All other expressions diverge, if even in subtle ways, from



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FIGURE 3.12:  Charles Le Brun, La Hardiesse [Boldness] from the series Diagrammes (ca. 1668) © RMN-​Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

this abstract graphic chart in a manner that could be objectively described or measured in relation to the grid (Fig. 3.12). Le Brun’s diagrams contributed, in fact, to the establishment of the Academy as modern institutional framework for the visual arts, promoting the authorized control of representation and reading of the human form. Academic painting would draw on this disciplined system of representation of the human countenance in more or less complex ways. But anthropometrics was principally employed in the new disciplines of the social sciences, for which photography and cinematography were deemed to be ideally suited tools early on. A century after Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomic studies, Cesare Lombroso proposed in The Criminal Man (L’uomo deliquente, 1876, with editions expanded through 1897) massive criminological classifications of the face and other body parts. Photography enters Lombroso’s project as it does the work of Francis Galton—​Darwin’s cousin, who advanced fingerprint techniques using statistical methods, and is also credited as the father of eugenics—​a nd of Alphonse Bertillon, who devised an anthropometric-​photographic system joined with quantitative descriptions in the service of criminal identification procedures that survive to our time (Fig. 3.13). The photographic act was thus rationalized and regulated vis-​à-​v is objective graphic parameters, predefined to allow both the generalized evaluation of the group and the registration of deviance against a grid of measurements. Anthropometrics could serve diverse instrumental applications in techniques of institutional state surveillance and social control, engaging graphic, statistical, diagnostic tools in subjugating the human form within prescribed and precise scenographies. The calculation of camera and object position, distance, scale, angle, backdrop, and lighting, radicalized a condition that can be understood as already inherent in photography’s optical and broadly objective claim—​one that, in a sense, reaches its conclusion in our digital culture. The photographer, Sekula suggests, is redefined here as part technician, part clerk—​a nd we would now add part programmer, or algorithm engineer.

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FIGURE 3.13:  First criminal identification card filed by the New York State Bertillon Bureau (1896). Photo: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services.

In his special variant on this system, Galton devised a kind of statistical photography, superimposing by precise alignment the heads and faces of dozens of individuals in various groups to produce an image of the average representative type. Galton dispensed, thereby, with the camera’s capacity for precise differentiation, as his techniques effaced singular, non-​ recurring features, minimizing exceptions, preserving only what elements persisted in the superimposed exposures to produce a synthetic photographic equivalent of statistical averages. For instance: eight cases of criminality are superimposed to produce one of several composite types; twenty plus thirty-​six consumptive cases produce a facial composite of fifty-​six, etc. (Fig. 3.14). 21 Anthropometric practice goes way beyond cataloguing here, fusing individual likenesses in synthetically manufactured wholes that eliminate any unique markers of the individual, ​to present instead an image of some phantom average. The claim to truth of this calculated optical fabrication hinges on the camera’s objective and scientific potentiality, understood to crystalize a natural, self-​evident condition—​a nd its presumably corresponding moral 21  Cf. Allan Sekula’s detailed discussion and his distinctions between the diverse projects of Galton and Bertillon. On Galton’s composite portraits see also David Green, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” The Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1984): 3–​16.



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FIGURE 3.14:  Francis Galton, from his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883). Image courtesy of Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

substance. A common physiognomic essence, subdued in the single likeness but foregrounded in the synthetic portrait, was thus seen as inherent in the criminal man or woman, the physically or mentally ill, the politically subversive, or the racial other. As James Lastra put it very clearly, the attempt to classify, rationalize, and master the incomprehensible crowds of urban modernity harnessed photography’s objective-​scientific (or, scientistic) potential: “the photographic encounter with the world, we might say, is always a gamble of sorts through which

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traditional representational forms like the portrait open themselves structurally to the aleatory, the idiosyncratic, the unintelligible.” 22 This is how, Lastra observes, Poe’s narrator in “The Man of the Crowd,” pursuing a singular and in that way illegible face that stands out against a grid of types—​clerks, Jews, gamblers, and others who (he believes) he can comprehend, but can really just classify—​fi nally resorts to interpreting this facial illegibility as a symptom of “the genius of deep crime.” In this case, one might say, illegibility is the crime. The photographic process was to propel legibility to a whole new level: social conditions and configurations were not simply “represented,” but grasped by the camera as self-evident truth: visual, indexical, transparent, claiming precision and generalizability toward a rationalizing-​scientistic system whose premises and applications now appear to us patently dubious. Yet vast systems of this sort, served by photographic and cinematographic devices, proliferated; some of these methods survived almost intact, and others insinuated themselves in different guises into contemporary institutional practices. Early cinema experimented, fitfully, with anthropometric culture, yielding a few curious cases whose self-​reflective suggestion is striking. The American Mutoscope and Biograph company’s twin films of 1904, each under a minute’s running time, Photographing a Female Crook and A Subject for the Rogues’ Gallery, are set in a police station’s designated photography space—​ although they were shot by cameraman A. E. Weed in a New York studio. The films depict how two policemen and a photographer make efforts to seat and keep a woman still—​by different maneuvers in each film—​in order to have her picture taken.23 The woman struggles bodily and, as the movie camera approaches her, wildly distorts her face, presumably to defeat identification (Figs. 3.15–3.16). One counts among the props and instruments that would contain her not only the photographic backdrop and seat facing the movie camera but also a still camera set up on the right and included in the movie camera’s initial field of vision. But in our broader conception of cinema’s anthropometric potentialities, I would also include here the dolly-​in camera movement toward the woman, advancing from long shot to medium close-​up. It seems to be principally against this steadily approaching, assaulting movie camera, threatening not only to document, but truly to capture, contain, and devour this woman at every scale—​f rom full body to face—​t hat she responds with increasing struggle and facial gesticulation: a reaction that makes evident the violent, oppressive dimensions of this visual interrogation. Charles Musser informs me that, ​as criminals were in fact known to contort their features when seated for mug shots to defeat identification, s​ uch images had also become a common “genre” with entertainment value in the daily papers. Grotesque facial distortion, both actual and staged, and across both still and moving images, thus challenged the anthropometric devices of visual confinement. The two films cited here can indeed be seen, to borrow Tom Gunning’s terms, 22  James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema:  Perception, Representation, Modernity (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 2. 23  Perhaps due to confusion between Photographing a Female Crook and A Subject for the Rogues’ Gallery, some accounts of these films in the literature are not entirely consistent among themselves. From what I have seen, Female Crook consists of a single shot while Rogues’ Gallery of two, the second shot being extremely brief, showing the woman smiling, as if already out of role. See Kemp R. Niver, Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress, ed. Bebe Bergsten (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986), 248, and Tom Gunning’s account in Before Hollywood: Turn-​of-​the-​Century American Film, eds. Jay Leyda, Charles Musser, et al. (New York: Hudson Hills Press and the American Federation of the Arts, 1987), 127.



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FIGURES 3.15–​3.16:  Resisting identification: Photographing a Female Crook (A.E. Weed for the American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1904) –​frame enlargements.

as a “caricature of prisoner resistance to photographic methods of fixing identity.” The female spectacle of facial contortion, read as a form of resistance, is triggered by and staged against “the oppressive power of the diegetic camera.”24 In retrospect one might see these incredible little films as proleptic, burlesque versions of what Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc stages some years later: the human figure is captive within the pre-​established regime of both juridical-​state and cinematic apparatuses; a power struggle ensues, and oppressive measures are taken—​its arena is the woman’s face. Already these earlier films, without indulging in narratives of martyrdom, expose the awful distortions evinced in such struggle. Their entertainment value—​which must have addressed itself to a particular kind of audience—​d issolves once we grant them closer attention. Even as we see these films in our time, and learn that their grotesque drama of the face is staged, the sense of oppression and violence that they exude divulges an actual historical condition, and still touches us. Not only anthropometric settings, instruments, and the men operating them, but also camera movement and framing, the organization of space and time in the cinema can be seen to interiorize such oppressive measures, so deliberately rehearsed in Hitchcock’s art. Unlike the two early films I described, visual systems for arresting, observing, measuring, and cataloguing the human form would routinely conceal the actual devices, sublimating the violence harnessed in the process and the institutional and cultural forces which inflect identification in these systems. The camera would, as a matter of course, attend to the human subject—​a nd to the question of identity in every sense—​as if it were an immediately available surface, an objective, ontological given.25 But is it not the case that just by virtue of being photographed within a prescribed scenography, like that of the Bertillon card, one is singled out in the files of the police? Criminal identity is already inscribed by the technologies, institutions, and powers that define and contain it.26 This perception is reflected in Hitchcock’s own attesting, in interviews, 24  Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 27. 25  Diana Fuss discusses this crux in Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. 26  It is interesting to consider that Hitchcock’s film is almost contemporaneous with the sociological and historical research, and the philosophical thought, devoted to the institutions—​most notably prisons and asylums—studied, most famously, ​by Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault in that period.

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to an innate fear of the police: just being caught in its gaze suffices to put one’s legal and moral legitimacy into question, to fracture one’s integrity as subject. FONDA’S ANXIOUS PASSIVITY  

in submitting to institutional procedures reflects just such tarnished consciousness. One should be innocent until proven guilty before the law, but one is already marked by criminality, and senses oneself as deviant—​so Hitchcock suggests—​i n any sort of contiguity with those apparatuses devised to chart, define, and contain the crime. The devices, the means and representational modes of such apparatuses—​which are in any case part of the greater fabric of urban modernity—​a lready themselves exhibit forms of confinement and imprint them upon the human figure. Indeed, in numerous shots we witness Fonda’s face, head-​on or in steady profile, caught within such grids. The bars at the insurance agency were only the first appearance of such forms by which Fonda’s face is evaluated (Figs. 3.17–3.20). A sense of profound anxiety, even panic, lurks throughout these grids and betrays the distortion and the psychic horror that comes along with them. Dare we see its figure in the chaotic bit of crumbling plaster, an apparently contingent material detail yet so oddly focalized, pointed to, indexed throughout Fonda’s investigation in the police offices? A background detail lurking in Fonda’s shadow, this invasive element in the image is nevertheless near, clear, and large enough—​about the size of a hand, or a face—​to claim our attention in these shots (Figs. 3.21–3.22). A filmmaker as exacting as Hitchcock does not leave such things to chance. This formless stain in the crumbling wall is sometimes directly centered in the frame between the detective’s fingers and Fonda’s head, almost competing with it. With some shifts of camera angle, it sometimes seems to erupt right out of his head, or else to bracket him in a configuration that also includes an ominous electric wire. Certainly what stands out in the context of our discussion is the way in which this formless entity is juxtaposed with the ordered, rational façade of the police on the one hand and, on the other,

 

 

FIGURES 3.17–3.20:  Anthropometric grids: The Wrong Man –​frame enlargements.



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FIGURES 3.21–​3.22:  Face versus formless: The Wrong Man –​frame enlargements.

the reassuring ideal humanity of Fonda’s beautiful face established in the early close-​ups. An image of destruction and decay—opposed to the formal integrity of both the face itself and the state apparatus in which it is caught—this horrific “little-​bit-​of-​R eal,” as Slavoj Žižek would say, gazes at us. 27 This invasion of the formless is soon suppressed, however, in the controlled grids of the institutional mise-​en-​scène, from the insurance agency through the prison setting, the arraignment scene, and beyond. These are reinforced by the anthropometric connotations of basic cinematic articulations visited upon the singular human creature caught therein. We have seen this misidentification machine switched on when the face was subjugated not only by the clerk’s projection of a presumably violent memory upon a routine gesture by somebody who looks like somebody else, not only by the restrictive setting in which both Fonda and the clerk are caught, but by the rigidly enframed and tightly paced cinematic syntax itself. Misidentification is in a sense a product of this system which, in firmly codifying the reading of a fleeting surface resemblance, or of a chance gesture, imprints identity upon contingency. Even the film’s resolution can be seen as similarly triggered when we find ourselves rushing toward identification of the “right man”—​who nevertheless remains forever anonymous, unknown. Does the climactic superimposition—​t hat artificial play of surfaces suddenly turned transparent—​suffice to explain what has come to pass, to determine and judge in a hurry the petty criminal, one of whose few lines is his calling out that he, too, has children? In an instant Hitchcock reminds us that other lives, entire biographies, unavailable domains—​social, personal, economical, psychic—​lurk under the surfaces of contemporary urban existence not quite available to the police, to diegetic resolution, and to the movie camera. Anthropometric regimes survive, however, and have become, if anything, interiorized, namely taken for granted on all sides of the law—​t hough some of their connotations must have soured with various totalitarian implementations culminating in the Final Solution. Yet we find them persisting, across a wide range of institutions, in the world that followed—​a world that

27  In his introduction to Everything You Always Wanted to Know, p. 7, Žižek posits the Real as a necessary detour within his Lacanian schema of Hitchcock’s symbolic order: “The paradox is that this symbolic pact, this structural network of relations, can establish itself only in so far as it is embodied in a totally contingent material element, a little-​bit-​of-​R eal which, by its sudden irruption, disrupts the homeostatic indifference of relations between subjects. In other words, the imaginary balance changes into a symbolically structured network through a shock of the Real.”

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still seeks reassurance in (quasi-​)scientific methods of identification.28 As Hitchcock’s film reminds us, even a routine face-​to-​face encounter might become in this arena—​in an atmosphere of mass hysteria seeping through Cold-War America, even in the ordinary grayness of a life insurance office—​a n apprehensive occurrence full of suspicion and dread. It is telling that Godard finds in the midst of this, of all films, an emblematic promise of authentic being in the free disposition of the cinematic face. But one also recognizes that such instances as he dwells on are few and far between, and perhaps themselves responding to, or already marked by, their time. This might be what Manny Farber diagnosed in Fonda’s countenance here: a “nervousness that is like a fever, self-​pity, a crushing guilt that makes him more untrustworthy than the movie’s criminal population.”29 There is a way in which the protagonist’s prosecution and the apparatuses in which he is caught do, in fact, bring out something in Fonda’s face: a burden that is perhaps more historical than it is Christian or existential. Possibly, no face is immune, no face is innocent—​not even this one. Between the clerk’s, the police’s, Godard’s, and Farber’s look, Fonda’s star-​face transpires as a dense nexus of ineffability, inscrutability, doubt, culpability: all these partake in the riddle of identity. Hitchcock’s own, presiding look suggests that—​whatever these attributes add up to—​such identity is distinct, in kind, from the “positive identification” pronouncement of the police lineup, and all such enumerations.

NOT A MIRROR, NOT A LAMP We know that, underneath the surface of generic resolutions, the restoration of identity and integrity of self is, in any case, only partial. No measure of discovery, correction, unveiling, or knowledge can restore a primal, unselfconscious integrity of the sort projected by Godard 28  When I first got a US Resident photo ID card in the mid-​1990s, it stipulated a specific angle of the head to expose the right ear in classical anthropometric tradition. Related identification procedures have perked up after September 11, 2001, when the press reported on recent advances in computerized anthropometrics and “lie detection programs” that enhance surveillance and screening strategies by visual indices. Certain FBI, CIA, police, and airport security personnel are trained in hundreds of hours of facial expression and identification techniques that revive some of the old Galtonian classifications with the purpose of picking out a face in the crowd: a terrorist? a nervous infiltrator? At times just wearing ethnic dress suffices to trip you from one position in surveillance grids to another. See Malcolm Gladwell, “The Naked Face,” The New Yorker (August 5, 2002): 38–​49. 29  Manny Farber diagnoses Fonda’s disposition in roles starting from the 1940s in these terms: “Fonda starts bearing down on the saintly stereotype with which writers strangled him. In a typical perversity, he edges into the bass-​playing hero of Wrong Man with unlikable traits: nervousness that is like a fever, self-​pity, a crushing guilt that makes him more untrustworthy than the movie’s criminal population.” See “Rain in the Face, Dry Gulch, and Squalling Mouth” in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, exp. ed. (New York: De Capo Press, 1998), 177. Fritz Lang, always attuned to his moment in history, must have glimpsed some earlier version of this when setting Fonda’s much younger face at the intersection of state apparatuses and apparatuses of vision in You Only Live Once (1937). See Tom Gunning’s reading of that film in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 235–​6 0. Consider, finally, how Sergio Leone boldly cast Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), forging out of these same features that served John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)—​now punctuated in color film with the sharp blueness of his eyes in extreme close-​ups whereby flesh itself seems thickened into a mask—​t he image of a racist sociopath of mythic proportions. Leone’s close-​ups, indeed, are never reassuring. The American ideal and its shadowy obverse were somehow matched in Fonda’s features.



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FIGURES 3.23–3.24:  Face-​to-​f ace: The Wrong Man –​frame enlargements.

upon the beautiful early close-​ups. Even in the diegetic domain, losses are multiplied: as in Vertigo, resolution of the mystery—​namely “positive identification”—​a nd a happy ending are certainly not synonymous. And while no catastrophic deaths take place in the workaday world of The Wrong Man, the fracturing of self, elaborated through the woman’s experience, is devastating, and no resolution of the mystery can correct it: even as the legal identification riddle might be resolved—​it is only pro forma. The criminal returns to the scene of the crime. For our eyes only—​as from an omniscient perspective in which divine intervention and chance are hardly distinguishable—​t he superimposition of the Wrong and the Right man promises a reversal of fortune. The clerk’s original misidentification, triggered by chance visual coincidence, which immediately plunged Fonda’s face into an anthropometric machinery, is to be answered and corrected by this other chance encounter: the forces of contingency may serve oppressive, catastrophic ends, or the mysterious workings of Grace. More than just plot device in perfect temporal coinciding of the actual criminal caught in the act, the movement into optical matching of facial parameters is an extraordinary spectacle: it stands out against the realist fabric of the film, although its relation to such anthropometric processes with which we have been concerned is equivocal. Disparate domains converge in the celebrated miracle-​superimposition scene: the modern face is confronted here not just with its random counterpart in the crowd—​t he workings of chance—​but with its far more fateful mythical double. The scene opens with nothing less than a hallowed Christ with the Sacred Heart icon, inserted in a brief shot-​reverse shot, face-​to-​face with Fonda, whose large shadow is cast on the wall, just next to the radiating light painted into the icon (Figs. 3.23–3.24). Since we are asked repeatedly in this film to compare faces, it may not be too far fetched to remember, first of all, that Christ’s face—​for its auratic plenitude, innocence, perfection—​is culturally construed as a paradigm of all faces (and of their image as such) and bears comparison with Fonda’s prelapsarian “first face” in the film (as per Godard’s venerating account). A sort of parenthetical symmetry can be drawn between that first innocent close-​ up and the Christ icon. 30 And just as those early close-​ups ascertain, for the viewer, Fonda’s complete innocence and integrity (despite Farber’s judgment), so here, Christ’s face acts as a sort of guarantee, presiding over the chain of contingencies and inspiring them with meaning.

30  That Fonda is first hailed by the police as “Chris”—​t he familiar version of his first and proper name and of which Emmanuel is, in any case, a Biblical variant—​can be symbolically posited as yet another instantiation of his misidentification; he does not intuitively respond to it, except insofar as such a name is in a sense shared by all Christians.

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But such auratic investment is cast in doubt almost at once: after all, it is only a modest mass-​ produced print of a naïve, popular rendering of the haloed Christ against a starry night. An epiphanically flamed, beaming Sacred Heart hovers over the robed chest, as if floating toward the picture plane, suspended between different spatial orders. Christ’s left hand points to the heart, while his right is raised in benediction. Everything about such an icon is addressed outward, to the viewer’s observation and his supplication. This is not about the unique individual identity, the living complexity, recognition, and depth of humanist portraiture, but an entirely coded, conventionalized rendition—​although it also hinges on the Catholic conception of the incarnate image, according to which such a reproduction is just as potent as an “original” image and, indeed, as its “original” model: Christ’s earthly form. This is why it is legitimate to approach it as the object of prayer and supplication: as icon (rather than just a painting or “representation”) it shares in the identity of the original, and this identity transfers—​like Bazin’s photographic ontology—​to any and all of its copies or reproductions.31 It requires only faith—​but nothing less. Otherwise how could such an image do the work of endorsing the miraculous turn of the plot? Fonda, on his mother’s advice, presumably prays for strength. One can imagine “seeing” the icon’s inspiration when, cutting back from it to a big close-​up of Fonda, his two bright eye lights almost seem to mirror the stars of the iconic backdrop. A moment later, as the superimposition begins to unfold, these twinkling light reflections resonate with the splatter of streetlights in the nocturnal urban scene from which the anonymous “right man” emerges to the foreground. Subsequently, with the matching of faces in the superimposition, even Christ’s halo seems to flash before our eye when the right man’s hat, rendered translucent by the superimposition effect, hovers momentarily over Fonda’s head. Although we might imagine here the icon come to life, perform a miracle, or at least console Fonda it is, as we noted, only a generic piece of popular art: the dissonance between its archaic-​sacral claim and status as mass-​produced reproduction is what defines it, also, as kitsch. But is not the question we put to it the same as the one we extend to the cinema, especially with regard to the predicament of the face therein? How can the cinema restore our human faith—​I mean faith in the human—​in a desacralized world of mechanical mass reproductions on the one hand and random contingencies of the urban crowd on the other—​a ll of which the cinema instantiates and perpetuates? What strength, meaning or value, what reassurance that does not dissolve into kitsch can the cinema inspire in the leveling grids of modern technologies, institutions, and generic representations? Surely, this question is among the great themes of film history. It achieves unique urgency in post-​classical American cinema and is focalized in Hitchcock’s film. The Christ-​icon’s naïve pictorial play of inner and outer—​the artifice of floating surfaces and painted lights of all sorts, the pointing to the hovering heart and address to the viewer—​finds a sort of equivalence in the piece of heightened filmic artifice that follows: the optical joining of the superimposition, with its own play of interior and exterior, surfaces and transparencies, its matching of disparate forms, its odd spatiality (Figs. 3.25–3.26). One sees it on several levels

31  The suggestiveness of the doctrine of the icon in relation to photography and film has not been lost on scholars. In Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4, 11, 53, Hans Belting uses the example of photography to describe the powers of identity and agency attributed to the icon, and describes the cult surrounding one Dr. Giuseppe Moscati (d. 1927) whose larger than life photograph is venerated at the altar of the church of Gesù Nuovo in Naples.



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FIGURE 3.25:  A cinematographic wonder: The Wrong Man –​ frame enlargement.

FIGURE 3.26:  Haloed by superimposition: The Wrong Man –​ frame enlargement.

simultaneously. Firstly at the simplest level (which cannot be dismissed), it is sort of popular catechistic lesson: if you pray, you will be saved. Secondly, reinforcing this magical causality but also distinguishable from it, is the basic narrative implication of parallel action: “while he prayed at home, this transpired down the street.” Thirdly, it reiterates Fonda’s overall passivity in the film—​ worlds away from the active protagonist’s driven pursuit in other Hitchcock films (for example, North by Northwest) to correct a mistaken identity, leading to an exhilarating, productive realization of one’s own. The superimposition is something that happens to him, imposed upon his countenance which is, again, passive to the extreme in his close-​up, while the active criminal advances into the matching of faces and then takes over the scene—​converting the superimposition into a lap-​dissolve. Fourthly, one considers the miraculous connotations of the superimposition here not by way of invoking ghosts and spirits, but as the conjuring of a quasi-​magical sympathy between the two men, implying a deeper level on which they are doubles, or by which some identity-​exchange occurs between them, only to then be redifferentiated as self and other, identity and difference, presence and absence, through a vision that is proper to the cinema.

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Finally one might consider the more complex possibilities of superimposition as a mode of cinematic thought along the lines that Daniel Morgan traces in reference to Bazin’s essay on the topic, and culminating in Godard’s film-​h istoriographic and analytic deployment of the device in the Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98). 32 It is Godard’s abundant use of superimposition qua montage of simultaneity, Morgan suggests, that reinforces the possibility of this device not only as a way of visually signaling a fictional character’s inner thoughts or explanatory recollection (as is the case in the superimposition effect in the lap dissolve of Judy’s face, in Vertigo, onto a vision of the crime) but also as a way for the medium itself to think through two (or more) images together. The composite image emerges as an image of thought or, indeed, posits the cinematic act, as such, as a mode of thought (in Godard, it is the video manipulation of film that brings it to yet another reflective-​h istorical level). Indeed, one of Godard’s examples in the Histoire(s) includes the scene with which we are concerned whereby, upon the already-​superimposed faces of the two men, Godard superimposes a third man’s face, that of Hitchcock himself. Hitchcock’s spectral face is, of course, abundantly familiar: physiognomically it is as dissimilar as can be when compared with the two matching figures in The Wrong Man—​one a Hollywood star, the other anonymous as both character and actor. Hitchcock’s own unique face thus hovers in the Godard sequence as a sort of presiding consciousness, a power that can join and separate the elements. It is not like the author’s signature cameo appearances, but a superadded pledge of an author’s responsibility to historical events, face-​to-​face with the camera. The presentation of self—​the face as an articulation of self in the world—​a nd the claim to truth are bound. Committed, as Hitchcock states in the film’s prologue, to a “true story, every word of it”—​namely a narrative that he has not invented or manipulated—​t he author (Hitchcock/​Godard) nevertheless holds all the super-​ imposed powers of suggestion and implication, and it is for him to explore, in his fiction, the circulation and irreversible contamination of guilt through the workings of the facial image on film. That Hitchcock’s remarkable opening speech on veracity and authenticity is staged as itself a geometrical play of shadows and light within a vast movie studio sound​stage, itself teases our faith, disturbing simple oppositions of truth and fiction, identity and appearances. The cinema’s optical and ethical charge—​l ike its weighing of image and knowledge—​cannot stand in steady ratio, or be directly translated one into the terms of the other. But nor can they be opposed, from within Hitchcock’s film, in quite the way that Levinas distinguished the face from its own surface. Godard’s use of superimposition to cite the Hitchcock scene—​where the device already achieves a sort of apotheosis—​but then combined with the filmmaker’s own countenance, posits the question of identity as bound up with authorial agency. The different components in the original film do not, in fact, collapse into each other as they meet in the close-​up. The maneuvering allows for the individual contours to approach, converge only for a moment, then pull apart and be redifferentiated. One must be able to put things together, not only to associate people, but also to tell them apart. Hitchcock’s scene seems to us, even by today’s standards, astonishingly choreographed—​it is a cinematographic feat, a wonder to behold: with its play

32  Daniel Morgan, “The Afterlife of Superimposition,” Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 127–41.



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of surface and depth, outer and inner spaces, with its escalating tension in the movement of the man’s approach and our dawning recognition. Certainly the movement into the facial superimposition animates all these ways of seeing it while also exploring simultaneity and disjunction, the face and the person as only ever​present to our view as a shifting play of surfaces that belies any assurance of transparency. It raises to a whole other level the film’s engagement with the face: as it falls from an originary plenitude to an object of scrutiny and misidentification; as it slides from unselfconscious integrity to being split under the oppressive gaze of institutions. Having thus dramatized the predicament of visually-​based indentification, the film raises the face again, in the superimposition scene, as an object of revelation. The perfect coinciding of face and person, of what is seen and what is known is only, at most, asymptotic, and its time-​span is that of an epiphany: it is instantaneous and for our eyes only. Delivering us from contingency and coincidence to the suggestion of design and destiny on the one hand and, on the other, to the floating dimension of the epiphanic, the superimposition translates all magical, imaginary, or philosophical correspondences for our own human eyes. It is a nice touch that such eyes are, finally, assigned to the minor detective: his “double take” occurs after hours, on his way home, having just crossed paths with the criminal in the corridor. It is for one person looking at the face of another to negotiate contingency—​the fleeting glance—​recognition, and reflection. Marginal, intuitive, uncoded, this glance, too, might be described as epiphanic. But a murky residue remains. Not the transparency of superimpositions, not the reflective iteration of forms and movements in the apprehension of identity, but rather an opacity that refracts every look, every light, shrouds the woman’s face. Even under the guise of benevolent mental care, an oppressive institutional gaze naggingly presides in her variant of an interrogation scene. Nested within a symbolic mise-​en-​scène incorporating a single lighted lamp at the psychiatrist’s desk, Vera Miles’s disposition here would initially seem to stage a psychic exposure, a flow of self-​expression, knowledge, insight, and the light by which these can be joined—​ at least for us if not for the psychiatrist. In a single long take (approximately one and a half minutes), the camera frames Miles in medium close-​up, keeping her face suspended between stasis and mobility in the foreground while tracing in short back-​a nd-​forth panning motions the psychiatrist pacing behind her (Fig. 3.27). The lamp shade sometimes obscures him—​indeed, at some point, he pauses just where his head is, quite simply, eclipsed by this big lamp that looms

FIGURE 3.27:  Face and lamp in dialogue: The Wrong Man –​ frame enlargement.

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in the foreground. The woman is not, of course, face-​to-​face with him: in classic psychoanalytic fashion, his speech is directed at the back of her head—​addressing itself to her hearing only. But for us the odd conversation—​if to call it that—​is displaced onto a visual oscillation between her face and the lighted lamp: they are, in effect, like two heads. Forcing together disparate elements from different planes of the mise-​en-​scène, Hitchcock’s graphic play with scale and depth, with framing and blocking, further elaborates the relationship between the face and knowledge, and invests a distinct psychic dimension into the film. Superficially, one would say that Miles’s face is over-​legible, that it is exhaustive but, really, it seems emptied-​out under the strong light, with only an inert shell—​like that lamp shade—​ suspended there before us, revealing very little. What can one see by this light? Does the expressivity we might feel compelled to read in Miles’s foregrounded countenance correspond to the smug formulaic diagnosis offered by the psychiatrist?33 Or do her tortured features, illumined against the relative obscurity of the office—​her unkempt hair, doughy-​pale complexion, knotted brow, and drooping eyes—​just illustrate what she herself pronounces: “I know I am guilty”? How can guilt be seen, or written, upon a face—​t hough the cliché is so familiar in our culture? This perhaps is all it is: not so much an expressionless face as a faceless expression—​a mask that has painfully grafted itself onto the flesh. Vera Miles’s countenance presents, in the second half of the film, yet another divide between the seen and the unseen “substance” of identity, between image and sign. The lamp that had served as a metaphor for the expressive, radiating, projecting consciousness supplanting, in the romantic imagination, the mirroring-​m imetic conception of art, would seem to partake in the staging of a revelation. Yet its disclosure, like that of the face itself at this point, is equivocal. 34 One finds also in Vertigo a pivotal scene of this sort—​equally punning, and forbidding—​when Madeleine/​K im Novak sits at a table opposite a lamp in Scottie/​James Stewart’s bachelor flat to recount the fabricated dream of her occult past existence so to trigger (we realize in retrospect) her lover’s association of the San Juan Battista location. A bold series of jump-​cuts between camera positions along a curve alternately framing each of the lovers separately opposite a lamp, effects the uncanny quality of the sequence: the conversation does not evolve face-​to-​face since Stewart is placed for the most part behind Novak, yet an odd variant of shot-​reverse shot does evolve here around the figure of the lighted lamp. Seeming to leap from shot to shot as Hitchcock jump-​cuts to a different axis, the lamp both mediates and interferes with the couple’s conversation at a point where, indeed, communication is deceptive (Figs. 3.28–3.29). In both these scenes faces, specifically women’s faces, are expected—​by convention or cliché—​to open up by the light of the lamp, yet what they reveal is the fact of their own impenetrability, their illegibility. 33  There are several instances in Hitchcock’s films—​most famously in Psycho (1960)—​where the cinematic discourse conveys the institutional-​psychoanalytic diagnosis with a tinge of irony while deeper insight is granted to another agency: the moving image. It seems to me that, in The Wrong Man, the keen perception of the sympathetic defense attorney is presented as far more sensitive and compelling than that of the psychiatrist—​possibly also thanks to the superior qualities of the actor, Anthony Quayle. 34  Robert Bird was the first to remind me of M. H. Abrams’s mapping of the shift from one paradigmatic figure of the poetic consciousness to another in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1953). See Jonathan Culler’s deconstruction of these oppositions in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 155–​68. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 55–​81, cite Abrams in their discussion of “Cinema as Mirror and Face.”



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FIGURES 3.28–3.29:  Face and lamp in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) –​frame enlargements.

In the psychiatrist scene in The Wrong Man the lamp comes to occupy the position of interlocutor, or else a failed interrogator as Miles’s face deflects the light and the doctor’s questions that strike her fore and aft. The face she offers is a sort of grimace, or mask: something one makes, or wears. Another way to put this would be that it effaces her face. The psychotic perception that inflects Deleuze’s observations on the face in close-​up is rather well suited to this context: “The facial close-​up is both the face and its effacement… . The affection-​image has at its limit the simple affect of fear and the effacement of faces in nothingness… . The close-​up does indeed suspend individuation.”35 Suspended (if not shattered) individuation is certainly narrativized in those films—​The Wrong Man, Vertigo—​t hat boast some of the most resonant close-​ ups in Hitchcock’s work, although they are not of the obviously “expressive” sort. 36 Hitchcock’s professed rejection of the emoting actor could be said, as Deleuze put it, to set expression against the face that underlies it: we have seen such dramatic expressive work taken up by Hitchcock’s camera in the jail scene, for instance. But in the scene under consideration Miles’s face seems to have already drowned under its own effacement. This perhaps is the difference between a “crisis of identity” and the collapse of the person—​we will attend to a particular juxtaposition of these terms in the next chapter. Hitchcock’s implied dialogue with the police is, in this film, only the most intricate of his deliberations with modern institutions that, he suggests, share some operative features with the cinema’s own machinations. These institutions are interiorized in our (historical) ways of seeing, situating, and reading the face of others. Yet so little is needed to animate and recover the wonders of the face, and that precious bit is preserved even in Hitchcock’s highly-​w rought craft: the fine punctuation of Fonda’s early close-​ups where distraction, rather than expression, seems to afford an “epiphany of the face,” or the police detective’s double-​take of recognition. A particularly eloquent one is the defense attorney, Anthony Quayle’s little glance at Vera Miles: beyond the professional substance of the case, he is the first to take note of her difficulty—​t his before the critical scene of her collapse at home and thus, remarkably, before Fonda himself seems able to register it. Insofar as these revelatory instances are addressed to us—​a fter all, only we can see them—​t hey train our attention, instructing us to look between the seams of the 35  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 100–​3 . 36  It is, in fact, curious to find The Wrong Man nested between the two spectacular color productions—​The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo—​t hat, at least as concerning Doris Day and James Stewart, involve some of the most intense melodramatic expressions and emphatic acting in all of Hitchcock’s oeuvre.

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coded transactions of modern life, state institutions, and the controlled regimes of the image. They transpire as singular, responsive intimations of subjectivity that the film preserves by renouncing world-​making myths of mastery, containment, and legibility—​which some cinema shares, and by which Hitchcock is often characterized. They linger in the searching duration of layered, shifting surfaces, the fleeting but keen and caring glance—​t he opening up of attention and recognition. They suggest that the cinema can, itself, take up these different ways of seeing and work through their qualities, their particular historical variants, their mutual imbrication. The cinema’s capacity to endow the world with a face is, paradoxically, bound up with its power to take it away—and then, again, offer it back to us, altered. We shall see this paradox explored, in different ways, through Antonioni’s, Warhol’s, and Bresson’s lenses. Not sheer optical or syntactic operations (nor the one forced onto the other) but a more primal look, a vital doubt and, at the same time, a sense of care—​or maybe faith—​a ll are preserved in Hitchcock’s look upon the face, to let us confront what we cannot know, and attend to what we cannot see.



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CHAPTER 4

PASS/​FAIL: SCREEN TEST, APPARATUS, SUBJECT Screen magnetism is something secret—​i f you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell. But you can’t even tell if someone has it until you actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol Fail better.

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

I

n the mid-​1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic, several experimental film projects chose the screen test as their central conceit. Not long before, narrative fiction films also revolving around the lives and labors of the movie industry—​in Hollywood, in Cinecittà—​ had taken up the screen test as a paradigmatic situation. It is a trope that seems to lend itself to a focused, even existential drama wherein basic forces are put into play: character, role, the rise to and fall from stardom, the confrontation of the individual with the indifferent powers of the industry, and with the camera that mercilessly exposes her deficiencies, her age, her weakness—​ in short, her humanity. Such scenes erupt especially in post-​classical cinema, with the decline of the studio system: almost invariably they tell of crisis and failure, bespeaking the cinema’s heightened self-​consciousness, the sense of its own falling-​off, the decomposition of genres and rupture of formal boundaries, the aging and the death of stars. These historical conditions of the cinema gave another turn of the screw to the earlier-​modern confrontation with the technological image, and with mass culture. The encounter of the human subject with the apparatus—​t he technology, the studio, the industry—​is dramatized and intensified, yet the screen test is, one way or another, suspended in these films: the question of the contender “passing” or “failing” the test, of a role being won or lost, is unresolved, or displaced onto different spheres of social being, and of consciousness. The irresolution of the screen test radicalizes it as form, while also blurring distinctions of “subject,” “actor,” “character,” and “role.” These heightened

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anxieties about human agency also prompt us, in these pages, to resort, again, to the somewhat antiquated notion of the person. Surely the most stunning artistic appropriation of the screen test as trope, or even as genre, was achieved by Andy Warhol. In his Screen Tests (1964–​66) Warhol laid bare the apparatus, devising in his Factory the confrontational fiction of the test as an existential predicament in which being is staged and its performance put to the test. His understanding of the screen test—​as device, as metaphor, and as deep, even philosophical, form—​was, without a doubt, bound up with his bold recovery of the portrait in the history of art. In contradistinction to Roland Barthes, who raised photography above the cinema precisely in this regard, Warhol’s work confirmed the moving image as the veritable “art of the Person”—​a rguably it surpasses in this aspect even his achievement with silkscreen portraiture in the 1960s.1 Warhol would have come of age seeing movies that reflected on the human confrontation with mass culture in post-war America—​more or less explicitly, the greater number of films of his era do so, across different genres. Some have, indeed, used the screen test as critical trope: Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and, that same year, Bette Davis’s mid-​career vehicle, The Star (directed by Stuart Heisler). Just before this, in Italy, Luchino Visconti made use of the screen test situation in the devastating, penultimate scene of Bellissima (1951). With Anna Magnani—​ the neorealist icon as a would-​be stage-​mother—​Visconti explored lower-​class delusions of instant stardom cultivated between the walls of post-​Fascist Cinecittà.2 Warhol and, in that same period, Michelangelo Antonioni seized, instead, on distinctly upper-​class women’s attempt to translate their already-​attained celebrity through inherited beauty and wealth, into movie stardom. In their different ways, these films barely conceal the women’s struggle to articulate an agency, the struggle for subjecthood to which the screen-​test situation gives rise. Warhol’s Screen Tests—​Callie Angell counts 472—​put both celebrity and anonymity, persons of wide-​ranging backgrounds to the test. 3 But one socialite and would-​be Hollywood actress, Edie Sedgwick, sometimes considered Warhol’s alter-ego, was the subject not only of nine Screen Tests but also of some of his most formidably complex explorations of the face, and of the possibility of the portrait in cinema. I take Face and Outer and Inner Space (both of 1965) to be among Warhol’s most achieved films, and I give the latter especially close treatment in this chapter. With his projected Sedgwick saga titled Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol was quick to foreground his star’s social background and to script it, as it were, into the film. In this regard, and most likely without realizing it, he worked in parallel with a minor work by a major director,

1  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 79. 2  This, as Visconti was perhaps the first to understand, was the inevitable conclusion of neorealism’s cult of the nonprofessional actor, found “in the street.” Of course—​a s I already noted in Chapter One—​M agnani, the Roman “woman of the people,” was as professional as they get. Visconti was also working in the wake of his experience, some three years earlier, with the actual fishermen on the production of La terra trema (1948), some of whom had, apparently, developed movie-​world aspirations after their appearance at the Venice film festival. I elaborate on Visconti’s Bellissima sequence in an earlier essay on which the first part of this chapter draws, “Pass/​Fail: The Antonioni Screen Test,” Framework 55, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 191–​219. 3  Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (New York: Abrams, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). Among these, Angell counts a total of nine Edie Sedgwick tests, all from 1965.



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Michelangelo Antonioni. The latter’s little-​k nown short film narrativized, and basically sealed, the (negative) screen fate of another poor little rich girl, prematurely granted star billing by a magnate of the Italian film industry. Indeed, the would-​be actress in question, Princess Soraya, was already a tabloid celebrity whose path crossed at least once with Warhol’s—​yet his Factory was apparently not her turf, much as one regrets not finding her among his Screen Tests.4 Antonioni’s work with her is certainly of an altogether different consistency, yet it resonates in surprising ways with some of the elements and attitudes—​t hematic, iconographic, affective—​ of Warhol’s project. I will approach these in stride.

THE ANTONIONI SCREEN TEST Il provino (The Screen Test) is Michelangelo Antonioni’s mostly neglected Prefazione, or Preface, to Dino De Laurentiis’s tri-​part omnibus production, I tre volti (Three Faces of a Woman, 1965). 5 It circles around the screen test of a woman already singled out as a celebrity and seeking, it seems, to give some substance and meaning to her public image—​a nd perhaps to remake her life—​t hrough movie acting (Fig. 4.1). Antonioni parses the material, formal, and psychic coordinates intersecting in the situation of the screen test, seeing them accumulate and intensify but never resolve. Drawing on the actual conditions of De Laurentiis’s production, navigating between re-enactment and fiction, Il provino was not to give birth to a star—​nor was I tre volti in its entirety. Staging or, in a way, witnessing the making and unmaking of its human subject as she struggles to articulate a screen persona, Antonioni’s short film lays bare the inadequacy not only of the person to the screen test but of the screen test to the person. One senses here the filmmaker’s own struggle to remold an exceptionally luxurious but fragile creature offered him prepackaged, hermetically sealed, by the production. Probing his beautiful protagonist’s reserve and her fallibility allows him to withhold the screen test’s conclusion and, ultimately, to reflect on cinematic mediation as—​I would suggest—​a mediation of being. Many of Antonioni’s films engage with a search for the person, for someone ostensibly missing (L’avventura, 1960; Identification of a Woman, 1982), lost (Il grido, 1956), or somehow in abeyance of self (The Passenger, 1974)—​variations that are, of course, often enfolded one within the other. In different ways these films trace the displacement and dissolution of a character, the failure to unify and sustain it, the confluence of the searcher and the person sought or lost, and some recognition that follows in its wake. Il provino does not need to venture far and wide, to traverse cities, regions and continents for this purpose. It stays in the movie studio, pursuing its elusive protagonist within that hermetic, artificial environment that

4  A dinner in Soraya’s presence, though with some comical confusion of personages, is narrated in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 190–​3 . Wheeler Winston Dixon tells of a 1969 screening of Blue Movie (1969) at the Factory, attended by Antonioni and Monica Vitti. See http://​blog.unl.edu/​ dixon/​2 012/​0 4/​22/​a ndy-​warhol-​m ichelangelo-​a ntonioni-​a nd-​blue-​movie/​, accessed July 28, 2015. 5  In what follows I refer to Antonioni’s film, alternately, as Prefazione, ​Preface or Il provino, depending on what the immediate context calls for. Generally in the chapter, I use either original Italian titles or English titles depending on how the particular film is best known in this country.

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FIGURE 4.1:  Il provino/Prefazione (The Screen Test/ Preface; Michelangelo Antonioni, 1965) –​frame enlargement.

 

FIGURES 4.2– ​4.3:  At the soundstage: Attempted Suicide (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953) –​frame enlargements.

serves as an actual location. Unlike Antonioni’s modernist cinematic monuments, however, this short film’s hybrid “docu-​d rama” mode is confounding: we do not know at what level of the re-​enactment we stand. Fiction and actuality, action and re-enactment, person and role are compressed in Antonioni’s use of the screen test. The closest precedent in Antonioni’s filmography to the heterogeneous texture of Il provino must be the earlier short Attempted Suicide, his contribution to the 1953 anthology film Love in the City—Cesare Zavattini’s self-​christened “movie-​magazine” comprising a cluster of investigations on modern love. Radicalizing the terms of encounter prompted by a particularly challenging topic—​women who have attempted suicide and returned from the dead (as it were) to confront, on film, their moment of crisis—​A ntonioni’s cinematic compression of telling and showing, present and past, turned the tables on the neorealist ideal of the non-​actor who draws on her “real-​life role.” The several sequences devoted to the women’s narratives, recollected and re-enacted on location, are enframed by connective passages, expressively lit, elaborately blocked and paced, set against a blank studio backdrop propped up within a large soundstage (Figs. 4.2–4.3). With its abject theme, its mostly lower-​class protagonists, and in black-andwhite, Attempted Suicide might first appear quite distant from the glamorous Technicolor world of Il provino. Yet both Antonioni shorts, drawing their stories from the local news and



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sensational press, revolve around existential tests of sorts, moments of encounter elicited by and for the camera, so that the very site of filmmaking unfolds as a space of transition between biographical-​h istorical experience and its emphatically constructed and cinematized corollary. From different ends of the social scale, both the neorealist types in Attempted Suicide and the aristocratic tabloid celebrity of Il provino are, essentially, non-​actors. Indeed, the intermittent efforts of performance required of them appears, at times, to interfere with what they really offer as non-​actors. Antonioni seems not only aware of but, in fact, very much interested in just this interference as a way of probing his subjects. Soraya’s celebrity complicates this precarious navigation of categories and, augmenting its attendant anxieties, yields a particularly unstable work. Oddly, Attempted Suicide—​w ith its multiple protagonists, each accorded a brief narrative fragment that joins the most traumatic instance of the women’s experience with prosaic, everyday detail—​seems, by comparison, more securely composed. Antonioni’s intricate layering of first-​person confession of memory, the second-​person interview (rehearsed and staged), and authoritative, opinionated third-​ person voice-​over narration in Attempted Suicide, blurs any clear distinction between modes of address, any simple linear threading of past and present, narration and action, studio and location. The Zavattinian “film-​inquest” unfolds here not only as social panorama but, as Ivone Margulies astutely observed, as a therapeutic occasion for personal self-​realization—​ and as exemplum. 6 In a climactic moment a young woman re-​enacts the string of everyday activities preceding the slitting of her wrists: she goes through the motions but interrupts them when the blade touches the scar. In place of slitting again, the blade now points to—​it indexes—​t he indelible trace of a past action. And as the deictic cinematic present meets this emissary of the past, the film’s mode of address shifts with the girl’s extending of her wrist directly to the camera. She then goes on to confess that what she really wants is to become an actress (Figs. 4.4–4.6). So does Princess Soraya. Former consort of the Shah of Iran, Soraya Esfandiary-​Bakhtiari was banished in 1958 for her failure to produce an heir. She then roamed amongst the European jet set, which landed her in one of its preferred playgrounds: Rome. Here her celebrity, but also her beauty and grace, brought her to the front doors of cinema. Carlo di Carlo, Antonioni’s close collaborator and archivist, tells that Antonioni’s contribution to I tre volti came about at the suggestion of Franco Indovina, Antonioni’s close friend and assistant on the great black-​a nd-​white features of the early 1960s.7 Indovina was romantically involved with Soraya, who was given the three episodes of Dino De Laurentiis’s omnibus production as a sumptuous means to build her screen persona. Antonioni insisted on placing and designating his contribution as “Preface” or “Introduction.” Although, at about 35 minutes, it is roughly as long as the other episodes, the Prefazione—​by its title and by other distancing devices that I examine later—​t hus situates itself in a threshold position that it exploits for what one might read as an extra-​or pre-​narrative function. This affords Antonioni a freedom of form, a reflexive disposition to be gained from being both within

6  See Ivone Margulies, “Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close-Up,” Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 217–​4 4. 7  Carlo di Carlo, personal interview, Rome, February 2009.

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FIGURES 4.4–4.6:  Re-enactment, monstration, and interview in Attempted Suicide –​frame enlargements.

and outside the structure in this eclectic work. Possibly it also signals Antonioni’s ironic, even non-committal attitude toward the De Laurentiis production as a whole: he might have recognized early on that Soraya would have no future on the screen but, having taken up the project, he thematized this recognition in the inconclusive screen test. The Preface thus introduces Soraya into the world of cinema for the first time, even as it foretells her failure.



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What is Antonioni’s particular interest—​a nd one might ask what is his share—in this story of failure? His one brief statement on the film in the course of production presented it as an extension of his first dip into color in Red Desert (1964), while already preparing for a subsequent film “still without a title” which, he added, will be “very violent.” Possibly he is referring here not to Blow-​Up (1966), but to Tecnicamente dolce—​Technically [or Technologically] Sweet—​ an unrealized project involving video color experiments, for which he prepared a treatment in 1966.8 Il provino falls within Antonioni’s most creative period and can be associated not only with a moment of transition with his shift to color and internationalization of his work in the mid-​1960s, but also with the “auteur super-​spectacles” of the Italian new wave such as Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963)—​both of which are clearly echoed in Il provino. The stylistic allure and commercial appeal of these films were integral to their exploration of how cinematic narration and form might dissolve in emphatically contemporary locations; how the struggle to grasp and the failure to hold together their meandering protagonists in a late-​modern universe of glossy surfaces and media events can give rise to exciting cinematic spectacle. Antonioni’s move to color in that period altered the encounter, on film, between manufactured objects, natural forms, and formlessness, between figure and setting. The dusty world of neorealism now drops even further into the past, as does the gleaming black-and-white of 1930s classical cinema with its wrought glamour of stars. Red Desert achieves its beauty quite differently: it pulses with densities of fog, with the meeting and the separateness of bodies, with the marvels of industrial design which invigorated Antonioni’s work with new graphic and chromatic possibilities. Thus, when Monica Vitti emerged into the polluted landscape in her green wool coat—​a green exquisite in its break with both the natural vegetation and with the primary-​color industrial palette—​ person and coat could speak or, by fantastic counterpoint to the setting, could sing together. Can all the elements be joined here, in the short but by no means unambitious film with which we are concerned, quite so eloquently? Antonioni never discussed Il provino further. That something about it remained, perhaps, unresolved for him coincided with the fate of I tre volti as a whole: after so much build-​up—​itself prefigured in the film—​it was largely dismissed by the critics, then shelved in the vaults of the De Laurentiis establishment which, to date, has never released it in whole or part. It sank into oblivion. As part of an anthology, or “omnibus” project, Il provino is comfortably ensconced in a production and distribution format quite popular in that era—​often the result of European co-​productions that packaged a cluster of shorts around a theme, or a place or, as is the case here, a particular performer. The short format allowed a degree of liberty, a special space for play that was creatively and successfully used in only a handful of cases: those by the known auteurs survived in film histories. Love in the City as well as its contemporary Siamo donne (We, the Women, 1953) are well-​k nown early examples, while in the mid-​1960s we find some of the same contributors in the credits of I tre volti across anthologies such as Le Plus vieux métier du monde (The Oldest Profession) and Le streghe (The Witches)—​both misogynist titles of 1967.

8  “Dichiarazioni di Michelangelo Antonioni” in Cinema 60 46 (October 1964): 63–​4. Alessia Ricciardi suggested to me the likelihood of Antonioni’s reference here to Tecnicamente dolce. The screenplay of this unrealized project was published, with commentary, in Michelangelo Antonioni, Tecnicamente dolce (Turin: Enaudi, 1976). Seymour Chatman discusses it in Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985), 176–​82.

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Like I tre volti, Le streghe was a Dino De Laurentiis production, its episodes each assigned to a different director, but connected through a flexible theme, and through a female star—​or in Soraya’s case, a would-​be star. In Le streghe Silvana Mangano, De Laurentiis’s wife—​her immaculate beauty and reserve bear comparison to the Princess’s—​sustains, in fact, a great range. It is just this capacity in Mangano that Pier Paolo Pasolini must have recognized and so well exploited, first in his own exquisite contribution to Le streghe, La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth As Seen from the Moon), then in vastly different roles such as the industrialist’s wife in Teorema (1968) and Jocasta in his Oedipus Rex (1967).9 Visconti’s episode, La strega bruciata viva (The Witch Burnt Alive) has itself been compared to Il provino: both circle around the figure of the jet-​setting, luxuriously garbed and groomed, yet gravely alienated celebrity whose cool beauty seldom betrays any glimpse of her underlying vulnerability and isolation.10 All episodes of I tre volti circle around a similar theme. Antonioni’s Preface is followed by Mauro Bolognini’s Amanti celebri (Celebrity Lovers) co-​starring Richard Harris, fresh from his role in Red Desert, and sporting a beard—​perhaps carried over from his contemporary role in another De Laurentiis production: John Huston’s The Bible. Here he is a best-​selling author and celebrity object of desire but somehow failed as a man—​a condition that echoes Antonioni’s male protagonists in L’avventura and especially La notte. In Bolognini’s episode it is by a sort of detour through Soraya’s ennui—​not realized in any compelling way, however—​t hat the man seems to recognize his shortcomings while she, too, remains dejected. Also the third episode, Franco Indovina’s Latin Lover, tells of dissolution, splitting, failure, recognition—​a ll elements prefigured in the Preface, but here transposed to comedy. Soraya plays an American woman on a business visit to Rome, where she is pestered by a ridiculous, marvelous Alberto Sordi whom she first haughtily dismisses and then graciously acknowledges in a gesture that secures his gigolo career. Beyond the sham and swindle, a glimpse of some deeper sympathy is afforded the quasi-​couple in this quasi-​comedy. Antonioni’s episode underscores the sense of exteriority and impenetrability in the camera’s encounter with its subject—​qualities that Warhol’s technique, we shall see, amplifies in its own way—​using the screen test situation to dramatize it directly. Of course, Antonioni routinely avoids conventional cinematic mechanisms of identification and tends to diffuse psychology or motivation in tracing his protagonists’ encounters and responses. His best work does turn, however, upon a heightening of perceptual experience filtered, most eloquently, through his female protagonists. But Soraya transmits very little: she resists; the sparse narrative does not evolve nor is it, in Antonioni fashion, diffused through her. All expression seems to bounce off her features and rebound onto a world of surfaces. Although she is something of a mask, it is not the mask of classical Hollywood enchantment that—​as we have seen in Chapter Two via Barthes’s periodizing of facial mythologies—​can arrest the spectator in its gaze. Her reserve is, rather, uniformly polite across the different episodes. Yet I tre volti was to offer quite another “third face” to a woman who had already carried at least two public faces, all in coherent lineage: first as the Shah’s consort, second as the banished princess—​her famously sad eyes often concealed 9  I discuss Pasolini’s La terra vista dalla luna in the introduction to my Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), vii-​x i. 10  See Alexander García Düttmann, “Quasi: Antonioni and Participation in Art,” Antonioni: Centenary Essays, eds. John David Rhodes and Laura Rascaroli (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 154–66.



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behind dark glasses as she circulated through the tabloids. The third is that of a woman in search of a role. I tre Volti as a whole seems, in this light, one extended screen test for Soraya: a rather extravagant and ultimately failed one. Il Provino divulges this directly, as a curiously foregone conclusion, exposing its underlying structure and its awareness of the medium while intimating the existential predicament of the aspirant captured within it. This predicament is not rendered as introspection on the part of a character but as imbricated in the very situation of filmmaking, intensified in the screen test, and formalized in Antonioni’s direction of the action, its framing, its mise-​en-​scène. He foregrounds the analytic, quasi-​scientific process by which the test unfolds, also begging the question of what the test is really for. What can the apparatus elicit from the person? Does it hold her together, take her apart? Or might it, intermediately, ease, thaw, or limber her reserve? Whatever the case, does she survive, or do so only as an empty shell, as relic of Antonioni’s probing? What are the fictions that sustain the subject when confronted with the machinations of the cinema, where, as Stanley Cavell put it—​she is “the subject of study, and a study not [her] own.”11 The stage is enticingly set for Soraya’s first emergence on the screen: the clinical, technological screen-​test procedure bears upon the contending actor. The aggressive devices and rhetoric of the press, the flashing violence of the media, the forces of big movie business invested in the enterprise—​a ll assert themselves immediately. A reporter in the drab and somewhat shabby offices of the Roman leftist daily, Paese sera, receives a rumor of Princess Soraya’s imminent screen test. Executives, guards, technicians, craftsmen, stylists—​a ll cogs and gears of the movie industry—​form a cohesive structure elucidated in Antonioni’s orchestration of the different parts of the studio and their functions. Extraordinary neon lights mark the driveway toward a glass-​encased lobby: even more than the modern Roman district of EUR in L’eclisse (1962), this view might invoke an Alphaville, or a Tati-​v ille, or a Dan Flavin installation. Strange animal cries—​perhaps the trumpeting of elephants or the call of large birds—​pierce the darkness. The paparazzi reassure each other that it is only the zoo assembled on these grounds for Huston’s Bible. We are, then, in the newly built Dino De Laurentiis studio complex on via Pontina, southwest of Rome. This exposition serves to approach Soraya with deliberate delays and obstructions, and as a personage who is in fact unapproachable—​a caged, exotic creature, a precious museum object. Behind closed, guarded doors a miniature, hermetic world is awake and revolving around her. Business, technology, the various arts and services of movie-​making are represented, more or less individualized through some recognizable crew members ostensibly re-​enacting here their own “life roles” in Antonioni’s film. In contrast to the underplayed visitations of the film’s famous producer and its distinguished costume designer, who remain basically faceless, the baring of Soraya’s face stands out: frontal, centered, her face is isolated against a black backdrop, hair and torso covered in black so that the face is almost like a mask hovering in space, or a moon against a starless night sky. Half the face is then concealed by a black screen that slices it right down the middle and is, in turn, moved laterally across her immobile face to expose the other half (Figs. 4.7–4.8). The shot thus subjugates her immediately to the camera’s

11  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 28.

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FIGURES 4.7–​4.8:  Soraya’s face assessed for the camera: Il provino –​ frame enlargements.

instrumental—​or indeed anthropometric—​f unctions, processing her face through the optical machinery to gauge light reflectiveness and color, analyze its symmetry, assess framing, and, basically, determine its adequacy for the industry. Only after this striking exposition is the interior context established, to further elaborate how this woman’s physique and the movie glamour apparatus meet. Soraya is seated in a dressing room, body now covered in white as she is being prepared for her test: cosmetically treated, primped, subjected to an exhaustive array of make-​up applications, hairdos, wigs, costumes. Throughout the sequence—​as through much of the film—​A ntonioni shifts constantly between a wide variety of shot scales and angles. His camerawork, too, partakes in this way in scanning, assessing, and mapping Soraya, although its restlessness would almost seem to mirror the woman’s own nervousness. At one point her eyes are enframed in extreme close-up when eyeliner is expertly applied—​the make-​up artist’s hands, his pencil, and the movie camera are all upon her (Fig. 4.9). An overhead shot then isolates her within the brightly lit, spotless space of the dressing room: propped in her chair, she is covered neck to foot, as if about to undergo a medical procedure (Fig. 4.10). Scientific, surgical connotations are thus joined with the analytic optical process: Soraya is by turns a beautiful insect or a rare organism petrified under a microscope, or a cold distant star that—​we shall see—​no telescope can quite capture or focalize. The delays and



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FIGURES 4.9–4.10:  Cosmetic/clinical procedures: Il provino –​frame enlargements.

obstructions, the manipulations of her person as pure exteriority, underscore her reserve. She is optically assaulted but also opaque, removed, enclosed in a magnificent shell, impenetrable, as if untouched by all these procedures that prime her but perhaps also shield her, like armor. She speaks German over the telephone to her mother, Farsi to her assistant, Italian and English with the crew—​even these shifts between languages and orders of conversation contribute, somehow, to the sense of distancing. We see her work through types; we see her blond, brown, and black-​ wigged; she mimics a Marilyn-​like seductress, an existential-​intellectual gamine with pencil in mouth, a frenzied neurotic. These poses are struck in succession, in direct address to Antonioni’s camera: the effect is one of total exteriority, as in a fashion shoot—​that one might compare with our discussion of Funny Face (1957) in Chapter Two. The sequence culminates with Soraya, in faux neurotic defiance, hurtling paint as if onto the lens (Figs. 4.11–4.12). Cinematic time is fragmented with sharp shifts and jump-​cuts into a series of gestures, transpiring in the void of a photographic backdrop. Is this already a test—​or a rehearsal for a test coached by Antonioni’s camera? A compact transitional scene follows that suggests we never left the dressing room: Soraya is finally being zipped up by her dresser into what seems to be her own elegant style. Both dresser and camera do not leave her as she keeps moving to and fro, nervously, in conversation with

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FIGURES 4.11–​4.12:  Working through types in Il provino –​ frame enlargements.

her assistant/​lady-​in-​waiting—​her most nuanced performance might be in this little interlude, to which I will return in due course. Soon she is accompanied to the soundstage for what we might now consider her second circle of testing. From the surrounding darkness of the vast soundstage she arrives at a lavish, traditional drawing room set constructed at its center, and first captured from a great height, bathed in light. An American director (or some production functionary) explains, in English, his plan for a telephone interview as part of the test. Clearly she need not recite a scene, need not act, but simply walk, sit, talk, be. But it is no simple matter to be oneself (whatever that self may be) in front of the camera: only a star can do it well—​it is, indeed, a necessary condition of stardom. Soraya moves through the set, looking through doors, touching potted plants, cigarettes, furniture. She is shot, alternately, from within the fictional drawing room set, and from without—​as if from another fictional order, of which the encompassing soundstage is part. From this “outer space,” it is as if the camera were stealthily peeking into the set, through windows and doors, or from high above. It seems bent on capturing something in Soraya that the more restricted view within the set and the “proper” fiction of the screen test cannot grasp. The distanced perspective naturally makes her appear rather small within the set and can give no clear sense of her mastering, or truly inhabiting, it. In one odd moment she is glimpsed entirely on her own, sitting on a stool in a corner of the



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FIGURE 4.13:  Waiting for the test is also a test: Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

drawing room set, waiting (Fig. 4.13). We might ask ourselves, in this particularly equivocal moment, who is sitting there? Are we to see it as part of the broader fiction of the Prefazione—​in anticipation of the fictionalized test—​or does it already constitute part of the test proper? From the removed position of Antonioni’s camera, we cannot quite tell in what role we are to see her. The breakdown of categories of being and acting, of person and role, is unsettling. In the little drama of the telephone interview between the American director and Soraya, a comparable oscillation seems to take place between different states of being—​or of acting. Twice in Il provino, in fact, and on different levels of the fiction—​fi rst in the dressing room, staged for Antonioni’s omniscient camera at that point, and then here, staged for a camera that is, intermittently, contained within Antonioni’s encompassing mise-​en-​scène—​ telephone conversations are devised to afford Soraya relative absorption, intimacy, interiority (Figs. 4.14–4.15). It is a familiar device in the cinema, standing in for a female monologue, or an aria of sorts.12 The telephone conversation is also adopted as device, we shall see, in Warhol’s Face and for a similar purpose, while bringing into the scene yet another voice from an “outer space.” Surely the conversation on the soundstage of Il provino is not spontaneous: Soraya’s answers might be genuine, in that she might have taken part in scripting them, but they are patently rehearsed and staged. RAI (Italian Radio-Television) reportage footage from the actual production of Il provino shows Antonioni directing Soraya. Clearly he steers her away from any relaxed disposition: “Don’t let yourself go, stay on edge,” then “Look at the telephone as if it were a strange object,” he tells her as she rehearses her steps toward the couch to pick up the receiver (Fig. 4.16).13 But while Antonioni is celebrated as the director of alienation, what he is doing here does not seem to result in a texture of performance much different from what Soraya offers in the other episodes of I tre volti. At most, a certain compatibility can be posited between Antonioni’s creative temperament and conception of acting, 12  One of its most celebrated instances in Italian cinema is Roberto Rossellini’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s theatrical vignette, La voix humaine, in the first part of L’amore (1948). 13  This footage is incorporated into Carlo di Carlo’s documentary film, Antonioni su Antonioni (2008).

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FIGURES 4.14–4.15:  Telephone as absorption device: Il provino –​ frame enlargements.

FIGURE 4.16:  “Don’t let yourself go”: Antonioni directing Soraya, RAI footage in Antonioni su Antonioni (Antonioni on Antonioni; Carlo di Carlo, 2008) –​frame enlargement.

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and Soraya’s persona. Yet the sum of these parts yields nothing here like the enthralling texture of his directorial encounter with Monica Vitti. One can almost see Antonioni’s awareness of this difficulty allegorized in the curious little scene of the American director stumbling, inexplicably, through a curved transparent maze to reach the telephone—​who is calling whom? For a moment it appears that the director himself—​a somewhat Felliniesque artist-​figure in his opera scarf—​is the one being tested, the one failing, yet he is afforded some instances of self-​reflection in the process. This abstract fantasy construction erupts out of nowhere and is never accounted for—​a s if it were a random set for an altogether different production put into dialogue with the traditional, lavish set surrounding Soraya. Antonioni’s film thus pulls, continuously, in different directions, shifting its planes of action and orders of fiction, embedding one test within another. Il provino threatens to fissure under its own reflexive layering. A third circle of testing ensues. A turntable is switched on to the recent hit movie tune of “Moon River.” It accompanies Soraya’s last scene, which is entirely without dialogue but dynamic in camera and body movement. Once again, camera angles alternate repeatedly between shots that inhabit the fictional screen test from within, and shots manifestly from outside the set, from Antonioni’s omniscient, elevated perspective which captures, along with Soraya, the studio apparatus as a whole: tracking camera, lights, crew. Now in evening dress and tall hairdo, Soraya descends a spiral staircase. She walks through the drawing room set, finally approaching and opening a pair of French windows where gauze curtains have been billowed into motion by large, noisy fans. Excessively bright lights are directed at her from across the windows: in a fiction film these would translate to full sunlight—​a light that Antonioni’s nocturnal tale never provides. In a startling reverse shot to Soraya’s gaze out the French windows, we see crew members maneuver two wind tunnels animated by stage fans to blow strong artificial wind directly in Soraya’s face. Both light and wind seem exaggerated: the plants sway, the curtains are wildly blown inward, Soraya seems to brace herself to remain still, rooted to her spot (Figs. 4.17–4.18). Not nature’s elements assault her but movie artifice, which violently exposes her to our view. The wind is not an unheard-​of device of screen testing: Irene Gustafson and Julia Zay take note of it in Greta Garbo’s last screen test, of 1949. There, the camera’s extended, merciless perusal of that divine, aging visage in a medium close-​up is exacerbated by artificial breeze (Fig. 4.19).14 While it may still leave viewers star-​struck, Garbo—​ likely juxtaposing its results with her own past image—​clearly did not see herself as passing this test, for it seems to have sealed her withdrawal from the movies. The tilt of Soraya’s head and the wind in her hair in Antonioni’s film in fact conjure the ultimate star image: figurehead Garbo as Queen Christina in Rouben Mamoulian’s eponymous film of 1933—​not “Event” but “Idea,” not human but divine (Figs. 4.20–4.21). We have discussed in Chapter Two Roland Barthes’s celebrated distinction, as part of his periodizing of classical versus post-​classical Hollywood faces. Soraya’s posture in the wind invites, more or less explicitly, just this invidious comparison. Can she take up this figurehead position—​does she pass this test? The paparazzi outdoors—​t hemselves braced against the elements, having tirelessly attempted through the long night to enter the studio, to catch a glimpse of Soraya, to confirm a rumor—​do not know.

14  Irene Gustafson and Julia Zay, “Notes on Screen Testing,” Journal of Visual Culture 6 (August 2007): 206, DOI: 10.1177/​1470412907078564, accessed October 1, 2016.

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FIGURE 4.17:  Soraya in the simulated sunlight and wind: Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

FIGURE 4.18: Wind machinery, as if jutting forth from Antonioni’s camera (reverse field of Fig. 4.17): Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

FIGURE 4.19:  Garbo’s last screen test (May 25, 1949) by cinematographer James Wong Howe. From Garbo (TCM documentary by Christopher Bird and Kevin Brownlow, 2005) –​frame enlargement.

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FIGURE 4.20:  Garbo as figurehead: Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) –​frame enlargement.

FIGURE 4.21:  Soraya as figurehead, à la Garbo: Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

They fail to capture, in an image, both the Princess’s entry and her exit at dawn. The story they concoct is nevertheless, and somewhat like the one actually occupying the contemporary tabloids, delivered to the public in the hollow affirmation the reporter dictates to the press office over the phone: “Soraya will be an actress.” In a particularly shrewd commentary on the ideological constitution of Soraya’s image—​in the media at large and as it is invested in I tre volti—​a contemporary critic, Rita Porena, emphasizes how the mass media had already thoroughly processed Soraya’s identity as empress and subsequently as an “ex”—​ex-​empress, ex-​w ife. Divested of any use, and invested with sheer exchange value, Soraya’s image as a consumer good, drained of subjectivity, is not substantially altered in Antonioni’s film. But discerning a certain melancholy in Soraya’s subjugated, impassive, alienated disposition as it is met by the camera, Porena concludes her review—​t itled “Il destino di una cosa,” “The Destiny of a Thing” (or, “of Something”)—​w ith a more nuanced, even redemptive observation: Silence would obliterate her: from here follows the public desolation of her romances, carried on in nightclubs and fashionable resorts, wherever there is someone who would

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recognize her. Finally, the cinema: in this incredible film, this museum of a dead object’s memories, an inconstant shadow struggles to materialize through the emblems of its past existence. If it’s true—​a nd it is—​t hat Soraya made this movie in order to become someone, to earn an identity, the result is particularly astonishing to behold: her thick and expressionless face, invaded by flesh and furrowed by eyes without a gaze, her face persists as an anthropomorphic thing.15

What Porena might be seeking here—​a fter such sharp ideological parsing of Soraya’s objectification—​is perhaps not a definitive conception of Soraya’s identity and expressive qualities, nor any confirmation of her acting vocation or star charisma, but a more humble “inconstant shadow,” an inkling of the person: the ephemeral, vulnerable being caught in a film that must constitute for her a stifling “museum of a dead object’s memories.” Porena’s closing oxymoron is particularly striking: what is the “anthropomorphic thing”—​or “anthropomorphic something”—​t hat persists in the inert flesh, in the opaque, unreflective gaze, through the film’s elaborate cultivation of surfaces? Is it like the “human something” by which Stanley Cavell described screen presence: that being which the screen performer lends to the role, and which projects through the film’s mechanical mediation between presence and absence? The “physical and temperamental endowment” of a star—​who should be both a “vivid subject for the camera” and an accomplished performer—​projects that “human something” most radiantly.16 One now recalls the brief interlude in which Soraya is being dressed up as “herself ” when preparing to leave for the soundstage. Her dresser, a silent, older woman with unmade-up, tired features, continuously navigates around Soraya to arrange her dress, since the Princess keeps moving to and fro in conversation with her assistant/​lady-​in-​waiting, who criticizes, in Farsi, Soraya’s reticence, urging her to expose her feelings to the camera. Soraya assures her she will try her best. This brief exchange is surely scripted dialogue, yet no Italian subtitles are provided, though this multilingual film contains plenty.17 Soraya’s withdrawn quality is underscored by this withholding of subtitles and matched by the complexity of blocking, camerawork, and editing of the scene as a whole. The dresser is silent throughout: whether or not she understands Farsi is not as critical as her transparency, by virtue of her function and class, to these two aristocratic women, even as she is quite present through these shots. The camera follows the three women’s movements to and fro in a medium shot within the shallow space, against a red curtain and free-​standing tri-​part mirror, which reflects, reduplicates, and—​a long with the conspicuous jump-​cuts—​f ragments the scene, introducing some agitation and dissociation into the otherwise fluid, contained, at once intimate and theatrical choreography (Fig. 4.22). The significance of this little scene crystallizes, in my view, with the women’s exit, when the  camera, now outside the doorway, settles into a perspective of the deserted corporate 15  Rita Porena, “Il destino di una cosa,” Cinema 60 6, no. 50 (February 1965): 36–​8 . 16 Cavell, The World Viewed, 25–​9; emphasis in the original. Daniel Morgan pointed out to me the resonance of Porena’s expression—​a nd my interpretation of it—​w ith Cavell’s discussion of screen actors. 17  Chatman translates and describes this particular dialogue in his brief account of the film in Antonioni, 137. It seems unlikely—​g iven Soraya’s own linguistic mastery and the presence of her entourage on the set—​t hat a translation could not be found to subtitle this scene.



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FIGURE 4.22:  Choreography of non-​actor and star: Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

FIGURE 4.23:  A neorealist shadow in the movie studio: Il provino –​ frame enlargement.

corridor where the women recede into the depth of the image. Shot duration is prolonged to draw our attention to the movement of bodies against the graphic play of fluorescent strips and shadows. After an extra beat the dresser, too, emerges into the shot foreground and follows the two elegantly lean women some distance behind (Fig. 4.23). The entire being of this anonymous non-​actor—​her deportment, her way of clutching a handbag, what Marcel Mauss would call the “techniques” of her body, clearly locate the silent dresser in the heavy-​laden world of working people, bearing vestiges of neorealism.18 In this way, too, she is contrasted first with the upper-​ class ladies whom she serves and seems, more generally, incongruous with the emphatically contemporary, corporate world of the movie studio, its sets and costumes, and the wide-​screen 18  I discuss in Chapter Two Mauss’s anthropological insights on how socio-​economic class is interiorized by the body, incorporated morphologically, as it were, to be then manifested in expression and gesture. See Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 454–77.

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Technicolor by which we see the lot. The duration and pacing of the shot accentuate this gap, which is as existential as it is material and social, inviting our reflection on just how these different people transpire in a filmic world revolving around the apparatus of cinema and media celebrity and concerned with the precarious relationship of actor, non-​actor, character, and star. At the same time, the dresser patently dissolves into her role—​not by any special quality of performance, but simply by being and doing what she does—​her role is co-​extensive with her. In the telephone interview the American director presses Soraya: Why does she want to be an actress? She says she wants to be different from what she really is and that, yes, she would be willing to play the part of a poor, badly-dressed woman. This, however, is not a part she is offered in the screen test, nor in I tre volti: it is not a part for her. Her only possible role is one that would somehow reduplicate her persona. As Carlo di Carlo observed: “Soraya can only be Soraya”—​i f only, one might add, she could be Soraya!19 Is this the same as “playing her own part”? How well does she do it since—​unlike her dresser—​she does not dissolve into her own role? As Edgar Morin observed in his aesthetic anthropology of film stars, the anonymity of the non-​actor borrowed from life, as it were, to “play herself,” is like a reverse reflection of the star, who is always herself.20 Between non-​actor and star there yawns the world of the “actors,” neither here nor there. Soraya is, indeed, offered to play her own role, but she is the opposite of anonymous—​she is always at the center of attention in the vast enterprise that revolves around her. But rather than the mystical birth of stars out of movie magic, it is the little mystery of the person—​at once celebrated and unknown—​t hat flickers, at most, as a residue of her screen test. Yet if she is to fill her own shoes, to inhabit her own role, she must be a star, or else not be. It is this, and nothing less, that is required of her. This is what is being put to the test.

EXCURSUS ON A STAR PORTRAIT The disparity between person and star, the inadequacy of the screen image (or indeed persona) to the person, and the latter’s emergence (or survival) as a residue of her confrontation with the apparatus—​i n what ways does this intricate set of relations correspond to longer traditions of representation that focus upon the human subject, known and unknown by their image? How do the screen test, the idea of portrait, and its fortunes in modernity bear on each other in ways that, we know, Andy Warhol was to exploit so fruitfully? When considering the portrait in filmic duration, Warhol was quick to understand how to lace its reflection on human time, namely, on mortality, both with the incandescence of stars and with the more subtle flickering of the person confronting the apparatus—which is always a test. Such reflection is already embedded in his silkscreen portraiture: the Marilyn Diptych (1962), which has garnered such fine critical responses, will help guide us toward Warhol’s discovery, on film, of what I call (after Barthes) the pathos of time. Warhol clearly understood that in its encounter with the human face, the cinema might be said to achieve its most subtle articulations—perhaps even to resurrect, as Jacques Aumont suggested, what photographic modernity’s mechanistic and 19  Carlo di Carlo, personal interview. 20  Edgar Morin identifies star and non-​actor in The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 132.



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objectifying thrust might have been said to stifle. 21 Histories have been written on the modern demise of the portrait in its humanist legacy: the dismantling of its motivated, referential, or otherwise mimetic claims in figural representation, the evacuation of all but the most contingent, or else patently-constructed markers of the person—​conceptualized, abstracted, discursive remnants of subjective agency in art. As this book’s Preface has suggested, if the cinema has also contributed to the decentering of the human figure in modernity, it has doubtlessly offered some marvelous compensations. Its ability to capture expression in its becoming, to magnify and project the face’s most subtle registers, to lay it bare but also to shield and to mask it in intricate ways, is unparalleled. How, then, does the moving image meet the portrait—​a nd how is this encounter sparked by star radiance? In one necrological summary of the legacy of humanist portraiture, Benjamin Buchloh has commended the ways in which pop art, in wedding pictorial and photographic values, extended the implications of the early avant-​gardes’ engagement with the dialectical, semiological, serial, and social constructedness of the subject for the late-​modern portrait. Yet, Buchloh qualified, more than earlier modernist practices, the knowing irony of pop offered no protection from “the onslaught of systematic alienation” in late capitalism. Must the art of the portrait withdraw then, he asks, into enclosed, protected, ultimately conservative private spaces, to rescue a subjectivity that the avant-​gardes and the totalizing claims of ideological modernism might have thrown out with the bathwater?22 Do the glossy surfaces of pop deflect the return of the gaze, and the ethical implication of self, in the face-​to-​face? And our question presses further: having already internalized the consciousness of photography, how does pop’s encounter with the human face evolve with the moving image, and how does the cinema’s already-​t rained negotiation of art and commerce—​d ramatized across so many films whose power lay for years quite outside the precincts of the museum or the art gallery, films that Warhol would have admired—​contribute to this encounter and radicalize it in startling ways? In a compelling discussion of iconic forms of commemoration in Warhol’s silkscreens of the early to mid-​1960s, Thomas Crow bracketed the humanist portrait as model, turning to more archaic facial paradigms: the Marilyn Diptych—​h is central example—​i s seen to echo the disposition of an altarpiece (Fig. 4.24). 23 Christological narratives of martyrdom, incarnation, and redemption resonate through this paradigm that precedes, of course, the validating representation of “the modern subject” in the bourgeois portrait. Frontal, hieratic, massive, immediately recognizable yet somehow nonspecific; nonindividual—indeed of a divided nature—yet projecting a presence and potency, the altarpiece does not efface t​ he biographical subject that is Marilyn Monroe. What we know 21  This idea is one of Jacques Aumont’s premises in Du visage au cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/​Cahiers du cinéma, 1992). 22  See Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” Face-​O ff: The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994), 66–8. Against the alienation of pop, and the grotesque photographic portraiture of the New York school (particularly Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon), Buchloh pits the post-​war return to the private consolations of the bourgeois subject in the example of German photographers Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, concomitantly diagnosing in their naturalization of subjectivity a resuscitation of elitist, exclusionary, if not racist values. 23  Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), especially 51–​7.

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FIGURE 4.24:  Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962) © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of her charmed, tragic career hovers behind Warhol’s medial and formal processing—​ his silk-​s creening of her found photographic image. His treatment inf lects the Diptych’s affective connotations, joining an affirmation of the power of images with a consciousness of their limitation—​t hey always fall short of the person. A gaze at once presiding and tragic thus projects through biographical and photographic time, through the processing and repetition and layering, and informs, as well, the time of the viewer. The iconicity of the Diptych is forged in Warhol’s manipulation of the photographic imprint which, Crow argues, welds a claim to “reference” with the elusiveness of the “trace” left in the wake of presence, and always under threat of dissolution. The repetitive, mechanical re-​s tamping of the photographic trace would seem at once to confirm presence yet also to elude it, as does the manifest erosion of the black-​a nd-​w hite imprint. Likewise, Marilyn’s frontal projection is underscored, Crow suggests, by Warhol’s cropping of her image so that she is pulled forth, as it were, toward the image surface, her face in close-​up jutting out in the frame that it occupies. But, one might ask, does Warhol’s formal treatment bring Marilyn any closer—​a nd can it open her smile to us? Or is she unapproachable, all-​presiding, all-​ seeing, yet blind as a mask, and hopelessly enshrouded in her own glamour? Face-​to-​face with us, the Marilyn Diptych’s iconic-​hieratic frontality proclaims a presence-​ as-​image, and yet an impenetrability, as if shielded by the perception of time, of pastness and decay. Juxtaposing the left-​hand side of the silkscreen—​w here color has manifestly been added in a uniform, secondary, mask-like layer upon the black-​and-​w hite photographic base—​ with the right-​hand side, Crow discerns the involuntary quality of memory itself proclaimed by the fugitive, effaced quality of the photographic trace. Marilyn’s image repeats like a diminishing echo: we see it slip out of our grasp. Even as commodity exchange would threaten to



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consume it, Crow writes, “the mass-​produced image as the bearer of desires is exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of suffering and death.” The inadequacy of Marilyn’s photographic image in overlaid silkscreen technique, jointly with its effacement, arouse what I would call pathos—embracing both star image and biographical person, within their respective limits. A detour, or indirection, is at work here: the celebrity pop icon first proclaims its mass-​produced repeatability and distribution, then invokes the plenitude of an altarpiece, but finally and manifestly falls away from it. This fall, this inadequacy, addresses us, retroactively eliciting an auratic gaze just where we thought it had perished. Against the seemingly endless availability and redundancy of the mass-​reproduced image, the effacement of the imprint by distance, by failure and loss, disjoins subject and image, underscoring the inadequacy between signifier and referent. While the compound sense of layering-​and-​effacement in the painted/​ photographic portrait is not controlled in the same way as the duration of film—​itself manifest both in the experience of the moving image and in the reduction of the feed vis-​à-​v is the swelling pick-​up reel—​there is a way in which the Diptych’s composite temporality informs Warhol’s cinematic portraits: their iconic-​auratic charge and their human pathos transpire in a dialectic of availability and removal, recognition and distancing, veiling and unveiling. This is how Marilyn appeals to our gaze, and returns it. Anne Wagner has gone further in elaborating on the complex, and paced, response elicited by the Marilyn Diptych, comparing its joining of repetition and effacement to the succession of cinematic frames. I would reinforce this comparison with the suggestion that one might imagine here the lap-​dissolve or fade-​out processing of a film shot that endows an impression of movement and change even in the cinematic freeze-​f rame. In this way the Marilyn Diptych proclaims the passage of time, whereby the workings of mortality echo through the instability of the image—​its threat of disappearance. Wagner emphasizes, furthermore, the degree to which—​precisely in an age of mechanical reproducibility and mass dissemination—​a responsibility to resist the apparent licensing of indifference when confronting Warhol’s work rests on the viewer: There is no question about it: one image equals the next, or at least differs from it meaninglessly; repetition prompts indifference and licenses us to turn away. It is only in refusing that permission, in resisting redundancy, that we are able to speculate about such differences and effects as do emerge … we note the way the image both blackens and fades, conjuring presence and absence through opposite means. The apparent integrity of Marilyn’s glamorous visage—​its parted lips and arched brows and beauty mark—​ become a mask that even familiarity cannot keep from fragmentation and decay. In its very exhaustion, the image is remade as its visual opposite. It is as if Warhol, in insisting so utterly on a single image as a singular meaning, is backhandedly courting a kind of referential plenitude. 24

24  Anne M. Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” Representations 55 (Summer 1996): 102–​3 . It seems that, from early on, some of the best writing on Warhol’s art has similarly brought the cinema to front and center: e.g., Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (London: Studio Vista and New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), and Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Praeger, 1973). Roy Grundmann, in Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), has further explored the iconic possibilities of Warhol’s appeal to the cinema.

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With its multiplication of surfaces in the rudimentary chromatic definition of parted lips and arched brows, Marilyn’s glamorous silkscreen mask is exalted, paradoxically, in its fragmentation and decay, registering the struggle with time, binding the viewer to its losing battle. Warhol’s Marilyn image is at once repeatable, divided, and singular; in this way it is both exhausted and replenished. Even the basic juxtaposition of black-and-white and color in the Diptych registers the historicity of media. The former may be seen to connote—​as do some outmoded movie and glamour techniques—​a sense of pastness and loss, not only Marilyn’s, but that of an earlier photographic moment vis-​à-​v is the assertive mask of color: a color that manifestly fails to cling to the photographic base or to infuse it with life. The melancholy address of temporality is thus borne by the medium itself: it is independent, in this sense, from the particular biographical subject. Temporal distance is affected here not only by dated styles of make-​up, hairdo, and clothing, but by the datedness of its particular technological features, and inscribed in the effacement of the photograph as object. Biographical, technological, formal means all join, then, in casting death’s shadow upon Warhol’s silkscreen. Repetition and multiplicity, effacement, presentness and pastness, the anachronisms of media—​a ll inform the viewer’s encounter with the star’s iconic image, wherein Warhol yokes plenitude and inadequacy, the mask of glamour and the signs of loss. Both Crow and Wagner thus acknowledge ways in which questions of temporality are brought to bear upon the Marilyn Diptych: these are, in part, of a cinematographic nature—​t he silkscreened icon is invested with a sense of unfolding and of passage. Such nuanced attention to temporal articulations and the experience of duration is sometimes lacking in art-​h istorical writings on Warhol’s films—​temporality in its various aspects is indeed difficult to describe outside of narrative discourse, biographical and historical contexts, or as signaled in dialogue by way of verbal reference to before and after.25 Our challenge is to describe the special texture of duration and temporal refraction in Warhol’s films: how does it mold his subjects? How, exactly, does it possess the spectator’s time?

SITTING FOR THE PORTRAIT IS THE PORTRAIT With Warhol’s Face, we encounter a film whose iconography most explicitly draws on the pictorial tradition, even as its plain title would first seem to defy the traditional honorific connotations of “portrait.” Edie Sedgwick, portrait “sitter” and star—​a nd, Truman Capote thought,

25  The quasi-​hallucinatory elasticity of time is often noted by spectators—​I rely here on my students’ and my own experience—​regarding Warhol’s silent films that involve the least movement, like Empire, Sleep and some of the Screen Tests: the experience of duration seems to permeate here the very texture of the image in its optical registration. It attunes us to the appearance of things as if in an altered dimension: objects, bodies, light and shade, all seem to hover between stillness and motion, especially when silent speed projection is involved. Douglas Crimp’s brief but essential “Epilogue: Warhol’s Time,” to his book “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 137–​45, testifies to the transformative quality of time in Warhol’s films; however in those chapters addressing the portrait films, Crimp’s attention to temporal experience recedes.



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FIGURE 4.25:  Andy Warhol, Face (1965). Frame enlargement from 16​mm film, black-and-white, sound, 66 minutes. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Warhol’s alter-​ego—​is posed in a predominantly three-​quarters medium close-​up, experimenting with accessories and make-​up, responding to an off-​screen interlocutor (Fig. 4.25). 26 Some pop songs, light classical, and Nino Rota movie music ensconce the scene in its cultural moment. The filmic frame and surface are acutely felt, accentuating a pictorial confinement, since Edie’s hectic movements war with the assertive stasis of the frame and the exceedingly shallow space, which permits little more than turns and tilts of the upper body, hands, and head. This situation is unchanged throughout the two consecutive reels, one shot per reel, adding up to 66 minutes running time. The classical lighting of the medium close-​up shows Edie’s lovely features to advantage. Stylistically evocative of movie-​star glamour portraits, lighting balance is maintained with shadows softened by a fill light, and hair glistening under a back light, endowing the figure with some corporeal volume and definition. Since Edie devotes her time—​t he film time in its entirety—​to applying make-​up, arranging her hair, trying on jewelry, discussing her beauty mark and her looks generally, our sense of her face-​a s-​image is doubly accentuated: she is painting her face, forging her own image, taking the artist’s part, in effect. The few props and background elements of the set—​at once boudoir and studio, home and factory—​i nvoke the pictorial iconography of a vanitas portrait (Fig. 4.26). With mirror implied just off-​screen left, but also jewels, hairbrush, and crystal chalice all stand out as emblems of worldly vanity, signaling the transitory fate of all the pleasures and beauties of the world, of all things material and seen, and their disparity from the unseen and the unknown, metaphysical and actual. Just behind Edie—​at such position, framing, and acute angle to the image plane 26  “I think Edie was something Andy would like to have been; he was transposing himself into her à la Pygmalion… . He would like to have been anybody except Andy Warhol.” Capote is quoted in Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl, ed. with George Plimpton (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 183.

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FIGURE 4.26:  Clara Peeters, A Vanitas portrait of a lady (ca. 1613), private collection. Retrieved from Wikipedia Commons (accessed August 22, 2016).

that it is hard to say whether it is shut or ajar—​a door with a conspicuous crystalline handle complements this elaborate organization of the mise-​en-​scène. As is the case with the various extensions of space—​doorways, windows, or curtains—that so often occupy the backdrop of portraits, ​t his prominent door, its edge carefully framed, intimates a hidden realm lurking just behind the surface, beyond our view. Dare one recognize it, in Warhol’s reign of surfaces, as a figure of interiority? Extending past the space-​t ime of the sitter and even past the longer life of art, the portrait thus declares itself to be a limited, worldly artifact oscillating between the visible present moment and the greater representational aspiration of the genre. Spatial and temporal registers are finely braided here as we confront the time endured in the sitting—​t he time lived in the portrait, then projected and seen as moving image. Translating the portrait to the time-​based image involved, across Warhol’s films, his deliberate self-​restrictions, while also pushing the medium and, in particular, its temporal coordinates, to the limits—​for duration endows such a film with temporal density and, Bazin would add, a temporal destiny. 27 Yet Face—​when compared with the temporal articulations of Warhol’s silent-​speed portraits and the complexity of Outer and Inner Space, which we will soon consider—​lays out its questions more simply. A basic consistency between Edie’s range of accoutrements, attitudes, expressions (spanning 27  The notion of a movie star’s “destiny” as the unfolding of their persona over time recalls André Bazin’s formulation in his February 1957 obituary on “The Death of Humphrey Bogart,” which has already come up in Chapter One: “Bogart is man defined by fate… . In more and more resembling his own death, it was his own portrait Bogart was completing.” Trans. Phillip Drummond, Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-​realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 99. See also André Bazin, “The Destiny of Jean Gabin,” What Is Cinema? vol. II, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 176–​8 .



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between ironic and vulnerable), the biographical and historical snippets couching them—​a ll cohere sufficiently to afford the sense of a rather well-​rounded character, persisting through change. In the traditional portrait, such coherence is buttressed by likeness or self-​resemblance: even if one has no definitive measure or “proof ” of the original person’s appearance or expressive repertoire—​whatever such “proof ” would mean—​one compares various portraits of Caesar, or of Saskia, younger or older, costumed or nude, full face or profile, head, bust, full length, markedly or subtly different in age, in biographical circumstance, or in mood. Some ideal, representative image emerges out of these different cases, as it did for Barthes when he conjured up—​we have seen in Chapter Two—​such diverse types of memory/​mental images as that of the waiter at the Deux Magots, of Rudolph Valentino and, eventually, the winter garden photograph of his own mother’s “essential” face, crystalized by death. The coherence of identity—​a n enfolding self-​resemblance through the repetition and variation of features, expressions, gestures—​is explored differently in the still and in the moving image, but in either one it proclaims more than it can really deliver. On the one hand, self-​resemblance is both agent and seal of identity, confirmed in the image. It holds together and differentiates individuals; it proclaims the continuity of the person through time, which translates as depth and roundness of character—​a s the recent success of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), shot over twelve years, served to remind us. With its vastly different attitude to the relation of biographical and cinematic time, Warhol’s Face also projects a sense of consistency through change, through proto-​n arrative snippets—​a telephone conversation, mention of Edie’s accident that caused her visible scar, “I was happy in Paris,” and so forth. These gather cumulative substance appealing, as they do, to a “before” and an “after” of biographical, social, and historical contexts. Such values—​referentiality, context, continuity, coherence—​i nherited from the bourgeois portrait, afford Face its presiding unity and legibility that one then invests in Edie herself, whose relationship to her own image is thematized and endorsed. On the other hand, resemblance—​automatically, however provisionally, established in the photographic arts—​does not suffice, neither here nor in any significant portrait. It does not fully account for the portrait’s claim to the person that hinges on the presence of the model to the artist—​a n indexical relation that enters into the traditional definition of the genre. The appeal of the portrait to singularity and identity is based, in part, on this assumption (or good faith) but also on the weaving of character-​e xpressive and social-​biographical layers—​a n effect of depth bound up with the dialectical staging of image and knowledge. Resemblance and consistency over time are counterbalanced, first, by the knowledge of change and of pastness, the insinuation of the unknown or the hidden—​sometimes figured as intimations of decay and death that lace even the most honorific portrait. Second, even as it compels and fascinates, physical likeness does not suffice for identity: what is at stake here is not a photo ID. It might even become its undoing—​we have already noted how the cinema narrativizes this predicament in so many ways, from The Wrong Man to Dead Ringers, and digital effects now make it both plainer and more disconcerting than ever. The unfolding of self in the face’s exteriorized becoming informs our experience of the person in tandem with the rhetoric of the portrait. Even in confronting the accomplished sculptural, pictorial, or photographic likeness, the viewer’s sense of coming-​to-​k now the subject—​something akin to a dawning recognition—​is felt to reward attention and extended

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contemplation: it joins the close reading of detail with some empathetic measure imported from life itself into the art gallery. Insofar as the individual is integrated in the portrait—​by way of appearance, gesture, expression, within historical contexts and the broader codes of the culture, milieu, class—​it acquires some syntactic legibility, which both circulates and anchors it. Warhol’s Face locates Edie quite coherently in this way—​scarcely different in this respect from those seventeenth-​century Dutch portraits that interested Barthes. Although 1960s American class markers, and their pictorial coding, are not as sharp as those discerned by Barthes in the Dutch portraits of gentlemen and peasants, and although they can also be used to quote and question Hollywood-​inflected class mythologies, the knowing spectator can put together a reasonably legible character from snippets of Edie’s manners, her frames of reference, and so forth. The moving, speaking image we are offered is representative on a social as well as an individual, existential level: the confining spatial and temporal limits of the portrait—​of any portrait—​a re palpable. It is through this feeling of time that an empathetic dimension of experience opens up in Face—​a nd responsibility now rests on the viewer to attend to it. Just how long is the time of a portrait—​pictorial, sculptural, or photographic? An instant? Is it really briefer than the time of Warhol’s filmic portrait, or does his living duration—​not as palpable, or as malleable, as that of the hallucinatory silent-​speed films—​render even more desperate our awareness of life’s brevity? In such a portrait life is lived as if in an hourglass. We can imagine Edie’s anxious turns, her bewildered expression and look back to the camera at the end of the film, to be saying: Is this all you are giving me, is it over already? But you haven’t given me fair warning—​why are you snatching my image from me now? I haven’t lived yet long enough, I haven’t said and done what I needed to do to fully be, or to become myself on film! The limited space and time span afforded the person in the moving image is very much underscored in Warhol’s film: it signals the greater span and the hidden depth of this subject’s life—​which, of course, can never be encompassed. Complementing the wealth of legible signs of class, culture, manner is, again, this temporal indication of the ineffable, of the illegible, of the hidden, that we have addressed in previous chapters: that which cannot be contained, pointed to, or given a name yet is a proper part of our experience of the facial image. The figural-​poetic intricacy of those signals of interiority that exceeds formal classification and identification is a necessary condition of the great portrait. It must be for this reason that the portrait genre recurs as trope in those terrifying fables of (non-​)identity that, against Bildungsroman reassurances, reflect on the portrait’s instability, on its necessary blind spots, and on its morbid, even ruinous nature: Poe’s “Oval Portrait” and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray immediately come to mind. We see Edie Sedgwick sitting for her film portrait, though we might also be seeing her preparing for one; for all intents and purposes, she might be preparing for her role in Outer and Inner Space. We ourselves are asked to sit for the same duration—​or nearly, depending also on how we regard the reel change—​a nd gaze at her moving image. The preparation, rehearsal, trial and process of the portrait’s making—​its coming into being—​is the portrait. Some might see it as a series of sketches capturing the contingent, evanescent contours of expression that suffice to make the “essential” Edie recognizable. Or should one add it all up to a (more or less) complete, rounded, and coherent portrait of a young woman? In much the way “study” and “finished” portrait can be equivalent in modern art, and as the screen test might be equivalent to a film in



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its own right—​as both Antonioni’s and Warhol’s practices suggest—​so this preparation-​ for-​t he-​portrait is the portrait. Its finality as artifact is both suspended and confirmed—​not only because narrative has basically receded, but because the film’s industrial duration and its markers, we have noted, are not adequate to any human measure. Does this harsh truth proclaimed in Warhol’s film compromise the very notion of the person—​even if removed from mythopoetic arcs of narrative and destiny—​or does some vital residue inscribe itself, precisely, on the dry ground of the apparatus, and in response to its, and to our, look? Warhol’s mobile-​faced young subject works through so many expressions, fluttering, as if in panic over the stubbornly fixed frame and industrially dictated duration of the film reels with their beginning and ending flares and graphic markers themselves enframing her. As we follow her, and nothing else, what we witness quite literally with time’s passage is the brevity and finitude of life on film. With its two-​reel entirety but no narrative arc, the film does not professes a “wholeness” of the portrait, yet Warhol gives plenty, too much for the strolling viewer in the gallery, and for the unprepared movie spectator. This “too little” and “too much” partake in time’s carving into Edie’s portrait. So vividly present in the moving image, the portrait’s sitter thus has to bear the gravity of time. And while intimations of mortality underlie any representation, the temporal restrictions of the image appear even more pronounced on film, when the seeming vitality and animism render the basic truth of death—​a nd then particularly Edie’s untimely death—​harsher by contrast. No mechanical reproduction or repetition enabled by the medium, not Edie’s animated, sparkling youthfulness, not her incessant chatter or her hectically shifting expressions, dissipate the finitude of cinematically prescribed temporal limits, the physical restrictions and, with them, the pathos of transience that unfolds before us. How can the person be captured in an image, contained by description or even within a biographical narrative that intimates what brought her to this point, that made her what she is—​a nd what it is that we see? Face allows us to imagine an overlapping of temporalities, in a duration that defamiliarizes the category of portrait as soon as it is recognized as such. Is our viewing experience telescoped—​ rather like Barthes’s image of Valentino or Garbo who, we have seen, coalesce as hieratic masks against the passing of the image in time, and only in retrospect and from a distance—​so that Edie coheres as an image transcending its many instances and expressions? Although nothing, of course, can bring her in all her filmed vitality back to life, our face-​to-​face with her in compelling duration that extends so far beyond that of the classical cinematic close-​up confronts us with a sliver of “real time” that transpires as the experience of “real-​l ife-​on-​fi lm.” Thanks in great part to the reflexive situation of the sitting, a sense of presentness and even co-​presence dawns upon the spectator who comes that much closer to his or her own end. Eschewing narrative-​cinematic identification and any short-​cuts to “identity,” this is the existential and ethical turn of Warhol’s cinematic portrait. I would set it against Barthes’s dismissal of the expressively shifting post-​classical face-​as-​event that he saw epitomized in Audrey Hepburn. Edie Sedgwick’s face is here, indeed, an event couched in its time, yet the cumulative weight of duration allows us, first, to recognize the wealth of nuances and contingencies that make up the person and, second, to let them be shed as they pass, and let the portrait—​l ike an after-​i mage—​r ise in their wake. At just over an hour’s running time, Face might seem long (as does art, if you will, when compared with the brevity of life), yet time’s passage carries its own memento mori that invests the portrait with the mythical charge of an apotropaic object while also conveying the futility and pathos

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of the life that cannot be recovered, even as it is honored in the image. Barthes had not considered such complexity of cinematic portraiture—​neither when contemplating the contemporary stars of post-​classical cinema, nor when praising, years later, the power of photography particularly with regard to the human face. Yet Warhol’s strongest portrait films can be said to approach, precisely, the anthropological efficacy and the aesthetic condition of the “art of the Person” that Barthes would reserve for still photography. Barthes did respond, nevertheless, and almost as an afterthought, to the challenge of Warhol’s portraits in one of his very last essays, “That Old Thing, Art …”—​a contribution to an exhibition catalogue on pop art in Venice in 1980. He describes a devastating negation of time in the pop image, yet his terms provide for a more nuanced reading of how, in Warhol’s films, the subject’s repetition, its effacement, its return, can also be seen to salvage human time, and compel the gaze. Barthes laces here a suggestive juxtaposition of “person” and “identity”—​ terms to which I will return in due course. For all these reasons, I quote from it at some length: The stakes of these repetitions (or of Repetition as a method) is not only the destruction of art but also (moreover, they go together) another conception of the human subject: repetition affords access, in effect, to a different temporality… the Warholian subject … abolishes the pathos of time [le pathétique du temps] in himself, because this pathos is always linked to the feeling that something has appeared, will die, and that one’s death is opposed only by being transformed into a second something which does not resemble the first. For pop art, it is important that things be “finite” (outlined: no evanescence), but it is not important that they be finished, that [the] work (is [it] a work?) be given the internal organization of a destiny (birth, life, death). Hence we must unlearn the boredom of the “endless”… . Repetition disturbs the person (that classical entity) in another fashion:  by multiplying the same image, pop art rediscovers the theme of the Double, of the Doppelgänger; this is a mythic theme (the Shadow, the Man or the Woman without a Shadow); but in the productions of pop art, the Double is harmless—​has lost all maleficent or moral power, neither threatens nor haunts: the Double is a Copy, not a Shadow: beside, not behind: a flat, insignificant, hence irreligious Double. Repetition of the portrait induces an adulteration of the person (a notion simultaneously civic, moral, psychological, and of course historical). Pop art, it has also been said, takes the place of a machine; it prefers to utilize mechanical processes of reproduction; for example it freezes the star (Marilyn, Liz) in her image as star: no more soul, nothing but a strictly imaginary status, since the star’s being is the icon. The object itself, which in everyday life we incessantly personalize by incorporating into our individual world—​ the object is, according to pop art, no longer anything but the residue of a subtraction… . We must realize that if pop art depersonalizes, it does not make anonymous: nothing is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a telegram, or a dress, as seen by pop art; they are in fact nothing but that: immediately and exhaustively identifiable, thereby teaching us that identity is not the person: the future world risks being a world of identities (by the computerized proliferation of police files), but not of persons. … .



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What pop art wants is to desymbolize the object, to give it the obtuse and matt stubbornness of a fact… . This is an audacious movement of mind (or of society): it is no longer the fact which is transformed into an image (which is, strictly speaking, the movement of metaphor, out of which humanity has made poetry for centuries), it is the image which becomes a fact. Pop art thus features a philosophical quality of things… they signify that they signify nothing.

Then, in a startling turn, Barthes recovers a redemptive, even personalizing potential in the pop image: since it stages its signifiers within the arena of art, the image begs to be “looked at (and not only seen)”—​namely it is the viewer/​spectator’s charge: However much pop art has depersonalized the world, platitudinized objects, dehumanized images, replaced traditional craftsmanship of the canvas by machinery, some “subject” remains. What subject? The one who looks, in the absence of the one who makes. We can fabricate a machine, but someone who looks at it is not a machine… . I add: pop is an art of the essence of things, it is an “ontological” art. Look how Warhol proceeds with his repetitions—​initially conceived as a method meant to destroy art: he repeats the image so as to suggest that the object trembles before the lens or the gaze; and if it trembles, one might say, it is because it seeks itself: it seeks its essence, it seeks to put this essence before you; in other words, the trembling of the thing acts (this is its effect-​ as-​meaning) as a pose: in the past, was not the pose—​before the easel or the lens—​t he affirmation of an individual’s essence? Marilyn, Liz, Elvis, Troy Donahue are not presented, strictly speaking, according to their contingency, but according to their eternal identity: they have an “eidos.”28

In these passages—​roughly contemporaneous with Camera Lucida—​Barthes seeks to define the ontological conditions not so much of a medium as of an artistic conception that has interiorized photography’s technological, automatic generation and repetition of images. Pop has overtaken the age of photography, pushing to the limit the equation of object and image that Bazin had already considered as part of photography’s ontological claim. 29 Many of Barthes’s terms here oddly echo—​a lbeit with respect to an altogether distinct art-​h istorical moment—​ his modes of approach to Dutch painting in the essay of some twenty-​seven years earlier, “The World as Object,” which we have encountered in Chapter Two. He now describes an “obtuse and matt,” flattening and desymbolizing quality in pop art, which also resonates with his earlier notion of the excessive yet irreducible and “obtuse,” or “third meaning.” In that

28  Roland Barthes, “That Old Thing, Art…,” (1980) in The Responsibility of Forms:  Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 200–​2 and 204–​5. In a few instances I’ve inserted in square brackets the French original, or some small adjustments to Howard’s otherwise authoritative translation. 29  André Bazin’s intriguing observation on the photographic condition of surrealism—​“Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image”—​in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema, Vol. I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1967), 15–​6, resonates closely with Barthes’s formulation.

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eponymous essay he described, in response to some Eisenstein film frames, a level in which legibility recedes in the face of the “filmic,” and the object (or part thereof) strikes the viewer with the analogical force uniquely afforded by the medium itself. How to bring this to the question of the human subject in the portrait? Pop, by this account, opens a gap between “persons” and “identities”: as the latter come under the aegis of classificatory systems (as we have seen in Chapter Three), the former’s humanist idea of the “individual” is violated. Sharply outlined, identities—​classifiable and legible—​can be duplicated. What, then, remains of the person? There is a catch here, but perhaps it is a progression, an unfolding in Barthes’s own perception, from the disappearance of the person, via the pop portrait’s instantaneous and blunt identification, and through to an imperative principle of an image-​t hat-​is-​a lso-​a-​fact. One might gloss this by positing that the pop image is not of the person, but rather gives rise to something like the image-​i n-​person, or even as person. 30 Its repetitions, its effacements, its temporalization, its address are incarnated through the subject who looks. Barthes’s definition of photography as, precisely, the “art of the Person” is predicated, in Camera Lucida, on the melancholy gaze by which the photographic image—​a certificate of existence crystalized in “the body’s formality,” or its “pose”—​is “umbilically” tied to the viewer who inhabits a different time and is yet bound to the “this has been” and “this will die” implication of the medium. Barthes juxtaposes it with the effacement of the pose in motion pictures—​where the body moves and passes; where, with the loss of the body’s “formality,” the image fails to surpass contingency and does not permit the individual’s iconic “resurrection” to the viewer. Repetition sets the human image against death, yet also prefigures it. Even as pop seems to flatten the pathos of time, to halt the play of reference and figuration, of distance and indirection that constitutes the poetic temporality of the pose, its systemic repetition (which inflects both form and temporality) suggests to Barthes a “trembling” of the object before the lens or the gaze. Trembling: an uncertain balance of movement and stasis? An ungraspable responsiveness? An elusiveness that gives the lie to pop’s ostensible distinctness of outline and containment? What is it that trembles before our sight of Edie’s cinematic image—​her “person,” her eidos, her “essence,” or any and all of its instances? Barthes’s unacknowledged source for the peculiar term may well be the same as that of Giorgio Agamben, who drew on Meister Eckhart’s way of thinking about the relation of body and image through an idea of “nudity”: “It is the trembling of the thing in the medium of its own knowability; it is the quivering in which the image allows itself to be known”—​even as the

30  Barthes’s understands the idea of the person very much in the line of thought so well crystalized in Marcel Mauss’s last essay, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self,” trans. W. D. Halls in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, eds. Michael Carrithers et al., (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–​25. Mauss explores the Roman genealogy of the concept as a civic, juridical entity, whereby the person has a right to his image—​which specifically meant owning the image and surname of one’s ancestors: name and image are bound up, then, as properties of the person. Persona pertains to the artifact or fiction—​hence the mask, the “character,” or “personality” that are construed as theoretically separable from the “self.” To the juridical meaning of the person “is moreover added a moral one, a sense of being conscious, independent, autonomous, free and responsible. Moral conscience introduces consciousness into the juridical conception of law.” Christianity adds a metaphysical foundation to the category of the person, construed as an indivisible individual preceding any particular condition. Psychological consciousness, a sense of self, already pertains to a relatively modern notion of the person, and comes into dialogue with older philosophical questions: is it the source of all action or are these predestined, is it free, is it divisible, is it discursive, or is it based in states and acts of consciousness or perceptions, etc.



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thing, or the body, remains ungraspable.31 The image is, then, a way of knowing. In an interpretative coup, “trembling” shifts, in Barthes’s text, from an ontological condition to an epistemological tension. This is how pop’s repetition-​trembling fulfills, for Barthes, the figural workings of the “pose” of portraiture: the person is glimpsed in its wavering between its “essence” and its states of being-as-image, none of which can ever match exactly. The terms are only Platonic to a point, for the subject is not an identity fixed by author or sitter. It bespeaks at least a search for (although not an assertion of) the person: it is a struggle for self. Extended to the spectator, as image, it might even release its eidos to the viewer who looks—​who seeks. In this context Barthes cites the example of Warhol’s films, mentioning Four Stars (1967) and The Chelsea Girls (1966) to characterize the temporality of pop generally. He sees the trajectory of such films as “finite” (as form) and “endless” (by repetition) but not “finished.” Their temporality disallows the “internal organization of a destiny”—​no “pathos of time” in pop. Yet there is a way in which one might extend Barthes’s move from “repetition” to “trembling”—​ which concerns, precisely, “the body’s formality,” the uniqueness of a personal “pose” or disposition in the image—​to the more specific possibility of the filmic portrait in duration. When met by the spectator’s attentive look, such layered work as Outer and Inner Space does—​I suggest—​ yield a “pathos of time.” One might see here Edie’s moving image struggle for breath under the weight of “fact” (as Barthes puts it)—​its own mechanical repetition or reduction by a merciless apparatus. It is not a proper “resurrection”—​t hat sea-​change of artistic figuration that forges an eloquent, death-​marked being out of a former self. Neither author nor person (sitter, star), neither metaphor nor metonymy, offer secure anchors of figural elaborations, consolations, or distractions in these cinematic portraits. It is the task of the spectator, of the viewer-​as-​subject, to occupy these vacated spaces of the pop image-​fact and grant them a gaze (not just a glance). With it, meaning might come “galloping back”—​t he dynamic equestrian metaphor is Barthes’s—​to hunt, or heroically rescue, what mechanical repetition had driven away. I follow Barthes full circle here to suggest that, unanchored to origin, its human subject unsettled, un-​ evolving, inert and restless, the pop image can nevertheless “tremble” into being in the throes of the apparatus. But its deliverance, in the “pathos of time,” hangs on our look.

OUTER AND INNER SPACE, AND THE PATHOS OF TIME By its mere title, Outer and Inner Space stands out against Face—​as against most of Warhol’s routinely literal, deadpan captions—​breaking with the sharp graphic signifiers of pop. It 31  Giorgio Agamben “Nudity,” in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedetella (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2011), 83–​4: Bulitio signifies the trembling or internal tension of the object in the mind of God or of man… . It is the trembling of the thing in the medium of its own knowability; it is the quivering in which the image allows itself to be known… . The nudity of the human body is its image—​t hat is, the trembling that makes this body knowable but that remains, in itself, ungraspable. This gloss on “trembling” is, I  feel, more immediately productive that the other path that might be signaled by Barthes’s terms, namely towards Søren Kierkegaard—​a path that I did not feel equipped to follow.

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describes an almost transcendental traversal of surfaces and boundaries, of self and world; it begs to move beyond or to delve within; it joins the distant and alien—​perhaps inflected by the popular imaginary of NASA at the time—​w ith the most intimate, psychological (or psychotherapeutic) enclosures, and all of these unknown. While one can see enfolded here, as Callie Angell put it, a drama of “outer beauty and inner turmoil,” Warhol’s own definition of the project of pop art in displacing abstract expressionism suggests an even more intricate process: “Then pop art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.”32 How exactly Warhol’s titles were given, registered, and preserved would involve a separate archival inquiry—​t hey were clearly not a matter of indifference. Certainly this film’s programmatic title, bound up with the self-​consciousness of pop art vis-​à-​v is its artistic predecessor, both reverses and strangely interiorizes its ethos. This reversal does not ignore or neutralize the terminology of interiority, depth, expressive form, and the metaphysical traffic between all such concepts; it proposes, rather, their mutual inextricability. The interlacing of Outer and Inner and their disarticulation, their intricacy as ways of thinking the image generally and the cinematic portrait in particular, quite exceed the bluff availability of pop, and blunt its irony. In its strategies of displacement and deferral, Warhol’s film complicates what the pop image—​as object, as fact, as event—​would seem to deliver at point blank. It divides our attention even as it compels our gaze, over and over again: it unfolds in time; it cannot be consumed at once. In 16​m m diptych projection, each of the two film reels of Outer and Inner Space consists of a single take occupying the entire reel at approximately 33 minutes. We might have imagined the two reels of Face projected this way—​not successively but simultaneously, side-​by-​side. 33 It is in envisioning this possibility that we understand the relative clarity of the portrait form that distinguished Face, which we have already imagined as Edie’s sitting-​rehearsal for the intricacies of Outer and Inner Space. Face seems to be, in this regard, a sort of test or preparation taking place in Edie’s dressing room, as it were, and preceding the studio/​Factory shoot of Outer and Inner Space. It also bears comparison, therefore, to the dressing room sequence of Il provino and its embedded test-​performances. Just as Antonioni’s film laces a succession of tests in different orders of the fiction, whose status is not always clearly marked even on the soundstage, so Outer and Inner Space involves test-​like coordinates—​foregrounding the studio apparatus and parsing out aspects of its subject’s appearance and performance. Yet in its complexity and ambition Outer and Inner is, clearly, “not only a test.” It stands as Warhol’s first cinematic diptych, rightly associated with his silkscreen procedure: the tension between multiplicity and unity, authorial control and permissiveness, duration and condensation in this film laces spatial with temporal repetition, synergistically intensified and taken to a new order. As in Face, the mise-​en-​scène and camera axis of Outer and Inner Space are identical on each reel—​here screened side by side—​a lthough in the latter film shot size and thereby framing alter 32  See Callie Angell, program notes to the film’s screenings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, October 15–​November 29, 1998, and Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando: Harcourt, 1980), 3. Apart from close viewing, my description and analysis of Warhol’s film in the pages that follow is indebted to the seminal work of Callie Angell, especially her detailed introduction to the screening at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, October 31, 2000, published in “Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space,” Millennium Film Journal special issue: Winds from the East, 38 (Spring 2002), accessed online October 2, 2016. 33  Patrick Friel first suggested to me, in conversation, such potential flipping between successive and simultaneous projection options of the two reels.



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FIGURES 4.27–​4.28:  Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space (1965). Frame enlargements from 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 33 minutes in double screen. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

with time, and in reverse-​relation between the reels, as the camera gradually zooms in on the right-​hand screen from medium-​long shot to a medium close-​up, while on the left-​hand side it eventually zooms out from medium c​ lose-​up to medium-​long shot (Figs. 4.27–4.28). 34 On each side, the three-​quarters filmic visage of Edie Sedgwick is outlined against a television monitor playing a prerecorded videotape of her relatively static profile in large, tightly contained close-​ up. The ensemble of heads in both the filmic and the then-​experimental video recording yields a quadruple portrait: a variant of the multiplied (or divided) structure of Warhol’s serial images. Cinematographic texture, black-​a nd-​white tonality and nuance are saliently defined against the doubly-mediated video images, which themselves function as ground and source of back-​ lighting in the mise-​en-​scène. The heavy make-​up and earrings embellish both glamour and the expressive mobility that graces the three-​quarters filmic figures. In the profiles however these effects are reduced: the make-​up is somewhat effaced by the harsh lighting, and the earrings mostly cut off by the frame. With their relative stasis the embedded video images are, then, quite austere and imposing, not at all glamorous, while the filmic Edie is granted some mobility even as she is compressed in the shallow space between the movie camera and the television 34  I am using Edie’s “filmic” face and body as rough measure for these shots since, within the monitors, the profiles are statically enframed in close-​up—​a lthough the impression of their scale does alter with the shifting positions of the filmic zoom. The zoom lens was a relatively new device at the time: it involves, of course, not an actual movement of the camera approaching its object, but a simulated optical movement which, in pulling things closer, tends to flatten the space. Zoom shots are explored extensively in the American avant-​garde, most famously by Michael Snow a couple of years later in Wavelength, but also by Warhol himself, who deploys them as soon as he starts moving his camera: routinely, he would foreground the artifice of the zoom by speeding into and out of spaces in movement of attention (as if “grabbing”) and withdrawal, as in Vinyl or My Hustler (both 1965).

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monitor—​contenders for her image. The studio setting is replete with the technological apparatus, itself seen periodically to be handled by the crew. Specifically it is the controls of the monitors that are handled: initially, it seems, for sound but eventually for channels so that the fact of television transmission—​low grade as it might be—​complicates even further the layered mediality of this work. Unbeknownst to the subject, a quasi-​drama emerges for the viewer alone, whereby Edie’s several images struggle for our attention while she herself must ostensibly contend with the Warhol apparatus, which has already seized and incorporated aspects of her. In the monitors her video profiles—​a bit larger than the filmed heads—​seem to jut forward. It is almost as if they were poised to whisper into the ear of the filmed Edie who periodically peeks back, half-​mockingly intimidated by this “intrusion” of her former self—​the video was evidently shot earlier—​upon the present tense of the 16mm film’s production. Performance, the range of movements, and the command of the look differ markedly between the film and the embedded video profiles, where Edie’s eyes cannot, by definition, meet the camera, which almost seems to hang upon her cheek. But even in her relatively relaxed three-​quarters pose on film, it is apparent that the direction of her look has been explicitly restricted. On the one hand her look is lured away from the movie camera by an off-​screen interlocutor situated somewhat to its left; this reiterates the classical cinematic organization that would routinely be edited into a shot-​reverse shot, as well as the taboo against the actor’s direct look to the camera, which we saw deployed somewhat more naturally in Face. On the other hand, from just a few gestures and stolen glances back and sideways to her right, it also seems that Edie has been instructed—​like Orpheus, or as in the biblical fable of Lot’s wife—​to not turn or look back on her video image, with which she seems nevertheless compelled to compete. As would probably be the case in a typical screen test, Edie has only a limited range in which to turn her look: she cannot therefore command the space—​neither that of the mise-​en-​ scène surrounding her, nor that which the camera implies as our own, belated, spectatorial space. The cinematographic image is weighed, then, against the new medium, though, ironically, it is the antiquated 16​m m film that preserves the now-extinct video format. In a curious chiasmus, video-​technology newness is made the repository of ghostly images from the past. But while the film contains the video in playback, a suggestion of closed-​circuit simultaneity is not entirely absent. Warhol would not hesitate, one feels, to manipulate the technology or loop time in this and other ways, elaborating on his repetition of shots in Sleep, for instance. Spectators of Outer and Inner Space—​not only the casual passersby in its more recent gallery installations but even those committed viewers (for example, graduate seminar students) sitting through it, beginning to end, in screening-​room conditions testify to this initial suspicion of closed-​circuit simultaneity between the video and the film. It is significant that this possibility is raised and then withdrawn in practice, for the crafting of repetition as spatial and temporal device is thus felt as subtle and varied, accumulating and layering time, opening up the potentialities of—​yet also the potential struggles with—​media. Media forms, qualities, and textures—the manipulations of the image scan and of the vertical roll on the television monitor, the flare-​out of the filmic image at the end of reels, the babble of overlapping sound superadded to the layering of image resolutions, poses, temporalities—​a ll speak to the endurance and the near-​d raining of the subject. With the premonition of “death at work” in the long-​take close-​up, a superadded consciousness emerges: in an age when the demise of cinema is already, and repeatedly, being rehearsed, we might see



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projected here the cinema dreaming its own end. It may well be staged as a drama: against the vital gesticulation and darting responsiveness of the filmed (and increasingly exhausted) Edie, the large, looming, pale right profiles in the monitors are relatively static, passive, turned upward, as if interrogated under strong light, and thus betray a certain vulnerability. In addition, the novel video technology cheats Edie’s face of the nuanced photographic texture, the dimensional and relatively embodied quality of the properly filmic parts of the portrait. With top and back of the video heads cut off in the radical reduction to the blank, flattened expanse of the cheek and the articulation of outline, the profiles also deliver a certain archaic simplification, harnessing the rhetoric of paradigmatic profile forms: silhouette, cameo, stamp. 35 The evidential and legal connotations of the profile—​a s employed on coins or stamps—​t hus also harken back to a symbolic power, an authority of the image exercised, in some sense, against the softer, nuanced, naturalized filmic face in three-​quarters view. Does this archaic power granted to the new technology, and bound up with the imposing appearance of the profiles, reinforce or otherwise compensate for the flat dimensionality and electronic breakdown of the video that becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the film? Is it a forewarning of a new order of circulation, the leveling of the world through television and new media? In almost every way the formal juxtaposition of the video and the filmic faces in this work complicates any diametrical oppositions and value judgments that would emerge. Against the confrontational pressure of its elaborate mise-​en-​scène and its strongly invoked off-​screen space—​invoked differently for the two basic facial dispositions and the two media—​ against the mortifying multiplication and splitting, against the incoherence of the verbal monologues, and against the then-​startling introduction of video into the filmmaking scene, Edie persists, mercurially: her gamine’s self-​conscious playfulness in alternation with nervous distress or anguish, periodically flipping into noticeable reflection, even melancholy, before folding back to ironic self-​display. 36 The fragmented, frenetic performances, each enframed in its architectural set-​up and in its own duration through the varying shot lengths, make for endless variation, also compounded by the sense of disarticulation between the two reels and the never-​quite-​synchronized projectors. Attention and distraction oscillate, while the meandering, overlapping, largely incomprehensible monologues do not anchor any part of the portrait. Spectators notice that, between the four heads and several voices—​harder to count—​Edie talks about space (presumably “outer”), the supernatural, the past, or gossip. 37 The manifest compression of shooting time to running time—​about four times the former to the latter—​adds particular density to our experience of the film: we get too much and (therefore) too little, our attention vacillates and indirectly mirrors the effect of Edie’s own agitation—​if not panic. Yet Warhol’s means are simple and economical. Having rejected editing in his early filmmaking practice—​a move comparable to his elimination of the touch of the artist’s hand in 35  I return to the juxtaposition of frontal and profile face in Chapter Five, also in light of Meyer Schapiro’s semiotically inspired discussion of the differential value of these paradigmatic modes in Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), especially 37–​49. 36  Norman Mailer commented on Edie as performer when she auditioned for his play The Deer Park: “She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances.” Quoted in Stein, Edie: American Girl, 314. 37  The soundtrack is discussed in Nat Finkelstein and David Dalton, EdieFactoryGirl (New York: VH1, 2006), 84.

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the silkscreens—​h is shots typically include the marked or damaged footage, black, overexposed, or clear at the start and end of reels. Preserving the film reels in their entirety, end to end, Warhol handles temporal condensation through spatial configurations of multiplicity and simultaneity, to achieve what standard cinematic practice handles by editing. Reversing the dilation of time in his silent films system—where a lower rate of frames per second is used in projection than had been deployed in filming—Outer and Inner Space is constructed by layering, compression, condensation. And as the temporal dilation in the silent films effects a hallucinatory tactility, a gravity that seems to haunt the filmic world, so time’s layering and the spatial conditions of Outer and Inner Space—​w ith filmic duration figured against the video rear-​i mage—​t ranspire as a different kind of burden, a pressure on Edie’s person and on her image. This is not the contemporary outer-​s pace fantasy of zero-​ gravity astronaut ​weightlessness, but outer and inner are sensed as forces that impinge upon and restrict Edie: she is truly captured here, within the space-​t ime of each medium and of both media together. Edie performs, resists, suffers, through Outer and Inner Space. Certainly, the nuance of the cinematographic trace is threatened by video ubiquity, by electronic sublimation, the regenerative promise and horror of closed-circuit simultaneous feedback and replay. One would have thought that Warhol would embrace the new medium, yet we find him hesitating here, as he uses the video with utmost reserve, allowing the film to encompass and survive it, to capture, twice, the video tape’s pathetic end, as if chastising it for reckless distortion. Yet the video luminosity and flicker, the electronic breakdown, the pleading vulnerability of the profiles—​at once childish and threatening—​themselves transpire as sensitizing devices vis-​à-​v is the exhaustion of the filmed subject. Armed with the ritual accouterments of movie glamour—​t he heavy make-​up and jewelry—​E die’s constantly-darting eyes and all her movements are extended to and magnified by the earrings, whose jagged geometrical shadows about the neck themselves rhyme with the patterns of the video-​i mage breakdown in the monitors. She emerges here as a sensitized, impressionable, and responsive face-​body surface—​or perhaps a sort of sculptural complex of surfaces. For she herself is a medium for images that, in the space-​t ime of her image-​multiplication, counters and transfigures the technological apparatus. It is a losing battle: the longer and more intently we watch her to register detail, variability of mood and performance, the more salient, perforce, becomes our sense of her struggle, her self-division, the tensions that shadow her exuberance. No layers of make-​up, no multiplication or duration, no chatter—​would relieve the burden of Warhol’s apparatus, that would make her a star, but also fractures and immolates her (Figs. 4.29–4.30). One sees her, as well, mythologically: as a sort of Bacchanal figure caught, panicked, in the light, in this flicker of life-​on-​fi lm, confined and already marked by death which no measure of beauty, vitality, depth, no cinematic illusion, motion or repetition can defeat. Edie Sedgwick’s career will, in fact, be brief. Just a few years later it will be seen to rehearse the narrative that places her biography, and her iconicity, in line with other celebrity catastrophes of that era—​ Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, JFK. The sudden, futile, and untimely death that claimed these and other contemporary idols underscores the mythological dimensions of lives lived too fast and too high, lives seen as snatched, torn to bits, then resurrected and adored in the image,



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FIGURES 4.29–​4.30:  Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space (1965). Frame enlargements from 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 33 minutes in double screen. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

still or moving. 38 Warhol’s silkscreens, employing found, often cropped, photographs of many of these iconic figures after their death, strike us as different from Edie’s unfolding record on film: for the films are made out of the living model. Yet a looming stasis is embedded in the films’ fixity of mise-​en-​scène and in their indifferent duration for, even if moving, Edie’s image is headed nowhere but to its own dead end: its time, her time, is not at her command. This, too, is a tragic recognition, perhaps more poignant inasmuch as, on film, it forever unfolds in the present tense. Archaic vestiges of the face-​as-​i mage—​t he cultic work of iconicity, of masking and shrouding—​but also the movie industry’s forces of duplication and perpetuation, distribution and permeation of the market—​a ll inform the special density of this film. Warhol knowingly embraces multiple modalities of the facial image—​its iconic charge, its secular apotheosis in the bourgeois portrait, its modernist blows, its compensatory glamour in classical and post-​ classical cinema, its inflation in the advertising image. This shoring of fragments within the layering and rebounding of time is so strongly felt because it is unsublimated by narrative and 38  Thomas Crow discusses the catastrophic death of celebrities as context for Warhol’s work in “Saturday Disasters,” which is interesting to juxtapose with Warhol’s simultaneous interest in anonymous deaths, as in the car crash series. The mythological substance of celebrity death as treated by Warhol is something that Roland Barthes might have reconsidered in relation to his earlier evaluation of the pernicious myths of post-​classical movie stars (that we encountered in Chapter Two). Barthes did not to my knowledge return to this topic except for his brief comment in Camera Lucida, 79, on how the melancholy quality inherent in the photographic medium can also be sensed when viewing (or re-​v iewing) a film whose actor has since died.

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genre reassurances. In the doubling and quadrupling of her image, Edie is split, torn, hurtled into circulation, refracted by extravagant movie fantasies of Cleopatra, from its earliest diva fabrications through the pastiche of Romans in film. All these transpire through the knowing language of pop, yet even these fall away as one senses, increasingly, that Edie may not be accumulating but, rather, shedding all these models and disposition, all these masks, these ways of being. A sense of futility—​“too early, too late,” “still living, already dead”—​is woven into Edie’s multiple, long-​take, finite-​but-​u nfinished, ever-​variable image. A pathos of time thus embellishes the mythological armature of the image, bound up with the tragic resonance of the star herself—​her biographical destiny retrospectively realized. 39 Marilyn is already dead; Edie is still alive and kicking in the moving image—​it is only a question of time. In the give and take between Warhol’s iconic silkscreens—​so many devoted to Hollywood stars—​a nd his filmic portraits, the discourse of temporality is parsed differently. It has been said that Edie’s beauty shares something with Marilyn Monroe, not long gone in 1965. But with her emphatically drawn eyes and darkened brows and spectacular earrings, she comes oddly close at the same time to Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra, whom Warhol had already portrayed in blue: an evidently cropped film still, stamped, repeated to the point of stuttering—​effaced here and there, and overlapping into black before halting into nothing but blue on the bottom right (Fig. 4.31).40 What archaic resonance—​a ncient Egyptian or otherwise—​what hieratic power survives, even if mutated, through Hollywood myths of Cleopatra then to be deposited in Edie? A connoisseur of Hollywood cinema, fascinated with the aging and the death of stars, Warhol sets up Edie’s film portraits as if for the movie star’s great close-​up, disclosing his acute sensitivity to the powers and the risks of industrial glamour in its hyperbolic circulation and availability. The earlier experience of motion pictures that he inherits—​going to the movies, sitting dreaming through double features, letting attention drift, letting the body cruise—​t his experience evolved and altered as movies were telescoped into late-​n ight television reruns, and as the most stirring films, the most gorgeous stars would be panned and scanned, cut limb from limb with channel surfing, and with commercials of every sort (depending on the hour and the venue) slicing into them. Yet their power persists, even if mutated—​t inged by the patina of time, and of datedness, and of the evolving media. If Outer and Inner Space might first seem to cultivate the late-​modern pageant of images, the rhetoric of advertisements, what it also lays bare is the failure of the image to hold together an integral subject, and in this failure lies the film’s great pathos or—​if you will—​its humanity. Glamour, like a shimmering, brittle shell, 39  Having read the iconography of vanitas in Warhol’s Face, one might see it extended in Outer and Inner Space to embrace even more grandiose models. David Jacobson suggests to me a Christological comparison, surely not foreign to Warhol’s sensibility:  Mary Magdalene’s passage through the shedding of vanities—​whose trappings are themselves channeled into ritual anointments—​a nd through the temporality of her vigil. Apparently Warhol was sometimes glimpsed watching intently, vigilantly, his own films for hours on end: is it not the case that—​a s for the Magdalene, for the artist, and for the viewer—​i f you watch the corpse long enough it is bound to resurrect before your eyes? Something in the inert pop image-​fact can be said to hold this possibility and, as Barthes had suggested, to throw the burden of its “trembling” revelation outward—​to the beholder. I discuss the temporality of the death mask that hovers over the facial image as always “still living, already dead” in light of Georges Didi-​Huberman’s writings on the anachronism of images, in Chapter Two. 40  Elizabeth Taylor was of course another favorite star figure for Warhol. Crow (56–​7) cites Taylor’s illness and collapse that interrupted the filming of Cleopatra in 1961: a sensational media event that made its way into Warhol’s tabloid painting, Daily News, of 1962.



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FIGURE 4.31:  Andy Warhol, Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1963) © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

cannot fully contain and conceal its subject’s vulnerability. It cannot rescue but only cushion Edie in her division and reduplication, wrap her in those sheets and shrouds of time that, inevitably, keep shedding as the film runs its course. In parsing the effects of repetition in pop, Barthes invoked the mythical Double and found it flattened, a mere “Copy, not a Shadow: beside, not behind: a flat, insignificant, hence irreligious Double.” Yet does not something of the ghostly, uncanny Double or indeed shadow persist in the large video profiles, extending back in space and time? Even as the authority and agency of artist and of sitter are diffuse, even as they offer no fixed point of meaning or reference, even as these images lend themselves to the viewer free of narrative or genre arcs of expectation, unburdened by legible expression or motivation, a sense of struggle persists, simply, in our view of the singular person grappling with her former image—while she herself is being turned into an image. There is violence in this situation in which we, too, partake as our look and our attention are invited to wander between the two screens and the four heads, between the film and the

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video. But nothing in this or in any of Warhol’s portraits of the period ever demeans its subjects since they are always afforded all the beauty and glamour, celebrity’s shields and masks, that Warhol cultivated so well. The pressure exerted by the formal organization, by compression and duration, itself evolves, finally, as a second-​level mythopoetic operation. Voided of volition and desire, and after the celebratory and the ironic outlook of pop has been spent, a cumulative pathos of time is sustained in Warhol’s design. The lived time of co-​presence and contact (the situation of filmmaking), compressed in the layering and doubling of the work’s formal composition, then extends as already-​a rchaic imprint through the duration of its screening. Running its course, like an hourglass, the film continually unfolds the present into past: this process, spun out of the very medium of cinema in its temporal condition of “death every afternoon,” is made painfully evident, and personalized, in Outer and Inner Space, as we watch Edie fall away from time, which no repetition and no image can really restore.41 The mechanical imposition of beginning and end is patently inadequate to human time—​too much, too little, no measure is right. Contingency and destiny (namely death), like the trivial and the momentous, like the before and beyond, the outer and the inner, the draining of life and its resurrection on film unfurl as on a single Möbius surface that belies their opposition. With authorial agency evacuated—​or distributed otherwise—with categories of performance and of being more porous than ever, anxiety escalates. Confronting the camera head-​on, alone even if multiple and chattering, subjugated to such oppressive conditions of duration, freed of narrative fiction but challenged in every other way—​physically, formally, socially, psychically—​t he subject struggles and in this way returns, under duress, shielded only up to a point by masquerade, irony, and by the film’s elaborate cultivation of surface. All these now seem to be a foil to the person’s re-​emergence: a reversal that mirrors Warhol’s own famously self-​effaced authorship. On the one hand his filmmaking career, as David James so insightfully mapped it, can be seen to recapitulate, en abîme, technological and socio-​economic paradigms in cinema history: from silent (and silent speed) to talkie, from unedited rolls of film running end to end, to edited, narrative, and even genre film, or even more broadly from early photography to late-​modern media industry, from artisanal modes to division of labor in the production process, from author to producer and trade mark.42 Since Warhol’s excising of self, or suspension of judgment, is willful, it transpires as a power that always also reflects back as self-​representation. It is figured by Warhol’s own mask: most obviously his other-​worldly look, the pasty complexion, the silver/​nylon hair. The “pale master,” as Stephen Koch calls him, “the phantom of the media,” thus structured his work around the principle of his own removal, mirroring through his subject the failure to ever capture personhood, with which he is nevertheless preoccupied above all else. Exploring the mystery of distance installed in his own remoteness from things and people, Warhol is obsessed with what is for him the impenetrable mystery of human presence, the human face and body… . 41  See André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” trans. Mark A. Cohen in Margulies, ed., Rites of Realism, 27–31. 42  David James, “The Producer as Author,” Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 58–84.



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Personhood is a mystery to him. His works gained their power from proposing the structure of that mystery. His voyeuristic obsession with the portrait is the arena in which this aspect of his art is most obvious.43

In Warhol’s radical confrontation of person and apparatus, the film portraits of the mid-​1960s can all be construed as tests of sorts; but “failing” the test then evolves as a vital gesture. It is, after all, failure, a recognition of loss, that effects a turn inward, a reflective consciousness and, within it, what I would describe as a flickering of self. It may just suffice as the cinema’s best shot at the person in the post-​classical era.

FAIL BETTER In the second version of his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin diagnosed the fundamental self-​a lienation of the movie actor when confronted with his or her mechanical reproducibility as image. The apparatus—​ not only the camera, of course, but the ensemble of technological, production, and market conditions—​puts the human subject, according to Benjamin, in the predicament of a test, comprising formal, social, and psychic coordinates, with the filmmaker in the position of examiner: Film makes test performances capable of being exhibited, by turning that ability itself into a test. The film actor performs not in front of an audience but in front of an apparatus. The film director occupies exactly the same position as the examiner in an aptitude test. To perform in the glare of arc lamps while simultaneously meeting the demands of the microphone is a test performance of the highest order. To accomplish it is to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus… . The film actor [places] that apparatus in the service of his triumph. In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatus. … . The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-​alienation.44 43 Koch, Stargazer, 20, 29, 50. “Pale master” is Koch’s expression in the acknowledgements. In a discussion on Warhol’s Screen Tests at the Eikones Institute, University of Basel, October 2014, Ralph Ubl expressed to me a sense in which Warhol might be nothing less than the devil. There are, to be sure, many ways to talk about the morbid drive of Warhol’s work, and himself as death-​i n-​person: the fallen angel, draining the world of life. Is this to be understood as one among any number of explicit artistic aspirations to be “of the devil’s party”? I agree that this possibility is raised in Warhol’s work, and in his persona but, as should be clear by now, I also grant Warhol’s films some assertively vital forces. 44  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Michael W. Jennings et.al., eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 30–​2 , emphases in the original. The second version on which I rely here is, according to Miriam Hansen, the one that Benjamin considered as his ur-​text, and involves a more nuanced discussion that does not strictly hinge on the

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If self-​a lienation is inherent in any confrontation with one’s mechanical reproducibility, how can the apparatus be subjugated to the actor’s “humanity”? How can human singularity—​ the unique person as subject in the image, reproduced and projected—​survive in the land of technology? How to accomplish or to pass such a test, and what would it mean to fail it? How can one’s humanity be tested? It is an impossible question—​a ll the more in the wake of the worst “tests” of industrial modernity. Yet Benjamin suggests here, surely, that some sense of the human can be preserved, or indeed be borne by the actor’s capacity to exploit most productively her self-​a lienation in the face of the apparatus. Given that person and technology will not meet as happily as modernity might have sometimes envisioned, given that being-​ as-​performance (as if one can always pick and choose) might encompass a failed (if unforgettable) performance, given that what counts for state and police identification does not really define or exhaust the individual, one might consider that it is also through failure that the person flickers. Not least by their generic designation, and by the formal rules of their serial design and production, Warhol’s Screen Tests beg the question of who is being tested and for what—​as if in indefinite preparation of a role to come. It is no use to insist that despite Warhol’s designation, his Tests are not what is usually meant by that term. The spectre of passing or failing the test is raised, and Warhol laces its demands and connotations exceedingly well: the Hollywood industry, the pressure of an exacting system by which to gauge “star material,” always pushing for something special yet in constant awareness of market expectations. These considerations Warhol raises and then bends on his own turf. He makes his test rules quite strict, drawing, in fact, on some of the same oppressive anthropometric-​criminological iconography that informed our discussion of The Wrong Man in Chapter Three. As is often noted, the closest precedent to the Screen Tests must be his Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a mural project involving vast enlargements of criminal mug shots from a police brochure by that title. Designed for the New York State pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, Warhol’s mural so blatantly reversed the usual direction and imposition of the gaze regulating state apparatuses vis-​à-​v is those fallen under the threshold of the law, that it prompted official objections and effacing of the mural even before the Fair’s opening.45 The tightly framed, shallow, harshly lit, frontal and profile mug shots of prescribed proportions within a bare scenography were carried into the Screen Tests, where a fixed​ frontal deadpan disposition predominates. We have also seen its traces in the juxtaposition of bare profiles with the filmic faces of Outer and Inner Space. Roy Grundmann likewise reads criminological connotations in Warhol’s Blow Job (1964). Nailed to the wall point-blank, the anonymous young man’s shifting looks and expressions—​ whose connotations span the criminal and the erotic, the morbid and the divine—​dramatize most forcefully and, indeed, as under test conditions, the subject’s physical and existential ordeal. The binary rhetoric of the more traditionally studied third version. See Hansen, “Room for Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004), 4. In “‘That Screen Magnetism’: Warhol’s Glamour,” October 132 (Spring 2010), 43–​70, Brigitte Weingart brilliantly parses the duplicity of glamour—​at once magical/​auratic and constructed/​i ndustrial—​a s staged by Warhol’s Screen Tests, and refers, as well, to Benjamin’s passages on the apparatical test conditions. I find many points of agreement between Weingart’s work and my own—​a lso beyond this chapter. 45  Richard Meyer offers an excellent account of this project in Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-​Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 128–​56.



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FIGURE 4.32:  Andy Warhol, Blow Job (1964). Frame enlargement from 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 41 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

sense of oppressive scrutiny of the apparatus in this incredible film is not only due to the frontal framing within a flat, shallow space, but is also heightened by the prescribed silent-​speed projection, dilating our view through the tides of the film’s seven reels (Fig. 4.32).46 Human time and cinematographic time are disarticulated here in ways that compare with, but by means that are quite distinct from Outer and Inner Space. More assertively than the latter, Blow Job is animated by a principle of excision, and by doubt: spectators are made to wonder what exactly transpires in the off-​screen space, what order of “being” or “performance” is being pushed to the brink. Not only off-​screen space, but also off-​screen time is inscribed here: for one also wonders whether the reel order is, in fact, chronological, how much time transpires between reels in the course of production, and what might or might not have taken place within these intervals. No production trivia or smug diagnosis should eliminate the constitutive force of negativity that thus enters the viewing experience, suspending the spectator between the seen and the unseen, the unknown. And as the rhythms of sex—​body rhythms, human rhythms—​are confronted with the industrial space-​time, we might ask which of them prevails, and how this would, or would not, resolve the question: does this young man pass or fail?47 There is, I dare say, some pathos in this situation. 46 Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, 63–​5. 47 In“Our Kind of Movie,” 1–​15, Douglas Crimp reflects on ways in which the achievement of Blow Job as, indeed, a great portrait also hangs on its warding off any indulgent sense of the spectator’s visual mastery of the man’s image. The subject’s unavailability to us in this film, Crimp suggests, is to be partly ascribed to his absorption in his pleasure and thus his defiance of the camera—​even as he lends it his image, just as the Empire State Building lends itself to Warhol’s camera. Crimp underestimates, in my view, the acute way in which, through a good part of the film, we also sense the man’s struggle to avoid the camera’s gaze and to be one with his pleasure. This tension links up with the idea of the test. Crimp’s quasi-​narrative reading of the signs and symptoms of the man’s arousal, climax, and aftermath closes off, it seems to me, the deeper promiscuity of the film’s spatio-​temporal conceit and its true challenge to knowledge. I have debated the notion of “off-​screen time” with Daniel Morgan, who develops it in his work, with very different examples.

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The question of passing or failing the test, all too explicit with regard to Blow Job, makes salient the operative principles underlying Warhol’s filmic portraits generally and, of course, the Screen Tests in particular. His prescribed scenographic, cinematographic, and acting rules for the Tests stipulated that the sitter must sit still against a bare backdrop, do nothing, refrain from action and expression and, even, refrain from blinking—​a comparison with sitting for the long exposure of the antiquated daguerreotype process is often cited. Having stepped, for the duration, outside the ordinary run of life, the Tests’ subjects would experience the stilled, sustained posing as if they were already inhabiting their own image—​it is surely a hyperbolic version of what many of us feel when posing, even for an instant, for our photograph to be taken. Are these Tests, in fact, honorific portraits, as Warhol would claim, or are they always marred by the anthropometrically oppressive, self-alienating conditions of their standardized production, arresting the human face within a rigid system against which divergences are evaluated? Spatial and temporal restrictions are involved in any screen test, but Warhol’s heightening of the mechanics and rules of the test, the withdrawal of distractions at every level—​something to do, a role to play, something to say—​joined with the ostensible removal of the author, allowed him to probe ever deeper into the predicament of the face on film. The question is perhaps not what would count as a successful test. Quite the contrary, Warhol’s rules must have been devised, in part, to be failed so as to capture something released from the subject in just this way—be it only a tear. What slips, diverges, or ruptures may well be construed as the singular residue, elicited by the unique encounter of person and apparatus, and only perceived in projection.48 It is that fallible “human something”—​recall Cavell’s epithet for screen presence—​t hat no special acting feat, no formal virtuosity, will guarantee. It might even be star material—​t his is what makes it the industry’s most precious resource. At this chapter’s opening, I posited the screen test as a facial genre of sorts, and found it elaborated in Antonioni’s Il provino, where Soraya’s indeterminate presence, or vacancy, is reiterated across a range of tests and through different orders of the cinematic fiction. Antonioni was clearly interested in how the apparatus braids this woman’s beauty and celebrity with her vulnerability and self-​a lienation, but also with a sense of her failure foretold. Her test does not give rise to a star, but her inadequacy does yield some inkling of the person—​a s in a sort of after-​i mage of her failure. I now read it in light of Benjamin’s suggestion that the cinema can render the adaptation, but also the mis​adaptation, of the human sensorium to the technological regimes of modernity materially and publically perceivable, projectable.49 Misadaptation—perhaps an earlier existential variant of inadequacy—as an experience of modernity, a mode of being, becomes, in this account, an expressive value. Chaplin projects it in virtuoso form: it is expressed in his body and gestural repertoire and is thematized in his films, most famously Modern Times (1936). The particular consistency of Soraya’s failure

48  Annette Michelson discusses Warhol’s intervention in film history through a central notion of “rupture,” which she relates to the modernist trope of the body in pieces, the part-​object, the operations of Kuleshovian montage, and the Warholian long take; see “‘Where Is Your Rupture?” Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson, October Files 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 105–​6 . I discuss the famous tear in the Ann Buchanan Screen Test in Chapter One. 49  I follow here, again, Hansen’s gloss in “Room for Play,” especially pp. 23–9.



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can only be appreciated (I have suggested) with some agonizing detours: by attending to her animal-​like impassivity intertwined with an uncertain sense of self, a vagueness that transpires in her voice, her elegance tinged by frailty—​i nadequacy is practically scripted into her biography as an expiring remnant of a bygone blue-​blood era. Possibly she could have been recovered, rediscovered, only by such a camera as Warhol’s. We have seen inadequacy project quite differently with Edie Sedgwick. The spectre of failure is sparked by her at once passionate and surprisingly nuanced expressions of resistance; her exuberance and delicacy jointly wavering between the knowing embrace of Hollywood glamour and a poignant sense of self that sustains her through her filmic ordeals. The pathos of time of which we spoke insinuates nothing of the “pathetic” in this young woman’s Passion—even as it appears that she took at least some of her Screen Tests in earnest. 50 All institutional, medium, and market dictates, all technical and stylistic mechanisms and formal control, all psychic tensions, meet the body of this woman and, refracting from it, address us fitfully. There is no getting away from self-division and repetition, technological and otherwise: it is the ground against which each failure will be drawn differently, for each failure—​l ike the proverbial unhappy family—​is unique. Hal Foster formulated this idea perfectly: The viewer cannot idealize the filmed person, as is usually the case with Hollywood cinema. One can only empathize, intermittently, with his or her travails before the relentless camera, that is, again, to empathize with the vicissitudes of the subject becoming an image—​w ith wanting this condition too much, resisting it too much, or otherwise failing at it. 51

It is the “otherwise” of this last phrase, in its departure from more tightly prescribed psychodramatic scenarios, that best describes the existential parameters of failure within which the Warhol subject emerges. Moreover, as Foster suggests, it might be only in response to our empathetic look that a “human something” will flicker—​even if intermittently—​in these films. Inadequacy and failure are construed here as a mode of being, or perhaps a mode of the person’s “trembling”—​as Barthes put it—​between being and image. We find its most eloquent expressions in the unlikely setting of Warhol’s Factory, where alienation and self-​a lienation were so intensively processed into art—​where they were art. The test contenders’ resistance, the portrait sitters’ struggle, or even Passion, yielded some astonishing portraits. Between myths of integrity or triumphant plenitude and the articulations of inadequacy which one discerns across an array of different cinemas, different forms of address and modes of attention allow for a vast range. Failure is one of its instruments, its generative moment and, perhaps, its most poignant form in this era. Other arts have recognized it: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” was Beckett’s instruction. 52 And one might add: when all else fails, fail better! Warhol was surprisingly candid when stating, in writings and interviews, 50  Callie Angell recounts Edie’s screen ambitions and the actual professional plans that appear to guide some of her Tests; see Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 181–2. 51  Hal Foster, “Test Subjects,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 42. 52  David Jacobson cited this speech to me from Samuel Beckett’s “Worstward Ho” in Company/​I ll Seen Ill Said/​ Worstward Ho/​Stirrings Still (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

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how distinct and vulnerable people are, how difficult as subjects—​a nd as subjects for art—​ even prior to the complication of hypothetical motivations, causality, editing, and narrative plotting. 53 If he wanted to be a machine it is, presumably, because it would have been easier, and because he knew better than anybody that persons are not soup cans, that faces are not labels, and that the more one tries to make them so, the more they flicker and even flare. He tested and proved it for himself.

53  Among numerous instances in which Warhol seems to express genuine curiosity and care for his human subjects, I find most poignant those cited by Gidal in Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings.



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CHAPTER 5

IN RETICENCE (BRESSON)

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f a piece with an eclectic stance against the “cinema”—distinguished from what he deems the proper art of “cinematography”—​Robert Bresson casts the human face in the shadow of negativity. His way of paring down appearances—​removing explanatory links and motivations, isolating the minor detail or focalizing the unaccented moment—​is often noted as a strategy of intensification in his work. Yet it is almost as if, at the same time, his camera will not look its subjects—​Bresson calls them “models”—​straight in the eye. He rediscovers the face in its withdrawal, in reticence. His way of vacating his models’ countenances—​refusing to occupy them with the routine communicative functions, excising the implied causality of film language and the illusion of legible motivations—​a llows him to distribute the gaze differently, to look equally upon all things, human and non-​human. A face, a foot, a clog, an animal’s head or its hoof, a doorknob, a dish spunge, some shrubbery at a street corner—​a ll are leveled before his camera. All entities and, indeed, the image as itself entity, are permeated by such perception, whose reticence interferes with assurances of workaday coherence, autonomy, and authority that classical cinematic representation seems to provide and that, one imagines, life itself might afford. Insofar as it uses the actual, living model (like the portrait sitter) to give rise to its images, the cinema makes certain questions of the face—​t he ethic of encounter, the presumption or imposition of knowledge, and its refusal, or its withdrawal—​inescapable. Bresson seems, on the one hand, to lay bare the human face: since he does not for the most part resort to professional actors and uses his models only once, they appear in his films like creatures newly-​born to perception—​exposed and vulnerable. Yet they are at the same time shielded or shrouded by certain techniques of Bresson’s cinematography, to which we shall attend: one senses something hidden in plain sight, one cannot approach it directly. What is it, then, that we do see, and what is it that grips us in a Bressonian image? By what roundabout and strange paths does his cinema meet its faces? His obstinate cinematographic perception is at once subtle, oblique, and devastating: it can cast even an ordinary glance to the limits, and it takes risks doing so. It erupted from the unlikely ground of the French post-​war culture of the cinéma de qualité, reverently based in literary adaptation, restorative in inclination, and fostering Christological perspectives. André Bazin was surely the first to distinguish Bresson’s radical departure against that ground and identify its promise for an altered consciousness of the cinematic medium. Already in response to Diary of a Country Priest (1951), he was able to discern how profoundly Bresson unsettles cinematic

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intuitions and traditions—​even as his project insinuates itself in a figural lineage that, we shall see, draws on both archaic and modernist systems. Bazin also understood that Bresson’s stylistics are not a local, incidental matter, but that they touch on fundamental issues in the ontology of the cinematic image, and that this can be recognized first in his treatment of the human face. Bazin’s intervention in that momentous essay did not only do important work for discerning viewers—​a mong them the Young Turks of the Cahiers—​but was critical as well, I would wager, for the filmmaker’s own evolving consciousness of his art. Bazin’s critical insights will therefore guide us through the central part of this chapter: I will take up his cues to explore how Bresson assaults anthropomorphic hierarchies, how deliberately he unsettles the relation of expression and motivation, how he works through a principle of negativity that inflects the very constitution of the image whose prime register is, still, the face. This “work of the negative” is productive, but it is also, in certain regards, iconoclastic; nevertheless it is achieved without resorting to abstraction, and while maintaining both the human figure and the vestiges of narrative fiction—​in some ways this makes it at times more difficult to define than works of the cinematic avant-​garde. The anthropological aesthetics of Georges Didi-​Huberman has already helped us locate—​ when looking at Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc in Chapter One—​t he generative possibilities of figural interference and anachronism in visual representation. Specifically in an art informed by a Christological conception of the incarnate image, and by a Renaissance representational system where legibility would seem to prevail, Didi-​Huberman diagnoses its loss in surprising eruptions of opacity: a radical otherness seems to persist at the heart of seemingly intelligible representation. While art history and iconography might tend to sublimate such sites of contradiction or illegibility—​for they threaten knowledge and oppose reason itself—​Didi-​Huberman sees here an operative power of negativity in and of the image. We will look at Bresson’s conception of the cinema as similarly driven by such constitutive self-​negation. There is a work of the negative in the image, a “dark” efficacy that, so to speak, eats away at the visible (the order of represented appearances) and murders the legible (the order of signifying configurations). From a certain point of view, moreover, this work or constraint can be envisaged as a regression, since it brings us, with ever-​startling force, towards a this-​side-​of [vers un en-deçà], towards something that the symbolic elaboration of artworks has covered over or remodeled… . It is the materia informis when it shows through form, it is the presentation when it shows through representation, it is opacity when it shows through transparency, it is the visual when it shows through the visible.1

This concluding string of distinctions—​which seems to posit a deliberate rift between terms too close (visual/​v isible) and to superimpose terms too contrary (materia informis/​form)—​ gathers substance through example. Here and in other writings, Didi-​Huberman points to the empty white space at the center of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (ca. 1440–​41, Monastery 1  Georges Didi-​Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press: 2005), 142–​3; emphases in the original. See also, with respect to what follows, Didi-​Huberman’s related book originally published the same year (1990): Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).



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of S. Marco, cell 3, Florence; see Chapter One, Fig. 1.16). The art historian, having located the work in its historical time and its particular place—​i n this case the fresco painting in its monastery function and setting, comprising its architecture, its lighting, and so forth—​must perhaps deliberately regress in order to elicit that “rend,” that point of crisis: a threatening, negative force within what would otherwise appear to be the coherent medium of painting in the High Renaissance. Didi-Huberman demonstrates how codes of representation and intelligibility, as such, fall short of accounting for what the viewer confronts in this blank space, where nothingness is itself sustained as visual substance. Yet it is through its obtuse “work of the negative”—​to now turn the phrase—that ​t he image speaks. This account of the retentive draw of inert visual material that both feeds and consumes the image resonates with aspects of my approach to the cinematic face in this book: its play of expressivity and opacity, its promise of plenitude and its inaccessibility, its illegibility. We might now cross this perception with Bazin’s exploration of the cinema’s aesthetic conditions through its fundamental “impurity,” its hybridity, its porosity—​ideas that he advanced with Bresson very much on his mind. 2 Especially as cinema finds itself, historically, past the optical experiments of the first avant-​gardes, having interiorized the talkie and continuing to challenge its own permeable borders with other media—​t he cinema is ontologically susceptible, Bazin might well say, to the “work of the negative.” In its very constitution, the cinema can be said to turn the image against itself—​by the fact of motion, duration and interruption, by editing, by the intrusion of sound and voice, language, music, noise—​t he cinema propels in all these ways a dialectic of constitutive and negative forces. Then, when it comes to adapting high-​literary texts, incorporating painting, looking to the theater—​a nd doing so, Bazin insists, without dissolving or denying the alterity of these media—​here too, in the hands of strong filmmakers, the cinema discovers itself through forms of self-​denial and self-​a lienation, turning against its own conditions, becoming internally susceptible to interferences of all sorts. This, too, is a work of the negative, and nowhere are its implications more acute than with regard to the human face. This most common, primary object of representation is its limit case—​a nd Bresson confronts it, indeed, by its perceptible withdrawal. Possibly, this is what has led some critics to deny the weight of the visual in his films, to peel it away from what they consider to be the primarily poetic, allegorical, philosophical or “spiritual” form of Bresson’s work, and to then conclude that he is not a director of the image. Thus Susan Sontag, in her seminal 1964 essay “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” observed: “form for Bresson is not mainly visual. It is, above all, a distinctive form of narration. Bresson’s film is not a plastic but a narrative experience.”3 Bazin himself seems, for a moment, to agree with this in his review of Diary of a Country Priest although, we shall see, he then devotes his most rigorous thinking to interrogating this problem: I believe there are few films whose individual images are as deceptive as these:  their frequent absence of visual composition and the stiff and static expression of the film’s 2  André Bazin’s essay “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation” was originally published in 1952. See What Is Cinema? trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 107–​37. 3  See Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” 1964, rpt. in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival, 1998), 60.

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characters give absolutely no indication of the importance of these images in the film’s unfolding.4

I later contend with the implications of Bresson’s own statement (in a 1966 interview) that would initially seem to agree with this:  “Ideally nothing should be shown but that is impossible”—​ a comment that puzzles and intrigues, especially in light of Bresson’s occasional references to his own beginnings as a painter. 5 Even Bresson’s aphoristic Notes on the Cinematographer might seem to corroborate this in the frequent privileging of sound, and voice, over the visual. Indeed, the Notes are permeated by a rhetoric of negativity, attending more assertively to what cinematography must not be, than what it is, struggling to define the limits and restrictions on “showing,” both on the part of the actor and on the part of the image more broadly conceived. All of this seems of a piece with the anti-​spectacular nature of Bresson’s cinema, with his elliptical mode that not only withdraws information and omits key events, but restricts its own technical and compositional means—​including his characteristic narrowing down of the view, avoiding the layering of sound, and eventually limiting himself to only one lens, to cite only the most prominent devices. But above all, it is the sense of prohibition, of negativity applied to the human face—​Bresson’s refusal to offer expressive facial images or use them to “glue” shots, exchanges, relations, or to anchor motivation—​t hat emerges as a defining characteristic of Bresson’s attitude to the image. The implications of this practice are momentous. Yet there is something so distinct, almost tangible, about a Bressonian image. How does it emerge out of such condition of negation? How to describe it, and how is the facial image key to such account? This is the question of this chapter, whose implications exceed the particular case of Bresson. What “work of the negative” we confront in his work needs to be parsed and accounted for in order to discern its sources and its figural texture, and to trace its consequences—​for his is not a weightless negativity, not a passive stance but, paradoxically, an assertive disposition of the image. It is firstly, and importantly, formal, having to do with character and camera positions and movement, with obstructions in the mise-​en-​scène, with framing, reframing, deframing, and with editing. In so many ways Bresson’s images seem oriented to block, obstruct, or to divert the look. Language tells us that the idea, the eidos, of the face is to face us. But even when it would seem to fulfill this condition, the Bressonian face is leveled with other objects such that it becomes its own barrier—​it might as well be turning its back to us. Is there a way in which such turning away redistributes the face, as it were, and thereby compels us to attend to the image as a whole as facing? The

4  Originally in André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson” in Cahiers du cinéma 3 (June 1951): 7–​21. When citing from Bazin’s essay in this chapter I use and reference Timothy Barnard’s translation “Diary of a Country Priest and the Robert Bresson Style,” in What Is Cinema? 139–​59; in this instance, 155–​6 . However, where Barnard’s translation departs from Bazin’s terminology on concepts that recur in my discussion, I have taken the liberty to alter them. I have also consulted Hugh Gray’s translation in What Is Cinema? vol. I (1967; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 125–​43. 5  Bresson’s comment is in a 1966 television interview about Au hasard Balthazar available in the Criterion 2005 DVD edition. Bresson has never, to my knowledge, shown any of his paintings. Brian Price reproduces and discusses one of his early, quasi-surrealist still photographs in Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16–​22—​I confess that this glimpse gave me no desire to see more. Pascal Bonitzer associates Bresson’s pictorial sense with the assertive use of deframing without, however, elaborating on this idea. See Décadrages: peinture et cinéma (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1995), 82–3.



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equivalences of the face, and its subsequent displacement by a broader conception of the image, accrues special weight in this final chapter: it is how Bresson works under the power of negativity without destroying the image, how he pushes the limits of figural representation from within representation. This is why Bresson’s modernism is inextricably bound with his continued investment in the potency and agency of images. The cinema—​w ith its technological, automatic generation of images, with its inherent hybridity and impurity, its general lack of autonomy, its non-specificity—​ is a privileged medium by which to stage, explore, and sustain such possibilities. It is agreed that, with Diary of a Country Priest, Bresson began to turn away from the polished, made-​up glamour of classical cinemas, whose impact was still palpable in his earlier feature films, Les Anges du péché (The Angels of Sin, 1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, 1945). Not all at once, but increasingly and ever more radically, he effaced from his work, in the course of the 1950s and 1960s, psychological motivation and all related visual cues of instant depth and dimensionality routinely invested in the actor’s sensitive visage. Such expressivity is still very much at work even in the New Wave cinemas with which Bresson’s work might be partly associated. Even when we peel away the expressive-​existential rhetoric of authenticity—​that we saw, in Chapter Two, rejected by Roland Barthes—​we might still consider the work of such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-​Pierre Melville, a good portion of Jean-​Luc Godard and of Jacques Rivette as contributing to the incandescent powers of the face—​especially, and tellingly, in these auteurs’ treatment of women’s close-​ups. There persists, as well, in Bresson, the youthful beauty of his actor-​models, which seems to add up to a family resemblance or perhaps (as Barthes would say) a sedimental mask of the class and culture interiorized by the body, becoming a sort of shared ground that precedes the particularity of features, and persists across the various instances, exchanges, and expressions of the individual.6 It is in this light, surely, that critics remark on the luminosity of the Bressonian face, its epiphanies punctuating the films, but difficult to read in relation to conventional or otherwise coded motivation, response (as in reaction shots), or as anchoring identification. A play of revelation and mystery pulses, unanchored, confounding the visible and the illegible, the concretely present and the hidden—​or the “beyond” that viewers struggle to define in Bresson’s work. The slippery definition of this “beyond,” which quickly slides from the spatio-​temporal to the metaphysical, is surely what has given rise to the fraught terminology of “spiritual” or “transcendental style” in the literature on Bresson.7 But it also leads to the one critical comparison that was immediately invoked with the appearance of Diary of a Country Priest, one that would seem to hinge on a shared hagiographic thematics but is, in fact, of substantial value in tracing 6  In his authoritative monograph, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89, Tony Pipolo offers a strong reading of the “family resemblance,” shared by several of Bresson’s young male protagonists, as connoting the “juncture where innocence has not quite been overshadowed by experience and is not compromised by what they do, whether that be soldiering, thieving, or killing.” 7  Understandably, this metaphysical frame of reference might find some support in Bresson’s ostensible themes in some—​not all—​of the films. Other than Sontag’s essay, I have in mind, of course, the young Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). To me the oxymoronic “spiritual style” or “transcendental style” connotes a metaphysical conceit that one is tempted to compare with John Donne or George Herbert. Yet these terms do not do much descriptive or analytic work: they skirt Bresson’s difficulty, and do not confront its true challenge with regard to what the cinema can do, how cinematic expression might be achieved on its own terms, and how the human face figures in all this. For a refreshing critique of this topic, see Brian Price, “Sontag, Bresson, and the Unfixable,” Post Script 26, no. 2 (2007): 81–​9 0.

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FIGURE 5.1:  Mirroring layout of production stills from Bresson and Dreyer on facing pages in Bazin’s essay, as originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 3 (June 1951).

the genealogy of Bresson’s concerns, and understanding in the process also what he sought to define himself against. This is, of course, the recurring comparison with Dreyer, specifically the canonical Passion of Joan of Arc of 1928—​w ith which I was concerned in a portion of Chapter One—​t he ur-​fi lm that Bresson had to contend with regarding, specifically, the questions of the face and of expression in the cinema. Working back from Sontag’s and Paul Schrader’s invocations of Dreyer, implicit or explicit, we encounter an earlier and sharper juxtaposition of the two auteurs by André Bazin, who noted it as soon as Diary of a Country Priest was released. Bazin did not much elaborate this comparison, though it recurs in different essays. But his juxtaposition is forceful and is first rendered by a graphic-​editorial gesture in placing a production still from Diary to mirror on the facing page a still from Dreyer’s Passion (Fig. 5.1).8 This design suggests how Bazin posits the two films as obverse reflections of each other across the historical divide of classical cinema that Bazin would roughly identify with the 1930s. What Bazin also mirrors, in a striking formulation, are the two authors’ conception of the relation of image and language across that film-​h istorical divide. Bresson’s Diary, he writes, is like a silent film with spoken titles while—​so Bazin observes in returning to Dreyer’s film the following year—​The Passion of Joan of Arc was already, virtually, a talkie.9 By this reverse symmetry of the relation of image and language (and the emphasis here is on language, not sound as such), 8 Bazin’s illustrations in the original publication version of his essay on “Le Journal” in the Cahiers are on pp.  14–​15. The essay was reprinted with some revisions, and without these particular images in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1975), 107–​27. 9 Bazin, Diary, 153. Bazin returns to Dreyer’s film in “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc: âmes et visages,” Radio, Cinéma, Télévision 112 (March 9, 1952): 3. In the important chapter devoted to Bresson’s own Trial of Joan of Arc, 164, Pipolo describes how Bresson uses language as an equivalent of action, endowed with a solid, material, and indeed “combative” quality. This astute observation can apply to the major part of Bresson’s work; I see ways in which aspects of my own discussion here reciprocate very well with this idea.



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Bazin opens up a central channel in his continued interrogation of the medium of cinema and his emphasis on its inherently impure or hybrid constitution. The comparison of film with other media—​painting, theater, literature—​a nd their deliberate incorporation in the cinema trigger, according to Bazin, cinema’s “ontological” realization of its aesthetic predicament, of its mediality. By its assertive contact across media—​as in the process of adaptation, where the cinema deliberately invokes and explores, but can refuse to interiorize its other to the point of transparency—​a n internal dialectical self-consciousness becomes possible. While we can break down and differentiate hybrid components at diverse levels of the film work—​for example, in considering the professional versus the non-professional actor, the centrifugal open space of locations versus deliberate studio artifice, cinematographic contingency versus the command of mise-​en-​scène—​in some ways these may all be sorted between the more basic categories of the primary ​cinematographic imprint (including sound) on the one hand, and the languages, codes, structures, and signs by which their meaning is controlled and circulated, on the other. As he is considering, in the post-​war period, the possibility of a cinematic avant-​garde proper to the talkie, Bazin thus posits the relation of image and language—​or, we might say, of imprint and sign—​t hrough a principle of interference, displacement, or dialectic. This is not strictly by way of revolutionary sound montage—​Bazin is certainly not opposed to synchronization—​but he nevertheless is seeking, we shall see, some deeper way of defining a dialectic of the cinematographic imprint vis-​à-​v is the very sign to which, at the same time, it gives rise. The example of Dreyer—​understood as a prime instance of pre-​war narrative avant-​garde—​ is pivotal in just this way. We recall how The Passion dramatizes the mortal struggle of a young woman—​her body, her person, her very being, comprising the visions and voices that possess her—​against a symbolic regime of the written law, of signatures and court procedures. The film’s massive use of fleshy close-​ups is weighed against its abundant dialogue intertitles: the face and the word, image and text, are not reconciled. Each regime makes distinct claims to authenticity: they never merge but, rather, give rise to one of cinema’s most ambitious philosophical wagering of image and language. This particular tragic drama is mapped, moreover, through the film’s historical position in the transition from silent to talkie, when the synchronized voice introduces a critical shift in the workings of the facial image, its constitution, and address. It was a film in every way bound to death; it made an incredible leap into an abyss—​hence its continued pathos, and its grandeur. Bazin’s evocative visual and verbal mirroring comparison of Bresson with Dreyer must have sufficed, I would hypothesize, to sharpen Bresson’s own ambition in a subsequent historical moment. Film history does not roll back; what Dreyer could do and what his heroic achievement would imply in 1928 cannot be repeated. How could Bresson recreate a comparable break, what could he achieve by way of internalizing-​while-​countering the expressive vocabulary and the rhetoric of authenticity epitomized in Dreyer’s use of the human face? Bresson’s explicit reference to Dreyer surfaced years later, in his Notes on the Cinematographer (published in 1975, though written through the quarter-​century leading to it): “Falconetti’s way of casting her eyes to heaven, in Dreyer’s film, used to draw tears.”10 This comment—​t he single, and utterly

10  Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin, intro. J. M. G. Le Clézio (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997), 127.

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devastating mention of any filmmaker or actor’s name in the entire book—​suggests to me that Dreyer’s achievement somehow haunted Bresson, for years, as an inescapable point of reference, which not even his own re-​making of that hagiographic narrative in the Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) could put to rest. Arguably, it was Bazin’s pointed comparison that drove Bresson to realize and differentiate his own ambition under the anxious weight of influence—​as Harold Bloom would put it—​so that Bresson’s departure then truly progressed by denial and negation that continued to inform his work. Other than this, Bresson’s career seems to transpire as if film history could be dispensed with almost entirely—​since he was set on reinventing the cinema from scratch, on being his own progenitor. But the penetrating insights of Bazin’s great essay, and what I take to be its formative impact on Bresson, exceed this particular, albeit emblematic point. We now turn to flesh it out more fully.

THE EPIDERMAL AND THE WRITTEN Bazin’s understanding of the power of the word in Dreyer’s film—​w ith its emphatic separation and doubling of visually mouthed speech in facial close-​ups and intertitled quotations from the historical trial transcripts—​must have already suggested to Bresson the same principle of interference that also drives Bazin’s “ontological” realism. The younger filmmaker’s own distilling, doubling, stringing, and clashing of basic elements—​now from within the talkie—​t hus was set against the depth-​oriented expressive molding of characters and against any sense of flow or transparency of the diegetic world. Bazin thus noticed, already in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, the isolation and amplification of particular movements, gestures, sound effects. Concrete natural sounds—​rain, a waterfall, a horse’s trot—​were propelled as intrusive, indifferent (and in that sense “realist”) elements that disturbed the script’s hermetic neoclassical order of dramatic and verbal artifice, and that resisted absorption by conventional verisimilitude of action or character development. The evident amplification (in the post-​production mixing stage) of discrete sound elements, further juxtaposed with post-​synchronized dialogue, was to emerge, in fact, as a hallmark of Bresson’s method, radicalized in later years. Bazin understood the resulting inner tension of mutually interfering registers as a new cinematic conception, forging new relationships between the concrete and the abstract, opacity and transparency, image and signification. Bazin confirms, when turning to Diary of a Country Priest, the deep implications of Bresson’s stylistics well beyond the issue of sound. The isolation, reiteration, and embossing of concrete elements whose primal consistency, or identity, does not dissolve in the process of composition is now understood to reflect on questions of ontology and semiosis in the cinematographic image. Its paradigm is the moving image of the human face: Like Dreyer, Bresson is naturally drawn to the most sensual aspects of the face which, to the extent that no acting is involved, is simply a privileged imprint of existence, the most legible trace of the soul. Nothing about these faces eludes the dignity of the sign.11

11 Bazin, Diary, 148.



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The formulation is dense, and confounding, comprising odd epithets and metaphors. The questions are momentous: how is the sensual imprint of the face made “legible”—​how does it become “sign”? What is the semiotizing process that unfolds in a strong, resistant image? One must work through these questions in stride: even when definitive answers cannot be established, such order of questions—​embedded in the most ambitious cinematic practice—​g ives rise to rigorous thinking on the cinema, for which the facial image remains a paradigm. Bazin is struck by a coextension of the face’s mute visuality (qua “privileged imprint of existence”) and its supreme textuality (its legible “dignity”). What he struggles to describe here, we shall see, is a more elemental dialectic of the image than the workings of découpage or of montage syntax, narrative or poetic. It is predicated on a reconsideration of the passage of the image into language. This is not the seemingly dismissive afterthought—​t hose famous last words—​of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” where language appears as an addendum to the absolute identity of nature’s imprint, but a more advanced exploration of their imbrication that is at stake in this discussion.12 What seems to be underway here is a revision of the ontological realism raised in the earlier writings, decisively breaking with the medium specificity into which such an ontology might slip. Bazin contemplates a more nuanced dialectic of the cinematographic image in its emergence from sheer visual presence and self-​identity into signification. The human countenance is the most sensitive measure for such dialectic of imprint and text, of image and sign in the cinema. In this argument the face is in fact set against the pure visuality which Bazin associates with the first cinematic avant-​gardes. Working through Bresson’s film, he identifies a deliberate impoverishment of the visual, a strange sense of its withdrawal, first in the conception of the face and then, by implication, in the face-​l ike dispositif of the film itself: a self-​a lienation, a systemic negativity, in and of the cinematic image. The face, turned against itself, as it were, is a paradigmatic instance of this dialectic; it is thereby also harbinger, measure, and instrument in Bazin’s vision for a post-​classical cinematic avant-​garde. Echoed here is Alexandre Astruc’s call, some three years earlier, for “The Birth of a New Avant- ​Garde: La Caméra-​Stylo,” that was to be taken up in the more ambitious reaches of the New Wave. Bazin’s own search, in this as in other essays, for a new cinematic consciousness of his time—​bound up with a conception of temporality, and of historicity as applied both to the post-​war, and to sound cinema’s post-​classical condition—​can be seen as a brilliant elaboration of Astruc’s manifesto. This dimension of Bazin’s essay clearly exceeds a critical account of adaptation, or of a stylistique of one particular filmmaker.13 He struggles to describe a dialectique—​t he term, already used by Astruc, recurs—​which is, in effect, a semiological consciousness at work in the cinematic image, with a view toward increasing its flexibility as a sign. This 12  See Dudley Andrew’s discussion of the “Ontology” essay and the belated addition of its startling closing statement, in his “Foreward to the 2004 Edition,” of What Is Cinema? vol. I, trans. Gray, p. xiv. 13  Bazin’s conversion of the discussion of adaptation into a much deeper reflection on cinema and language occurs early in the essay and is, to my mind, more profound than the ostensible conclusion (famously cited by Truffaut in his manifesto against the cinéma du papà): “After Robert Bresson, Aurenche and Bost are merely the Viollet-​L e-​Duc of film adaptation,” Bazin, Diary, 159. A similar idea is formulated in Bazin’s account of how the cinema’s deliberate appropriation of theater can give rise to thought, “creating a kind of dissociation within identification”: again, this instance of an “impure” cinematic practice opens up a privileged zone of consciousness. See “Theater and Film (2),” in What Is Cinema? trans. Barnard, 202.

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semiotic dimension precedes, in principle, the syntactic considerations of montage. Astruc’s notion of the caméra-​stylo offers an early formulation of this idea: [Every film] is a series of images which, from one end to the other, have an inexorable logic (or even better, a dialectic) of their own. We have come to realize that the meaning which the silent cinema tried to give birth to through symbolic association exists within the image itself, in the development of the narrative, in every gesture of the characters, in every line of dialogue, in those camera movements which relate objects to objects and characters to objects. All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being or certain objects which form part of his universe. It is by clarifying these relationships, by making a tangible allusion, that the cinema can really make itself the vehicle of thought.14

Even when the cinematic image is molded of matter as raw and as weighty as flesh, as layered and as overdetermined as the human countenance, an inner dialectic, effecting alienation-​w ithin-​ ontological-​identity, yields the possibility of a cinematic écriture. Assertive montage is not its exclusive pen, but rather all conceivable gestures, relations, and tensions on which the cinematic image alights become viable instruments of thought. Bazin’s formulation of this cinematic dialectique—​starting from the most primary level of the image’s coming-​into-​being, its emergence to perception and to attention, its appeal to consciousness—​is elaborated in light of Bresson’s practice. One is first struck by Bazin’s repeated emphasis on the face as principal dialectical element: the physique and the work of actor and character—​who are mutually imbricated—​a re offered even as they are also contained by the filmmaker’s restraining technique. It is as if, knowing the cinema’s powers to exploit the rich potentiality of the human figure, Bresson progressed, paradoxically, by limiting, confining, or attacking it—​like some auto-​immunological condition. This reserved approach to the facial image immediately stands out for Bazin, since it so perversely contrasts with the “violently visual” impact of even the minor characters in Bernanos’s source novel. Bresson’s adaptation, instead, is constantly removing them from our view. In place of the novel’s concrete power to evoke, the film gives us the constant poverty of an image which hides from view by virtue of the simple fact that it does not develop.15

Bazin reports how production circumstances forced Bresson to eliminate about one-​t hird of Diary of a Country Priest for the final cut: a harsh but crucial intervention that does not, in and

14  Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-​Garde: La Caméra-​Stylo,” The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 20, my emphasis. Astruc’s essay was originally published in 1948 in Ecran français 144 (March 30, 1948). Cf. Bazin’s contemporary appeal to a new avant-​ garde in “Découverte du cinéma: défense de L’avant-​garde” Ecran français 182 (December 21, 1948); “A la recherche d’une nouvelle avant-​garde,” Almanach du théâtre et du cinéma (1950), 146–​52; “L’Avant-​garde nouvelle,” Cahiers du Cinéma 10 (March 1952): 16–​17. 15 Bazin, Diary, 141.



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of itself, account for his style but that amplifies the assertive role of ellipses that, paradoxically, take up the place of Bernanos’s textual hyperbole.16 These figures of reticence far exceed diegetic découpage: Bazin immediately channels them toward the constitution of the image, and indeed they are nowhere more potent than when they assault the face and, refracting from there, immediately effect a negative conception of actor, character, and agency, and by implication causality. I borrow my privileged term here, “reticence,” from classical rhetoric, where reticentia is a figure of interruption: the breaking off or falling silent in the middle of speaking, as if unable or unwilling to confront something which it is impossible to express.17 A reluctance to tell, or show, more than bare fragments, often as in peripheral glimpses, themselves elliptically figured and disjointed—​such reticence imposes itself as an assertive rhetoric of the image. It is not a passive neglect, but an emphatic dispositif, and becomes more pronounced as Bresson’s paradigmatic figure in the course of his career. But how is this worked into the constitution of the cinematic face, and how is it then implicated in the image more broadly conceived? Firstly by disintegrating the actor’s performance. Indeed, in place of the actor, the Bressonian model—​deprived of expressive plenitude, neutral, passive, malleable, as the term suggests—​is not “absorbed” in the film, but sustained as one among the elements that make up the work’s dialectical machinery (“mechanism” is Bazin’s term) of consciousness.18 Such sustained heterogeneity of resistant elements is consistent with Bazin’s conception of the literary text in adaptation. Here as in other essays he makes clear that the source text is not to be diffused or “digested” in the film, but to palpably retain its own identity: that its literariness should itself persist even as it has migrated into a different medium, and even as it may seem to obstruct the machinery of cinema.19 Source materials, antecedent to the film, thus enter it as in a raw,

16  In this formulation I am drawing also on Bazin’s “For and Impure Cinema,” where he observes how Bresson inverts “the book’s violence. The real equivalents of Bernanos’ hyperbole are Bresson’s ellipses,” 125. I have not been able to verify at what stage exactly the reputed cut of some 45 minutes of the film took place; I count, therefore, on Bazin’s report. 17  For these and related rhetorical figures see Silva Rhetoricae on www.rhetoric.byu.edu, accessed October 29, 2008. It is for its applicability to facial dispositions that I have privileged the concept of “reticence” over other figures of ellipses—​some of which overlap and, of course, continue to operate on many levels of Bresson’s work. In “The Rhetoric of Robert Bresson” (1975) and “Cinematography vs. the Cinema: Bresson’s Figures” (1989), rpt. in Robert Bresson, ed. Quandt, 117–​43, 145–​63, P. Adams Sitney discusses the ways in which figures of ellipsis prevail in Bresson’s cinema. Sitney’s essays have informed so deeply the way I look at Bresson that, one way or another, they must seep into this chapter even when not directly cited. 18  Bresson’s epithet “model” for actor was to be formulated later, though Bazin seems to have a premonition of it already here, through the vocal monotone of delivery and reduced psychological expressivity of the face. It is not impossible that Bazin himself suggested the notion of “modeling” to Bresson, who would then go on to associate it with his experience as painter. In a review of A Man Escaped (1956), Bazin writes: “He literally drains his actors to the point of emptying them of all expressive will. Then he shapes them [il les modèle] as he wants and extracts from them their extraordinary melody beyond any simulacra of performance and acting.” Bazin, “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé,” Education nationale 32 (November 22, 1956), translated by Dudley Andrew—​to whom I am beholden for so many Bazinian clues. 19  The most significant among these are perhaps Bazin’s “L’Adaptation ou le cinéma comme Digeste,” Esprit 146 (July 1948): 32–​4 0, translated in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); and “For an Impure Cinema.” On this subject see Dudley Andrew, “Private Scribblings: The Crux in the Margins around Diary of a Country Priest,” in Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 112–​30.

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unintegrated state, stubbornly interfering with any notion of pure-​i mage-​in-​movement on the one hand and, on the other, with any possibility of absorption toward transparent, illusionistic flow. Imprints of objects and places, the model’s bare face and voice and, more specifically to adaptation, the hard fact of the textual source in its material reality—verbality, linearity, ​t he very image of writing, erasing, and writing again—​recur in the film. The effect of such interference is one of halting, displacement, alienation. In tracing these ideas through Bazin’s reading of Bresson, one recognizes again how the critic’s notion of realism is set against transparency and verisimilitude. The resulting “impure cinema” thus evolves in a “dialectic of concrete and abstract.” It does not hang strictly on the syntactic and rhetorical juxtapositions of montage but can be identified, as Astruc had already suggested, at more primal junctures: in the tension introduced even by underdeveloped, resilient visual and sound elements that maintain their prior (or, proto-​cinematic) identity, effecting an internal dialectics of the shot or segment.20 Any gesture—​selected, enframed, reframed by camerawork, traced through the movement and progression of the film—can be taken as an instance of such dialectic “within the image itself ”:​ the persistent, internal multiplicity of tensions that propel the primal, automatic imprint to our attention via the altered visuality and temporality of cinema. Alongside such dialectique, by which Bazin describes the relationship of parts—​the heterogeneous realist elements, none of whose founding identities is dissolved in the film—​is his term dépaysement, which describes the relationship of the image (the shot or part thereof, including sound) to its founding imprint. Dépaysement—​a term whose surrealist connotations must have inspired Bazin—​suggests displacement, dissociation, uprooting, defamiliarization. It connotes the disorientation of an exile torn from native land but also, with the stubborn persistence of identity, the refusal to “blend in”: one is no longer at home anywhere, and one is, thereby, also self-​alienated.21 As Bazin puts it, Bresson strips down cinematic events to essentials yet, at the same time, turns them against their source in their own proto-cinematic reality. The resulting self-​alienation is not a symbolic abstraction, however, but the grating incongruity of concrete elements that renders them all even more stubbornly concrete. This is where Bazin introduces one of his most celebrated metaphors: the “grain of sand” that grips the mechanism, interfering with any transparent, communicative inclination that the narrative might invest in the diegetic world.22 Considering Bazin’s case (the following year) “for an impure cinema,” the grain of sand metaphor also involves a metonymic figuration of the camera’s mechanical and optical functions. Following its logic we might say that already in the basic cinematographic registration, those are foreign elements (of the external, profilmic world) that enter the apparatus to partake, by interference, in the constitution of the film. In Bazin’s aesthetic cum ontological system, the very shadows obstructing the passage of light through the film, and even the workings of the shutter, can all be

20 Bazin, Diary, 145. 21  Bazin, “Le Journal,” Cahiers, 11. Barnard combines several terms in struggling to translate dépaysement, as in: “the unfamiliar effect of uprooting” (p. 144). The implications of surrealist perception for an understanding of the media of technological images are explicit in Bazin’s “Ontology” essay. Jennifer Wild pointed out to me Breton’s definition of surreality, in the early 1930s, as the function of a will to total dépaysement: “volonté de dépaysement complet de tout,” in André Breton, “Avis au lecteur pour La Femme 100 têtes de Max Ernst,” Point du jour (1934; Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 63. 22 Bazin, Diary, 145.



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construed as negative functions that nevertheless make possible the filmic image and its movement. This basic image of light and its obstruction returns, we shall see, toward the end of Bazin’s essay, and with grander implications. In all, it is not the smooth running of the machinery—​technology, studio, systems of representation and, in particular, the transparent style—​that Bazin is after but, on the contrary, all those different ways of interfering with it. These are the conditions of cinematic consciousness. The imprints of sound and image are thus grasped as materials at once raw, primal, pliable, yet resistant: they maintain their consistency, as it were—​Bresson does not let them dissolve and blend into some vague unity. They deliver their proper substance to the film; this is how they partake of, even as they also interfere with, its communicative, narrative, discursive, and poetic functions. The principle of dépaysement, the self-​a lienation at work within the shot, among and within in its parts, encompasses all levels of the work—​its production, its technology, its address. Image, voice, action, cause and effect—​a ll are fragmented, displaced, defamiliarized, turned against themselves (as it were) in their transmutation into Bressonian cinematography. The human face is at once a model, or prototype for this operation, and its consummate product. With it, the actor’s very person is torn, hurtled to a different order of being, even as its primary consistency is unchanged. In advance of the juxtapositions of montage and, theoretically, even in advance of particular choices of framing and pacing, any sense of fictional verisimilitude and spatio-​temporal flow cracks under the fundamental solidity, the willfully “undeveloped” impression (or imprint) of the face—​as it nevertheless becomes its own image. How to unpack the totality of human presence in the cinema into distinct elements—​ how to tell the dancer from the dance? The split between face and voice—​surely a special instance of Bresson’s pervasive disruption of the relation of sound and image—​is where the isolation and amplification of elements would be most strongly felt as it interferes with the sense of corporeal integrity and self-​identity. As editors and actors reported in later years, not only would Bresson consistently avoid direct sound but, even at the post-​synchronization recording studio, he would deliberately prevent the face-​to-​face “meeting” of the actor with her own filmed image, disturbing the synthesis of body and voice to which the talkie predominantly aspires. Rather than have the actor speak out lines in front of the projected shots, as is the usual practice, Bresson would record the actor’s voicing of discrete phrases over numerous (at times fifty or more) sound takes, and would then further fragment these into parts, later joining words from different takes to recompose dialogue and lip-​synce it where necessary.23 Increasingly, in the course of his career, even such simulated matching was less of a concern: dialogue would just as often unfold over shots in which characters were turned or in the course of turning away, or whose faces were otherwise deframed, relegated to off-​screen space.

23  Concerning post-​s ync in his later productions, see accounts by Bresson’s crew in Il caso e la necessità: il cinema di Robert Bresson, eds. Giovenni Spagnoletti and Sergio Toffetti (Turin: Lindau, 1998). Included in this excellent book are remarks by Jacques Kébadian, assistant director on Au hasard Balthazar, and Mouchette, 157–​9; Jean-​François Naudon, assistant editor on Lancelot du lac and editor of L’Argent, 169–​74; and Dominique Sanda, who plays the protagonist of Une Femme douce, 179–​8 4. The case of Diary is certainly not as radical as these later films—​I have not been able to verify to what extent Bresson practiced post-​s ync already in this early production (beyond routine uses where direct sound recording on location, for instance, is a true difficulty).

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The illusion of expressive synthesis of face and speech—​w ith its attendant psychological baggage—​is drained in such practice, which doubles up the already “automatic” principle of the model’s performance, achieved through repetition to the point of draining the actor’s will, control, consciousness. Model, performance, image, speech are all on some level fragmented, turned against themselves, as part of the principle of dépaysement. Bresson undoes the causal and referential chains that cinema all too readily draws from the dissimulation of the actor, the binding of gesture or action and motivation, visual surface and identity. Yet the image is not, after all, discarded. What, then, are the implications of this dépaysement—​t he self-​a lienation permeating every aspect of Bresson’s work? Even without hindsight of Bresson’s subsequent, more radical work, and even in view of an early film that can certainly be said to still incorporate some expressive punctuation—​as in the use of music, lighting, instances of framing, movement, gesture—​Bazin diagnoses already in Diary of a Country Priest a refusal of psychological realism that goes hand in hand with Bresson’s disruption of the smooth synthesis of elements. He observes how the radical leveling of different functions of the voice, in dialogue or voice-over narration, affects the relation of the face and language, and profoundly alters the experience of the image as such. Extending the comparison with Dreyer, which we have already cited, Bazin’s discussion of the face is more elaborate, and fraught: ekphrastic and poetic, his writing struggles to convey the experience of a charged image: What we are required to read in the actors’ faces is not at all the momentary reflection of what they are saying but the essence of being, the mask of destiny. This is why this ‘poorly acted’ film makes us feel the absolute necessity of its faces, the obsession of an oneiric recollection. The most typical image in this sense is that of Chantal in the confessional, dressed in black and withdrawn in shadow. The actress Ladmiral shows us only a grey mask, hovering between night and light, rough like a wax seal. Like Dreyer, Bresson is naturally drawn to the most sensual aspects of the face which, to the extent that no acting is involved, is simply a privileged imprint of existence, the most legible trace of the soul. Nothing about these faces eludes the dignity of the sign. They reveal to us not a psychology but an existential physiognomy. … Their features do not change: their inner conflicts and stages of battle with the Angel are not plainly conveyed by their appearance. What we see, rather, is closer to painful concentration, to the incoherent spasms of a reptile moulting or an animal dropping its young. When we speak of Bresson stripping his characters bare, we mean it literally. 24

This powerful, difficult passage suggests that cinematographic contingency (as understood in the “Ontology” essay), registered and captured in the fleeting nuance of expression and gesture, is turned over entirely—​so Bresson’s work suggests—​to the “dignity of the sign.” What might have been imprinted on film is turned over to an order of images that renders it

24 Bazin, Diary, 148–​9. Among my few adjustments to Barnard’s translation here, is my reinsertion of Bazin’s phrase, l’obsession d’un souvenir onirique: it is in the original Cahiers version of the essay but, curiously, not in its reprint in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma?



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permanent, necessary, legible—​a nd thus “dignified.” Namely, Bazin no longer conceives of the image here as an inert objective imprint; nor is it a “representation” of what motivating forces, or causes, might underlie such object—​say, those shifting “inner conflicts” that might affect the actor’s face. These are not the signs of character psychology or intention captured thereon, but something more permanent, approached in a crystallizing process of reduction. Just as Bresson’s use of post-​s ynchronization disintegrates the actor’s performance—​paring off, like an onion, his or her very being—​so the dialectical dépaysement of the (facial) image undoes the causal, referential chains that cinema readily draws between character, motivation, gesture, or action, between identity and optical surface, between inside and out. This breakdown of the passage from sensory density to legibility opens up different doors of perception. The productive dialectic between the face’s visuality and its textuality surpasses the mute index and achieves consciousness—​it is not a mere “referent” but a cumulative power of cinematic being. In withdrawal of the model’s original plenitude or integrity (as “person”), and in assuming the “mask" of the filmic image, Bresson’s faces come into being in a painful negation. “Stripped of all expressive interpretation and reduced to their epidermis,” Bresson’s facial images transpire as a consequence of their own f laying: the perceptible, communicating body is convulsed into radical exteriority that is its filmic being. 25 This is not a lucid formal process of sublimating abstraction but, rather, a metamorphic, spasmodic self-​a lienation by which the subject splits, sheds, gives off part of itself in the most intensified realization of its being. Hence the metaphors of birthing and molting, as if nothing less than large muscular contractions or f laying of the skin—​a disgorging, inside-​out spasmodic convulsion of sorts—​would yield “interiority” but as an effect of surface. Inner being is “stripped bare” as physiognomic disarticulation, giving birth to the face as incarnation of self on film by engaging the body and, more importantly, the film’s body, the cinematic system, the image as a whole. All this is achieved, paradoxically, from within the withdrawn, ascetic disposition of Bresson’s models. Perhaps it is this paradox that prompts Bazin’s observation that Bresson’s faces command and haunt us like an “oneiric recollection”—​g hosts returned from exile and from the past who possess the viewer in the different time, and place, of the film’s projection. Such return is not the simple equivalence of self-​identity or objective presence, nor does it transpire as sign to refer us elsewhere. Like the wax seal or mask, a cultic entity more primal—​w e have seen in Chapter Two—​t han the portrait, and at once personal and impersonal, it emerges by “night and light,” converting contingency to necessity. 26 Forged by convulsion of self-​b ecoming-​ other, the filmic face is a haunting image—​it is the image as a haunting. In its original Cahiers du Cinéma publication this difficult area of Bazin’s essay is illustrated with a production still, which we already glimpsed in the comparison with Dreyer: Claude Laydu’s profile in close-​up, eyes lowered, occupies the left side of the frame, his illuminated countenance set against the darkness of the confessional wherein Nicole Ladmiral’s head,

25 Bazin, Diary, 151. 26  Bazin’s interpretation of the metamorphosis of cinematographic contingency into the “dignity of signs” is analogous, in a sense, to the narrative and thematic principle, recurring through Bresson’s work: the transformation of events and actions from accident (chance, or the French “hasard”) to design and necessity.

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FIGURE 5.2:  Production still from Diary of a Country Priest, with caption quoting from Bernanos’s novel, illustrating Bazin’s essay in the Cahiers du cinéma 3 (June 1951).

facing forth and looking down at him, is situated slightly higher and more receded in center frame, her complexion grayer by comparison (Fig. 5.2). Both profile and frontal faces appear somewhat disembodied (even more so in the production still, as published, than in the actual film as shot) since the left side of the frame slices off Laydu’s hair, while the girl’s clothes and hair blend into the enveloping darkness, leaving her face to float therein. Thus, under this production still, runs the caption drawn from Bernanos’s novel: … I had before me now a strange face, disfigured not by fear but by a more profound, more internal panic. … At that moment a peculiar thing happened. … While I was staring into that hole of shadows where, even in broad daylight, I can barely recognize a face, that of Mademoiselle Chantal began to appear, bit by bit, by degrees. The image was suspended there, under my gaze, in a sort of marvelous instability, and I stayed immobile for fear that the slightest gesture would have effaced it. 27

Considered alongside the particular choice of still, and placed close by Bazin’s complex discussion that I have quoted earlier, this quasi-​Proustian passage evokes, indeed, a sense of tense reciprocity of concrete and abstract, substantiality and apparition in the play of light and dark, movement and stillness, visibility and withdrawal. Yet when we turn to Bernanos’s full original

27  Bazin, “Le Journal,” 14, quoted from the caption to the production still. I assume that both the still and the quotation—​comprising its edit in the choice of ellipses—​a re Bazin’s choice, which I have compared with the full text in Journal d’un curé de campagne (1936; Paris: Librarie Plon, 1961), 141–​2 . My translation is based in part on that of Pamela Morris in Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: MacMillan, 1937), 133–​4.



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passage we find that it does not really dictate such blocking of figures and faces as Bresson’s striking composition involves. An indication of Chantal being on her knees is emphasized twice over in the novel, while in the shot, as in the production still, she looks from an upper and almost hieratic frontal view—​in blatant reversal of the conventional positioning of persons in a confession—​at the priest who, in lowered profile, seems not to be looking outward at all (again, this runs against Bernanos’s description) but appears engrossed in contemplation. We might consider that, in any case, a first-​person narrator, as is the case here, is not likely to describe directly his own spatial disposition but let it (if at all) only be inferred. His description is of a world organized by consciousness; its mnemonic power assumes, therefore, an imaginary articulation, rather than a properly objective exteriority. The juxtaposition, in the still, of frontal and profile, looking and listening, address and withdrawal, might have suggested to Bazin the “grey mask” and “wax seal” of Chantal’s static, blatant presentness—​a mode of the face that flips over to (and is in a sense interiorized by) the marked linearity of the profile that articulates the “writerly” world of the priest/​journal-​keeper/​narrator. 28 This is the figural dialectic of mute carnal imprint and legible sign crossed in the facial image. If we now follow Bazin’s thesis on the continued autonomy and obstinate presence of the novel in Bresson’s adaptation—​w hich so radically foregrounds its own linear textuality in both verbal delivery style as in the punctuation of actual scenes of writing throughout the film—​we might conjecture that even as he is “living” or “acting” the scene recollected and described in his diary the priest, looking downward, appears to be listening to, rather than seeing it: this against Bernanos’s emphasis on the primacy of the look in this encounter. Moreover, it is as if, while he listens, the priest is already engaged in the writing-​down of the scene. One might see visually connoted here—​especially in light of Chantal’s almost androgynous face and enigmatic expression hovering over the writer—​t he pictorial trope of the Angel dictating to the Evangelist (Fig. 5.3). This iconographic suggestion would figure, in and of itself, the passage of the voice and the word from a vision of the Angel, through the inspired listener: a passage from ear to hand-​in-​t he-​act-​of-​w riting that is presented, after all, also as image. Voice and word are rendered visible in face, body, and gesture; the latter, in turn, produces the text and thus converts it, again, to the domain of reading—​ the ensamble being encompassed in the image. The scene as focalized through the production still, wherein the human countenance would seem to command our view, emerges, then, simultaneously as a scene of writing: its textuality overhauling its resplendent visuality. 29 Writing is repeatedly foregrounded in the film as an irreducible visual-​g raphic residue, 28  See Meyer Schapiro’s juxtaposition of connotations of the still frontal face versus the active, profile view (as in the frontal address of a saint versus the profile of a supplicating donor), in Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), especially 37–​49. 29  I am thinking here of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of temporality in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 196–​231. Derrida emphasizes the way in which the image of writing has been routinely used to figure the relation between experience (or perception) and memory (or thought, or reason). Yet writing has also been construed as a threat to presence and is thus subordinated, in the Western tradition, to the primacy of speech and voice. At the same time, in Derrida’s perspective, the text’s irreducible graphic tracing is itself not static or permanent but always constituted by its perpetual removal from the living present—​by the threat of its own disappearance.

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FIGURE 5.3:  Jean Bourdichon’s folio of St. Matthew writing, Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne (ca. 1500–1508). Parchment. Image courtesy of Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Dist. RMN-​ Grand Palais/​Art Resource, NY.

itself always slipping into the image—​a ll the more so when crossing out and tearing the paper portray writing as an explicit, even violent act (Figs. 5.4–5.5). The very temporality of the confessional scene—​conflating the pastness of the “event,” its imaginary organization within the distinct (second) pastness of its diary writing, and the complex sense of their always-​fleeting presentness in the cinematic image—​i s, in its constitutive multiplicity and self-​d ivision, anachronic. Its colliding temporalities, its configuration as a scene of writing



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FIGURES 5.4–5.5:  An image of writing/​an image written—​and its erasure as, itself, a graphic sign: Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951) –​frame enlargements.

that intrudes upon the presentness of faces, and its overall textual emergence, render it a dialectical image indeed. 30 Bazin’s sense of a dialectique inf lecting the constitution of the cinematic image—​a n image that ruptures under the pressure of language, and in synaesthetic slippage from seeing to reading, from visuality to textuality—​m ay be informed, as well, by his own reading 30  Bazin’s use of “dialectique” in an essay so deeply engaged with image and language in the complex temporality of consciousness, wherein the figures of history collide, could deliver us to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image from the unfinished Arcades Project—​t hough Bazin would not have been familiar with it. On Benjamin’s concept see Eli Friedlander, “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,”

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of Bernanos. As he observes in his essay, the experience of seeing is, in fact, vivid in the descriptive thrust of the novel as a whole and of this scene in particular. Yet we might now notice that it, too, is already shaded by reticence. Chantal’s face is said to emerge as a miraculous apparition in the confessional’s “hole of shadows”—​a n almost infernal space is connoted by this epithet for an area categorically secluded from sight, and where the face-​to-​f ace should be elided. What seems to be conveyed in the Bernanos passage selected by Bazin is an image in process of transformation: a face oscillating with its own effacement just as its meaning, its fundamental identity, emerges to the priest’s understanding. Without indulging in ekphrastic elaboration of physiognomic and expressive features or gestures, the passage describes Chantal’s face as if it were already an image but an inherently unstable one hovering, as Bazin sees it, “between night and light,” between visibility and effacement. Before it, therefore, the priest must himself remain immobile, since it emerges almost as an apparition, an ephemeral projection that can dissolve in an instant. Such disposition of the immobile viewer before an intensely temporalized, unstable image as described by Bernanos would surely connote for someone like Bazin the experience of a spectator in the movie theater. Its defining feature by his account is its imminent withdrawal—​a negativity bound up with its productive (if convulsive) contraction as sign. This is not the stable mythical plenitude of the solid imprint, nor strictly an experience fully contained in the spatial, formal dimension of the visual. Rather, it is an image borne by consciousness and language, and threatened to be eclipsed by them. Compounding temporalities and representational strata, it is an image capable of delivering us elsewhere, quite exceeding the singular instance of its material formation as well as its referential, representational functions. 31 Bazin is defining, then, a dialectic of brute, mute visuality of the face and its negation in the face’s textuality: its writability and its legibility. This, in his terms, is the simultaneous, continued interference of two kinds of pure reality. On the one hand, as we have seen, the actors’ faces are stripped of all expressive interpretation and reduced to their epidermis, surrounded by a nature free of artifice. On the other hand lies what we would have to describe as the reality of the writing. 32

Boundary 2 35, no. 3 (2008): 1–​2 6; DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2008-010, consulted October 15, 2008. On the cinematic-​v isual forms of memory, the cinematic first person, and the temporality of the journal form, see Sitney, “The Rhetoric,” 126–30, and “Cinematography,” 155–7. See also Pipolo’s discussion in Robert Bresson, particularly pp. 79–81. The notion of anachronism is invoked by Bazin himself, as in his account of the literary artifice of dialogue in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Diary, 145). The term recurs in the work of Georges Didi-​Huberman, and I have also learned from conversations with Christopher Wood, whose co-​authored book with Alexander Nagel explores the wider span of anachronism in the history of art, comprising temporal plurality and instability, and the effect of transposition between media: see Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 31  The suspension of the face between visuality and textuality is echoed again in a Bernanos passage omitted in Bazin’s quotation: the priest considers the supreme semiotic condition of the face in light of the disfiguration of the “mask of agony,” which he had heard physicians attribute to their suffering or dying patients, and which he now weighs vis-​à-​v is Chantal’s spiritual panic. The reference is, of course, to the facies hippocratica, cited in Chapter Two. 32 Bazin, Diary, 151.



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The reduced “epidermis” of uncoded sensory material, equivalent to the cinematographic support, undergoes finally, in Bazin’s reading of Bresson, a quasi-​a llegorical trajectory. The chain of displacements between physical matter and the “dignity of signs” is of a transubstantiative order: writing, reading, erasing, scrawling, spilling, ingesting, disgorging ink, wine, blood, mud. One’s experience of the film suggests that the traffic between these elements can turn at every point in any direction—​t hat it can be sublimated and desublimated in turns. En abîme, we could trace such trajectory within the very sequence with which we have been concerned. In a decisive instant the inspired priest demands that Chantal surrender to him a letter, whose existence and content he had guessed and, likewise, we can only surmise to be a suicide note. As he almost seems to conjure the letter out of nothing, this critical, transformative moment is allegorically charged by the passage of camera movement from Chantal’s face, eventually isolated in close-​up, down through the darkness enveloping her body, to her illuminated hand at her pocket, from which she produces the letter (Figs. 5.6–5.9). This movement through darkness, from face to hand to letter, can be read as figuring the passage, explored herewith, from imprint to sign, embedded in the workings of cinema. Yet Chantal’s stunned invocation of the devil when exclaiming her shock by the priest’s insight—​l iteralized in that he sees into her, and into her pocket, reading her without having to read her letter—​joined with the downward camera movement to the dark center of her body, suggest a continued duality, a tense back and forth between face and body, image and letter. 33 Is not such slippage—​such back and forth—​between the face as a body and the face as subject, between the visible and the invisible, between the mute imprint and legibility, intimated in the very nature of identity? It is embedded in the concept, as well as the etymology, of “character”: at once the agency of an inscription and its result—​f rom the engraving or stamping instrument to the impressed mark or brand, and from the objective graphic mark to the distinct features that cohere as identifiable face, as if sealing all the qualities of the individual. “Character,” which we now mostly assign the latter part of this transfer, may be said to reside in the process whose direction is, in a sense, reversible or, simply, indeterminate: which is the stamp and which is the image, where is agency located? No part is discarded in our notion of character, which is how it expresses and impresses, how it lends itself to human experience and social transactions, as well as to fiction, and to art. Georges Didi-​Huberman emphasizes this duality in cult images that proclaim divine character: the originary contact-​imprint of the face of God is bound up with its necessary withdrawal. Its agency is predicated on both conditions.34 Though Bresson would appear, temperamentally, quite removed from ritualistic investment in cult images, for Bazin, such objects as the mummy, the death mask, or the Shroud of Turin have, of course, already served as privileged 33  This chilling “insight” can be said to have slipped tragically into life, insofar as Bresson might have sensed some morbid undercurrent in his unforgettable actress Nicole Ladmiral who, a few years later, took her own life. 34  On “imprint” as primal image-​m atrix, carrying both ritualistic and juridical functions and underlying facial resemblance that precedes representational mediations, see Georges Didi-​Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Minuit, 2000), especially “L’Image-​matrice: Histoire de l’art et généalogie de la ressemblance,” 59–​8 3, and the exhibition catalog L’Empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). For Didi-​Huberman’s analysis of the concept of “character” as based in imprint and withdrawal, see Confronting Images, 191–​2: “the ‘true’ portrait—​t rue through its contact, a truth not apparent through its appearances—​ required the implementation of its withdrawal, according to a dialectic that Walter Benjamin doubtless would have called the ‘aura.’”

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FIGURES 5.6–5.9:  Face-​to-​letter: Diary of a Country Priest –​frame enlargements.

figures for the photographic/​cinematographic image’s claim to identity—​theoretically independent of likeness or mimesis, yet impossible to extract and altogether remove from it. The image cannot be discarded. Bresson’s work aspires, however, to achieve just this: in deliberate gestures of self-​alienation, he struggles to wrest a fundamental sense of identity from the individual body, to let the image flip into its other: the pure sign, the mark of absence. This struggle, and its failure, makes for an extraordinary body of work.

THE IMAGE AGAINST THE FACE Are you framing her head or her elbow? Or purposely not framing? That would be the best. See what I mean—​I f you get her head, the framing is bad. Make it half her head and half her hand.

Robert Bresson to his cameraman on the set of Mouchette. 35 Bazin’s great essay on Diary of a Country Priest Priest struggles, in the end, to sublimate the reality of the flesh and to turn the image over entirely to its other: the Word, the Letter, the Sign of the Cross—​not its agonizingly corporeal base. The hagiographic itinerary is, as always, itself utterly physical: the priest’s body wastes away in illness, comprising all those physical symptoms that Bresson does in fact spell out (blood, vomit). It is only the contraction of indexical iconicity into 35  Robert Bresson’s instructions to camera operator Jean Chiabaut are in Theodor Kotulla’s documentary Au hasard Bresson (1967), included in the Criterion 2006 DVD edition of Mouchette.



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FIGURE 5.10:  The supremely legible image concluding Diary of a Country Priest –​frame enlargement.

  FIGURE 5.11–5.12:  Supreme legibility: Joan’s look and its reverse field in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) – frame enlargements.

the sign that, as such, would afford the separation and ascension of a soul. The Christological narrative is, in Bazin’s account, synonymous with the semiosis of the image at the film’s conclusion. In the process, meaning is so radically exteriorized as to defeat the visual in mystical darkness, or in theophanic light. Insofar as the priest’s diary is also a visual medium by which, we have seen, temporalities collide, and insofar as Bresson renders both the act of writing and its material base as confluent with the moving image (see again Figs. 5.4–5.5, above)—​so, at the conclusion of the life, as of its writing, “the image could have said nothing more.” What is, then, the film’s last shot—​the optical-​graphic shadow-trace of the simple black cross on the white screen—​is it image or writing? The difference between the two is negated in this figure, an elemental sign of the body-​become-​ letter, or cipher. It is supremely legible—​even to the illiterate, like Joan of Arc (Figs. 5.10–5.12). In fact Dreyer’s cross, as it appears to Joan, remains more vividly tied to the phenomena of the world: it is a shadow thrown by the shape of her cell window, manifestly effected by the sunlight—​a natural, temporal occurrence, whose material support, the rough cell floor, is as manifest as is the dissolution of the light with the passage of time. Bresson’s cross is, on the contrary, truly an abstract notation, no longer related to the tortured body—​not a crucifix, not a substantial, material cross from wood or metal, not a worldly occurrence, but an abstracted shadow that transpires as the most elemental obstruction of the projected light, a negative form, a basic filmic-​optical inscription.

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This is why Bazin considers this an instance of “pure cinema,” comparable to Mallarmé’s blank page and to Rimbaud’s silence as epitomizing supreme states of language. He calls it “a triumph of cinematographic realism.”36 We might call it modernism. As close to monumental permanence as signs go, the cross separates itself from the contingent immediacy of the imprint; it does not point to the particular, mutable, temporal body, but starkly registers its absence, opening onto an order of signs that is always mediated, always deferred. As Bazin writes, it is “the only visible trace left by the assumption of the image, [bearing] witness to something whose reality was only a sign.” After the deposition of the body and after the assumption of its image, the bare two-​dimensional shadow is given over in iconoclastic fashion to the sign of signs. 37 But what does such iconoclastic reduction mean, and what follows in the career of a filmmaker committed to narrative, and thereby figural, cinema, inscribed by historical and material reality? What does it mean to arrive at such reduction, or abstraction, but then to turn back always to such youthful beauty as one finds consistently among Bresson’s protagonists? The iconoclastic lineage signaled here persists in Bresson’s work and is increasingly radicalized in his reticent conception of the face. Echoed in his curious pronouncement, cited earlier, that “nothing should be shown” is the Biblical prohibition on the graven image. 38 Its most assertive Christian variants in Byzantine and Reformation iconoclasms sought the removal of any corporeal depictions of Christ, particularly the facial image wherein the claim to likeness is deemed most idolatrous (Fig. 5.13). The bare iconoclastic cross was sometimes erected where the corporeal image, such as the radiant face of the Christ Pantocrator, had been removed (Fig. 5.14). An anxiety about iconicity informed austere temperaments also within Catholicism. Thus, while not in principle iconoclastic, the austere influence of Jansenism is still to be felt in French churches whose bareness, since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, came to be distinguished from Roman-​Catholic churches elsewhere in Europe and beyond. 39 This is Bresson’s turf. 36 Bazin, Diary, 156. 37 Bazin, Diary, 156. On the iconoclastic cross see Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 104. 38  Like other visual arts, cinema and related media have often incorporated iconophobic and iconoclastic gestures: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) is a famous example. Reading the avant-​garde as iconoclastic in spirit, and seeing modernist abstraction in this light is explicit or implicit in many views: a prime reference might be the suprematist work of Kasimir Malevich, whose Black Square and Black Cross, or his Red Square (Peasant Woman) (all of 1915, among other versions) the artist himself considered as pure or transcendent forms of the face of God that would replace the traditional icon in the modern world. See the concise discussion of these ideas by Theo Salemink, “The New Iconoclasm. The Avant-​Garde and The Catholic Church,” Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, eds. Willem Van Asselt et al. (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2007); DOI:10.1163/​ej.9789004161955.i-​538.188, accessed May 22, 2011. See the several essays on iconoclasm and avant-​garde in Iconoclash, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), especially Hans Belting, “Beyond Iconoclasm: Nam June Paik, the Zen Gaze, and the Escape from Representation,” 390–​411, and his “Invisible Movies in Sugimoto’s ‘Theaters,’ ” 423–​7; Caroline Jones, “Making Abstraction,” 412–​16; Dörte Zbikowski, “Dematerialized. Emptiness and Cyclic Transformation,” 428–​35. W. J. T. Mitchell writes on the rhetoric of iconoclasm as operative ideological mechanism in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 160–​2 08. In light of Adorno’s “Transparencies on Film,” Gertrud Koch discusses the tension between the mimetic impulse and a persisting iconoclastic strain, bound up with the image-​a s-​w riting in cinematic modernity, in “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” Screen 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 211–​22. 39 See Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image:  An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 193. While Bresson has sometimes denied affinities with Jansenism, this theology still informs some of his preferred frames of reference, most notably Pascal.



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FIGURE 5.13:  Reformation iconoclasm: defaced relief in Utrecht Cathedral, desecrated in 1566. Wikipedia photograph by Arktos, 2003.

Looking through Bresson’s career one confronts repeatedly such double movements of offering the human face and withdrawing it: across diverse subject matter the articulate, incarnate facial image is threatened by its own iconoclastic deposition, yet persists through some “work of the negative.”40 Bresson’s is not an avant-​garde iconoclasm: it does not turn to a cinema of abstract notations; it does not yield to a radical breakdown of the image but sustains a fundamental figural efficacy, even a facingness. How can this be? One can begin to think about it as one thinks of the figure of the cross as, in principle, facing us—​especially when the body disappears, when corporeal volume evaporates, when the particular face dissolves and the cross flips over from iconicity to sign, as we have seen at the conclusion of Country Priest. It is as graphic notation, on page or on screen, that such facingness is assimilated as dispositif: whether it tells of redemption or of destruction, the internal coherence of the Bressonian image emerges in its light. Certain lineages of modern art have effectively been described in just such terms. Michael Fried reads Manet’s pictorial flatness as an “act of acknowledgment” bound up with the way in which the painting so emphatically faces its beholder. Facingness is disengaged here from the orientation of any particular face or body: this means that even when the figures are turned away, or ostensibly turned inward in their occupation or contemplation, the treatment of the pictorial surface—​its flatness underscored by Manet’s bluntly “unfinished” surface quality—​affords a facingness of the painting as a whole.41 Conversely, where the principal figure does face the beholder, as in Olympia (1863– 65), or in The Dead Christ with Angels (1864), the model’s face may appear to defy our look, or to seem otherwise deadpan, drained, withdrawn. The courtesan’s broad face in Olympia is as brazenly

40  Such double movement of incarnation and deposition, image-​making and image breaking, is conceptualized by Bruno Latour as the paradigmatic cycle of “iconoclash” which, he suggested in the exhibition and anthology that carried that title, underlines the history of the image. See especially Joseph Leo Koerner’s discussion of cycles of Incarnation and Crucifixion: putting the image of Christ up for display to then depict its necessary withdrawal which epitomizes the Christological narrative, in “The Icon as Iconoclash,” Iconoclash, 164–​213. 41  Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially 266, 289, 311–​18, 323. My discussion of Manet is much indebted to the conversation of Ralph Ubl.

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FIGURE 5.14:  Iconoclastic cross in the Hagia Irene Church replaced, in the eighth century, earlier mosaic decoration, probably of Christ Pantocrator. Istanbul. Wikipedia Photograph by Gryffindor, 2007.

facing as can be, but it is also in this way that it becomes its own barrier: one’s gaze is met and, almost defeated (as when one withdraws one’s look before the other’s prevailing one), turns to other parts—​breast, armpit, hand, cat, flowers—​that all seem to return our gaze (Fig. 5.15). It is an uncanny gaze that seems augmented the closer one looks at any one of these details, face-to-face with this large painting. In Manet’s Dead Christ with Angels, Christ may be—​narratively, dramatically—​ on the point of resuscitation–​resurrection: the face’s visibility is withdrawn in the shadows, while the highly modeled body juts forth as if it were a face (Fig. 5.16). The sharp division between head and body is so disconcerting that one alternately senses Christ’s face as depleted, a dead weight—​ like an inanimate object that must be quite literally held up by the angel’s hand so that it doesn’t drop entirely. The rhyming of this gesture with the second angel’s supporting of her own head in contemplation iterates the weighing of material and mental (or is it divine) substance sustaining



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FIGURE 5.15:  Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863–65). Oil on canvas (130.5 × 190.0 cm.). Image courtesy of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris/​Art Resource, NY. Photo by Erich Lessing.

these bodies as a sort of question, which is not altogether rhetorical.42 Yet in another sense it would seem as if Christ’s face has already dropped down onto his body’s middle. His chest, ​nipples, wound, navel, the knot of the loincloth, all gaze at us, just like Chardin’s monstrous ray fish, from a body that has itself become an image—​or a medium for images. For then, distributed in the painting, are all those other faces, and gazes: in the concave of Christ’s hands with the eye-​like stigmata, in the bright, boney convex of his knees. Separately and jointly, these pictorial object-​faces address us—​one might even imagine that, in returning our gaze, they perform a sort of stigmata. Facingness now detaches itself from the particular human face and, assuming a body, possesses also the painting’s body. In its withdrawal, the face can thus be distributed onto other objects, and gathers thereby an uncanny agency—​since it now surpasses mimetic and anthropomorphic limits, traverses animate and inanimate entities, the living and the dead, body and surface. Having thus assumed the daemonic agency of an other, might it not now be said to traverse and outstrip the particular face, to coalesce in the disposition of the image as a whole—​in which case our gaze can no longer quite possess and master it? Facingness—​an image-​disposition which Fried also brings to a consideration of photography—​is of a piece with the cinematic mode of address with which this book has been concerned.43 No special stretch of the imagination, or of historical and geographical logic, is needed here to associate Manet’s lesson with the perception of a French filmmaker who speaks of “one single 42  In the present context I cannot help but see something Bressonian in this second angel’s features, while her posture rhymes with that of the mournful woman in the penultimate scene of Au hasard Balthazar. 43 In Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 151, Michael Fried reiterates his discussion of Manet, emphasizing that his art “was a new acknowledgment that paintings were indeed made to be beheld… an attempt to make not just each painting as a whole but every bit of its surface—​every brushstroke, so to speak—​face the beholder as never before.”

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FIGURE 5.16: Edouard Manet, The Dead Christ with Angels (1864). Oil on canvas, (179.4 × 149.9 cm). H. O. Havemeyer Collection. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/​Art Resource, NY.

mystery of persons and objects.” A certain lineage can be traced from the figurative, even narrative, pictorial modernism of Manet to Bresson, and there are so many different ways to chart it. The Notes on the Cinematographer makes one of them explicit in Bresson’s remark on the “equality of all things. Cézanne painting with the same eye and the same soul a fruit dish, his son, the Montagne Sainte-​Victoire.” In the painter’s leveling of still life, portrait, and landscape, Bresson notes the formal and phenomenological implications of a modernist artistic perception and, synonymous with it, a “single mystery” or a shared “soul,” as he says, that permeates all things animate and inanimate, human, man-​made, or natural, anthropomorphic and aniconic.44 This lineage could be described as traversing, certainly, the cubist portraiture of Picasso: the way in which our look slides, in the Girl with a Mandolin (1910), from face down to breast, then to the mandolin whose hollow echoes the eye—​an analogy we have already encountered when comparing Picasso’s 1912 Guitare relief and the Grebo mask in Chapter Two (Fig. 5.17). The face and the look are even 44 Bresson, Notes, 136 and 26, respectively; emphases in the original. “Aniconic,” namely, non-iconic, non-anthropomorphic, non-figurative, is a term used broadly in theological and anthropological discussions of religions or cultures that forbid the representation of God, or even any image making.



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FIGURE 5.17:  Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) (1910). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/​Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/​Art Resource, NY.

further distributed to other elements of body, object, and setting that can be said to compete with the face, or to receive it—​like a stigmata—​across the pictorial surface. And one can very well read such operative leveling of persons and objects, places, events, in descriptive prose—​as in the French tradition that might thread Emile Zola with Bresson’s prominent contemporary, Alain Robbe-​Grillet.45 It may inform how we look to semiotic and ideological accounts of modernist practices, intertwining and complicating them. An illustrious modernist genealogy thus cushions Bresson’s figural strategy, which confronts us still 45  There is probably nothing original in my brief citing of such modernist lineages here as backdrop to a discussion of the “distribution” of the face, which Christopher Wood encouraged me to consider. The ways in which such lineages inform the cinema is acknowledged in film histories, and might call for more extensive discussion across media, that lies beyond the scope of this book.

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within the purview of narrative cinema’s representational hierarchies and expressive conventions—since it is so deeply felt to challenge our intuitive, everyday response to the human face as standing out in the visual field. When the individual face does not possess the gaze or don the usual expressive vocabularies of interiority, when it withdraws and gives way to “the work of the negative,” the gap between seeing and knowing makes itself felt. This is what the discontinuities of perception implemented by cinematography, and so much heightened by Bressonian reticence, can unravel. More than facingness—​Fried’s preferred term for a disposition of the still image, pictorial or photographic—​a notion of address, already deployed in this book, seems better suited to the variable dimensions and temporalities of the cinema. It implies an opening—​even a ripping open—​of the moving image; it describes a face-​l ike disposition, which is not only formal and experiential, but ethical. Even while faces themselves appear inert or reticent, address resists closure and never collapses into fixity: it projects forth, opening up to time, yet it leaves the face intact. Bresson thus lets go of the anthropomorphic hierarchies by which the cinema has routinely synthesized subjectivity, and lets the moving image, as such, address its viewer.

NOT AN OPEN BOOK, BUT A DOOR AJAR In light of Bazin’s reading of Diary of a Country Priest, we have traced Bresson’s system unfolding through an iconoclastic movement of semiosis, culminating in the inherent frontality of the shadow of the cross—​a sort of negative image, really—​in the final shot. Bazin’s inspired reading may well have made conscious and even helped radicalize Bresson’s practice, for in subsequent work expressive devices were further pared down, and the models’ meticulously trained reticence seeped into every aspect of the work. The withdrawn or displaced glance, the opaque face, and what Jean-​Pierre Oudart saw as a “syncopated” face-​to-​face, came to dominate the films after the Diary, along with the monotone of delivery, and the equation of voice-​over narration and dialogue.46 With the “automatism” of the model, no expression glues one shot to another—​ even shot-​reverse shot constructions and quasi-​Kuleshovian editorial association of faces and objects tend to be emptied out in Bresson’s hands, leaving only empty shells (as it were) of these film-​l inguistic articulations. When they are employed, they might be subtly mismatched or syncopated, so that reading across the shots seems to start and halt, with no gratifying synthesis. As Bresson’s characters so often seem to be in the course of vacating the image, it is the movement of turning away, joined with the extra temporal beat given to spaces burdened by their

46  It is interesting to consider that Oudart first imported “suture” from psychoanalysis to cinema in view of the shot-​reverse shot construction in Bresson’s Trial of Joan of Arc, seeing this basic technique accentuated here to effect a “deliberately syncopated discourse” and thereby a tragic consciousness. Oudart claims that Au hasard Balthazar fails, by contrast, to come to terms with the fundamental duality of space and the sense of absence achieved in Joan of Arc, concluding that “this makes Bresson without a doubt the most ambiguous figure in modern cinema.” Jean-​ Pierre Oudard, “Cinema and Suture,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 211 and 212, April and May 1969; English translation by Kari Hanet in Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–​78): 35–​47. The draining of editorial techniques that I go on to describe above varies: it might be most pronounced in the color films, starting with Une Femme douce (1969).



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withdrawal, that one feels the most. The burden of the vacated image is matched by Bresson’s characteristic narrowing down of the visual field by way of obstructing the look—​decentering, or deframing it. By such redistribution of the gaze, compounding the pervasive reticence of face and image, we come to sense our own look as torn, orphaned before Bresson’s work. How does it, then, address us? Late in Au hasard Balthazar (1966) Jacques, the childhood sweetheart, returns to offer with his love for Marie—​the film’s central protagonist, as inscrutable as the donkey Balthazar—​a way out of the social and personal disaster that her family’s predicament and her infatuation with Gerard, the leather-​jacketed gang leader with an angel’s singing voice, have plunged her. Balthazar, whose impassive presence traverses the film, is not included in the shots that establish the space of Marie and Jacques’s conversation on the bench—​itself marked early in the film as metonymic figure for their relationship. A temporal lapse breaks the conversation sequence: the ellipsis that gapes in its verbal content is underscored, but also enigmatically inflected by an editorial cut away from Marie’s lowered profile as she talks, to an extended close shot of Balthazar’s head as he grazes, and over which the musical theme now recurs (Figs. 5.18–5.19). One might hypothetically construe and link these successive shots as Jacques’s point-of-view, yet—​in Bresson’s dispersive mode—​such retroactive anchoring is not quite supported by any establishing or otherwise more “embracing” shots that would stabilize, contain, or cohere the shot of the animal’s head. Nor does the fact that the donkey’s left side might seem to mirror/​respond to Marie’s right profile confirm any actual spatial binding—​a s some matching sets of profiles might do as a sort of variant of a shot-​reverse shot. Shot-​reverse shot, in any case, does not normally involve proper profiles: the precise orientation and substance of the look are so restricted in profile views—​a s opposed to the prototypical three-​quarters face that traditionally transpires as the most natural and most revealing angle. Even when some basic communicative link is established, however, in editing matching profiles, it remains a disposition that radically limits expression and nuance and, with its underscoring of outline and removal of the gaze, transpires more as a sort of stamp or seal. We have discussed variants of this both in the previous chapter’s treatment of Warhol, and in relation to the priest’s profile in the confessional scene. But how profile would compare with three-​quarters view when an animal’s head or eye is involved, and in the context of matching of looks in shot-​reverse shot, introduces an even deeper element of doubt into Bresson’s composition of this scene.

 

FIGURES 5.18–5.19:  Face-​to-​f ace? Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) –​frame enlargements.

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The possibility of projecting a link between these two beings-​in-​profile, Marie and Balthazar, and reading meaning into the exchange thus implied is, then, at once offered and withdrawn. Is it the case that such a meaningful link might exist in the world that holds these creatures together, but that no particular spatial coordinates or film-​g rammatical structures could properly account for it? The mirroring edit of the girl and the animal’s head could be said to convey, then, another order of exchange: a departure from the human conversation taking place, a departure from verbal or otherwise coded discourse, a questioning of the extent to which such discourse within spatio-​temporal continuity can “communicate” at all. The shot-​reverse shot had already imploded in the film’s unforgettable alternation of Balthazar and the circus animals—​t iger, bear, monkey, elephant—​earlier on, when the wild hyperbole of the sequence of heads and their impenetrable stares pulled the rug from under any simple translation of visual coordinates into inter-​subjectivity (Figs. 5.20–5.25). Indeed, Bresson’s use of the donkey, here and throughout, never imposes any anthropomorphizing intentionality that an animal’s face, head, or look, might be made to imply via focalizing or editing schemes so often exploited in conventional cinematic uses of animals. No linguistic maneuvers will force these stunning,

 

 

  FIGURES 5.20–​5.25:  Face-​to-​f ace? Au hasard Balthazar –​frame enlargements.



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  FIGURES 5.26–​5.29:  In reticence: Au hasard Balthazar –​frame enlargements.

hieratic animal heads into direct conversation, identification, or any fabricated reciprocity that our habits of reading can truly command.47 Following the conversation scene on the bench is a sequence-shot of Marie taking care of Balthazar for the last time. From within the dark stable, where the camera is set up, we see her come in with the streaming, humid light, arms full of hay. Even as facial expression is limited or altogether elided—​since the girl’s face is mostly turned away, or otherwise obstructed from our view—​t he shot conveys her deeply absorbed bearing. The camera pans and dollies at a medium-​ close range to follow the lateral movement of her body: it lets her head slip out of the frame as she approaches Balthazar so that mostly fringe elements—​t he girl’s middle, her arms as she places the hay—​a re glimpsed, then a sidelong view of the donkey’s head is momentarily focalized as we hear Marie, her face now off-​screen, say (evidently contemplating Jacques’s proposal in the previous scene) “I will love him, I will love him.” She then moves into the frame again, the middle of her body now obstructing the animal’s head; finally the camera turns leftward to follow her movements as she leaves the stable (Figs. 5.26–5.29). The meandering relay between the girl’s averted countenance and the animal’s large dark eye links the two, here as throughout the film, but it never imposes upon this link any definite syntax or invests it with direct identification. This is an instance of what P. Adams Sitney discusses as Bresson’s linearizing of the metonymic principle—in some ways consistent with what is, after all, the quotidian realist milieu that grounds the work.48 Indeed it is a scene depicting a routine workaday activity, not an extraordinary 47 In Neither God nor Master, Price reads both Balthazar and Mouchette as partaking in Bresson’s radical discourse on the way in which language is not to be the measure of the human or, thereby, the basis for opposition or discrimination. 48  Sitney, “The Rhetoric,” 121.

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occurrence: Marie performs it as one performs such tasks, automatically—​it is the sort of action that coincides perfectly with Bresson’s training of his models. This is why the girl’s attention does not seem focused on what she is doing, or on Balthazar: she is at once absorbed and unconscious. She is thinking intensively but not about what she is doing.Yet again, by this negative mode, a unique order of conversation (that some would call “spiritual,” or even “divine”) is sustained in the image and lends itself to the viewer. In different ways, both the fluid, relaying link by camera and figure movement in this sequence-shot and the editorial juxtaposition of Marie and Balthazar in the preceding conversation scene effect a sense of absorption, attention, intimacy. But both instances also confront us with the strange joining—​and the interference—​of bodies, and of selves, while bypassing the ordinary back-​a nd-​forth of coded communicative functions at both the formal and social levels. It is by negation and in withdrawal of such functions, and by re-​ distributing the gaze, now unmoored, to a different order such that it permeates the image as a whole, that these scenes strike us as, nevertheless, articulate. Our attention is arrested even as we cannot synthesize or lock the elements—​body parts and part glances, withdrawn or deframed—​w ithin a conclusive expression or statement. The image addresses us in reticence. Bresson’s shots, obstinately composed and paced to level persons, objects, spaces, thus also seem to raise barriers everywhere between things—​or else drain them in a flat, opaque field. Even when an isolated gesture or look does endow, for an instant, a Bressonian hand or foot, or the face itself, with luminousity, even when some intimation of a “countenance” would touch a provincial or urban corner in these films, it does not routinely enter into a causal, syntactic, or synthetic functions: it does not dispel the universal condition of withdrawal. Mouchette (1967), one of Bresson’s most devastating films, is punctuated with such instances, as when the girl tosses a spunge or flips the top of a pot, or when she suddenly looks upward to follow the flight of a bird and her radiant face then inspires a moment of light and energy. But even in those earlier films—​A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959)—​where redemption seems possible, where the protagonist does, in the end, emerge alive and spirited from the downward pull of the world and its confinements, one considers, in retrospect, that such instances are mostly drawn against a pervasive condition of reticence. This is the “work of the negative,” acutely felt in the very constitution of Bresson’s images, comprising their temporal unfolding: for reticence slides from faces, to objects and settings, and to the texture of the image as such. Quite possibly what this adds up to is an archaic modality of the image, as if it were constricted, reverting backward to some earlier state of being—​l ike that under-​developed imprint that Bazin had associated with the inert wax seal or gray mask suspended on a threshold of visibility where it must yet contract, spasmodically, into signification. Bresson may be said to recover here something primal indeed, an inert perception of a world from which human agency has been pared down, as if it had not yet been fully created, or named—​the biblical connotation is warranted. What astonishes is how he achieves this by the most deliberate, systemic, and willful use of apparatus. He touches on something archaic and vulnerable, lacing both creative and destructive forces that show through when cinema suspends its perpetual sublimation of the image to signifying functions. With the withdrawal of the face and removal of the look as focalizing measures in a hierarchy of perception—​wherein we habitually valorize intention, intellection, individual subjectivity—​we are left to confront, then, a more primal gaze, which distributes itself throughout the image. Since no primacy is given to a single anchor of subjectivity, signification or meaning, we sense it as impersonal, indifferent, partaking of a radical leveling, a humbling



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reduction of the face—​or, at times, its complementary movement in an equalizing elevation of all parts, all entities. Such “reversibility” of a permeating perception—​where elevation (or intensification) and reduction (or humbling) are facets of a single coin—​is intimated in the very figure of the donkey. Consider—​a s Godard suggests in his wonderful interview with Bresson—​t hat the donkey’s look, by sheer physiognomic position of the eyes at an angle to its front, disrupts in any case our common binding of looking and facing.49 It is the oblique, or even the profile view of the animal’s head that—​notwithstanding our earlier questioning of the profile-​to-​profile linkage—​m ight be said to face us, refracting the look from the perpendicular to the horizontal plane, and vice versa. Balthazar, like a camera, becomes a medium by which the gaze is relocated, redistributed. And in considering the donkey as (it is often said) Bresson’s ideal model, we finally gloss Bresson’s dictum that the model is “all face”: the camera endows the entire body with a reflective, subjective expressivity even as the face itself—​like the animal’s head—​m ight be as opaque, as resistant as a body, as if coated with the rough hide of a beast of burden. 50 The face might come to constitute its own barrier and might, thereby, not return the gaze as part of the communicative transactions of cinematic grammar to which cinema only so rarely gives the lie—​but redistribute and refract it within an altogether different order of perception. Insofar as we still speak here of the face as cinematic dispositif, what remains is not the humanist assurance of an anthropomorphic universe but an alien perception, at once physically grounded, present, and withdrawn—​revolving in its own sphere, obtusely itself, irreducible. This is the draining “dark efficacy” gaping between the face and language, between image and sign. Hence the terror, the abandon, which one is not surprised to see prevailing in Bresson’s work with the years, resonating with the increasingly morbid thrust of his films. 51 This “dark efficacy” sabotages legible representation but recovers a more primal agency in the moving image. We now approach its recurring figure, punctuating Bresson’s work: it is a figure that pulses and recedes, and that itself confounds the opposition of figure and ground. In all these ways it emblematizes the dispositif that we have been circling throughout. Late in Au hasard Balthazar—​following the sequences with which we have been concerned—​a harrowing scene unfolds in the abandoned farmhouse that had served for Marie’s sexual encounters with

49  Interview by Jean-​Luc Godard and Michel Delahaye, “The Question” (1966), trans. Jane Pease 1967, rpt. in Quandt, ed., Robert Bresson, 479. Pipolo (pp. 188–90) elaborates on the position of the animal’s eyes: its shattering of our routine sense of frontality, its implications for point-of-view, shot-​reverse shot, on-​and off-​screen space, and its intimation of vaster questions on presence-​absence in this film. 50 Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 40. This interpretation is embedded in the gloss that Bresson offers in his elaborate footnote to this shortest of his aphorisms, quoting from Montaigne’s anecdote on the rogue who, questioned how he could walk about with only his shirt on in the cold of winter responded: “and have you not, good Sir, your face all bare? Imagine I am all face.” In her paper for my seminar on the face at Yale University (2004), Catherine Flynn elaborated how this “reverses the usual understanding of face and body as, respectively, sensitive and less sensitive. In calling his robust unclothed body ‘all face,’ [Montaigne’s rogue] implies that his face is toughened skin, a hardy surface that withstands exposure to both the elements and the public as a matter of course.” 51  Elsewhere, I  explore the withdrawn disposition of the Bressonian image in light of certain psychoanalytic accounts of autistic perception: I set it against the animistic model that would seem to define, more pervasively, the work of motion pictures. See my essay, which focuses on some of the same examples treated in these pages, “Of the Face: In Reticence” in A Museum without Walls: Film, Art, New Media, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 159–​77.

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  FIGURES 5.30–​5.35:  A door ajar: Au hasard Balthazar –​frame enlargements.

Gerard, and where she foolishly and destructively plans to settle things with his gang for the last time. The actress Anne Wiazemsky’s passively sulking, mulish countenance and her peculiar gait are amplified in Bresson’s stunning choreography and montage of paced, repeated, at once interlaced and halting movements of the girl’s search through the house: opening doors, looking into rooms, pausing to listen, vacating spaces (Figs. 5.30–5.35). 52 The framing, almost consistently in medium shot, further confines the already shallow spaces. Walls, doors and doorways, accumulated and overlapping surfaces, convey a sense of flat, bare but oppressive interiors, a zone not entirely defined or enclosed but never quite open: even as it unfolds, it is withdrawn—​ a space not altogether revealed. Bresson’s careful work of framing, pacing, and editing ​erects a barrier between the protagonist’s look and our own, separating the two orders of looks: from both sides of the screen, as it were. While the girl’s movements and looks guide and focalize the 52  Wiazemsky’s physiognomy and manner—​at once deep and flat, inscrutable, fanatic, catatonic, and so well exploited by Bresson in this film—​was taken up and elaborated in her later roles, most notably for Jean Luc Godard (La Chinoise, 1967, Wind from the East, 1970) and in particular Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema, 1968, and Pigsty, 1969).



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sequence, and while she is ostensibly seeing more of this diegetic world than the camera offers to our view, her face and reactions reflect nothing more than just what these narrowly framed walls and doors yield—​or rather deny—​w ithin the narrow confines of the filmic frame. At the heart of the sequence is a typical Bressonian shot, the likes of which one finds in so many of his films: the camera is set up closely facing a door that Marie opens only enough to allow her slender body to slip in toward us. She pauses at the threshold to look, approaches the camera, pauses again, and turns to exit from frame-​left, leaving the door ajar (Fig. 5.32, above). Her exit and the added temporal beat that follows before the editorial cut invoke off-​ screen space—​both beyond the frame laterally and into the hidden depth behind the door. But, more emphatically, they accentuate a flatness of space and a temporality emptied of action. In this, perhaps his most notorious perversion of conventional cinematic economy, Bresson omits nothing of the entire process of entries and exits, intensifying the spatio-temporal extensions surrounding it. While so much may be pared away, elided, or hidden in Bresson’s world, and in the spaces he affords it, the approach to, the opening, shutting or (even more emphatically) part-​shutting of doors, and how such doorways continue to transpire (or, to be) even after an otherwise minor action has passed—​t his is always laid out in its entirety, and affects most profoundly the burden of time and of an abandoned, stilled space. We are only offered minimal glimpses—​earlier in the film and in the section that follows, when Marie’s father and Jacques find the beaten naked girl—​of the miserable, sordid mess of this particular setting. The segment itself, made up, technically, of reaction shots, denies us any reverse-​field views, leaving only one side of the world, as it were, to intensify the bare, flat world that narrowly surrounds Marie. The emphasis, it seems to me, is not even on positive “acts of seeing”—​as in looking outward and fleshing out the space that would meet her glance—​but, rather, on the subjugation of the girl and of her look to these not-​a ltogether-​available spaces: she suffers them as they appear to drain her look, shot after shot, finally projecting outward to confront our own gaze. 53 All the ills and miseries of this provincial setting do not add up to more than a formulaic causality of the goings-​on—​a nd do not explain the subsequent disappearance of Marie, except insofar as the final passage to Balthazar’s death offers some symbolic synthesis greater than the limited personal experience of this one girl. However, something here is articulated precisely by this reticence—​of actor, of narration, of the image in assertive camerawork and editorial strategy. Retroactively, one conjectures that there is more in this house, and more of the girl’s response, than what we can be offered as image. The barrier that we sense in the scene between different orders of the look, the “dark efficacy” gaping between diegesis and image yields, for an instant, the sort of dread that one might sense in a horror film—​but it propels us elsewhere. With no direct or personal projection of subjectivity, no familiar balance to fall back on in the dissimulation of the actor, with no synthesizing of motivation and expression, the Bressonian image obstructs, withdraws, offers the face as a barrier that deflects onto other surfaces. Yet even if deflected, even in highly mediated form, does not Bresson’s image address us after all—​not in the immediacy of the shot but as an effect of cumulative surfaces articulating in reticence? The image itself, in all its aspects, takes the place of the face: it addresses us as a totality, unhinged from the particulars of the individual, from personal, passing expressions.

53  Sitney speaks of “acts of seeing” in Bresson’s films, see “Cinematography,”, 146, 150.

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Human, animal, or inanimate parts, and all their parts, partake in it. Bresson may be said to recover here an inert, primal perception of a world from which human agency—​insofar as it is occupied by communicative, signifying formulae—​has been pared down. This is what remains when the cinema suspends its perpetual sublimation of the image to signifying functions, when it tears the sign apart and lets the image, unmoored from individual expression or articulation, face us. The door left ajar figures our suspension on the threshold of interiority—and its possible passage from reticence to address. No synthesis of image and language, not the social face-​to-​face, not empathetic identification, not an open book but a door ajar—​even when a face, in reticence, does not yield, the image may command our gaze. If, as Emmanuel Levinas understood it, the face will not be contained in the visual as mere plastic entity, y​ et it is, of course, the visual with which we must contend, might we not define it as a condition of the face—​at once its aesthetic and its ethic—​ to be always turning away? It is its reticence that signals, that compels us. But that also, always, depends on our own disposition as we face the moving image—​on our own willingness to address it. 54

54  I am again informed here by Thierry de Duve’s discussion of a very different category of limit-​i mages: of men, women, and children photographed before being killed at the S-​21 extermination compound in Phnom Penh between 1975 and 1979. De Duve understands the notion of “address” as binding aesthetic and ethic in these terms: “I have no way of knowing whether a work of art contains a universal address except the feeling of being addressed personally by it… . More often than not in truly innovative art, that feeling hinges on my capacity or my willingness to address the work so that it addresses me.” See “Art in the Face of Radical Evil,” October 125 (Summer 2008): 3–​2 3.



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P O S T FAC E

THE TWO-​SHOT

 

 

FIGURES 6.1–​6.4:  Final shot of Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014) –​frame enlargements.

L

ast night at the Castro Theater, watching the two-​or-​so-​m inute two-​shot that concludes Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014), I recognized that, basically, I have been thinking these past years about the face on its own (Figs. 6.1–6.4). Although the face-​ to-​face has been a recurring theme in these pages—​in terms of the shot-​reverse shot, and in terms of the relation, far more than just geometrical, of spectator and moving image—​most of my discussion circled the single face, alone. Sometimes it was multiplied by itself, as was Edie Sedgwick in the Warhol apparatus, but mechanically and so ever more alone. And—​other than the uniquely haunting two-​shot of the country priest and Chantal sharply juxtaposed, profile and frontal, in the confessional—​there prevailed, finally, the power of faces-​in-​reticence before Bresson’s camera. Instead, there is something wonderfully ordinary, and classical, about Anderson’s two-​shot—​even though the mode of Inherent Vice is not exactly mainstream but, rather, a cinematic spin-​off of a Pynchon picaresque, one that nevertheless very elegantly builds

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FIGURES 6.5–​6.6:  “Making faces” in Inherent Vice –​frame enlargements.

through a cumulative series of encounters, clashes, conversations between fallible characters. What is at stake here, then, is not a moving-​i mage “portrait”—​not a standalone “attraction” as was, say, The May Irwin Kiss (William Heise/​Edison, 1896), or Warhol’s Kiss (1963) either. It is, simply, the satisfying finale of a fine feature fiction film: a relaxed close-​up enframing the Marlowevian private-​eye “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and his salvaged lover Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterson) in a car, driving in the fog, talking, being. This final two-​shot follows, in fact, an intensely dramatic shot-​reverse shot exchange between Doc and the police detective “Bigfoot.” While the villain has been eliminated and justice done, this is not a happy scene. It takes to the limit Bigfoot’s devouring orality, laughable at first but then increasingly desperate, and now joined with the film’s dedication to drug consumption. We see Doc finally appreciating the substance of the detective’s hunger—​that its dimensions are those of the inner void left by the loss of his partner sacrificed in a shady police-​gangster conspiracy. Doc actually sheds a little tear, easy to miss on first viewing. Partly to wipe it away, partly to de-​sentimentalize his appearance, he then lifts both palms up to his face, presses the cheeks together and pulls the mouth down and open in an almost child-​like gesture (Figs. 6.5–6.6). This face-​making stands out against Phoenix’s gift, as a performer at once intense and subtle, for listening and paying attention—​a non-​gesture, really, which numerous scenes afford him occasion to do. But in the penultimate scene he handles and contorts, a​ s if to mold or sculpt h​ is own face, endowing the features with exaggerated plasticity. The quasi-​mythological quality of Phoenix’s upper-​lip scar resonates with this, while also betraying, as if from just beneath this grimacing mask, a sense of recognition and compassion. The leisurely two-​shot that follows relieves this face-​to-​face dramatic tension. It holds two faces together as part of a single greater expressive value: what it offers is irreducible to any particular attribute or gesture, and cannot be divided into any of the instances, expressions, any of the disparate nameable parts of the whole. Nor can it be assigned to any single face on its own. The actors’ actual faces and their personae have been tightly braided by now in the dissimulation of the cinematic fiction, fastened by the knowledge we have amassed of them. As in each of the films explored in this book, we are made to feel here the tangible limits of this knowledge. What is hidden or illegible about them is, in the strongest cases, as much a part of their being as what is seen and known: such is the unique conjunction by which we intimate the person. Its enthralling site is the face. The shifting lights and hazy atmosphere suggest that Doc and Shasta are driving in the fog. We could be thinking of Bacall with Bogart, or of Karina with Belmondo, always in cars,



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although Anderson’s pastiche of citations does not diminish the film’s dedication to its subjects here. They are, by this point, more than just functions of a cultural saturation, and are sensed to be at least as autonomous (in their togetherness) as the characters in those set pieces in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) or in Pierrot le fou (Jean-​Luc Godard, 1965), or any number of similar situations.1 In all these films I am touched, as well, by how the blunt artifice of the simulated drive conveys very frankly that the car is not the real space in which the situation transpires. Rather, the experience of driving in the fog after a certain climactic turn of events unfolds within a psychic space whose coordinates are, precisely, those of the two-​shot. Namely, that being, finally, together really does mean being side-​by-​side, sharing in a commonality—​ not, however, drowning in a kiss or otherwise turned away from us to lose themselves in a single body but, rather, looking outward together at the foggy world as it passes, while also encompassed within the car as vehicle of fiction, and within the filmic frame. This is the space, at once intimately enclosed and open ahead, in which people can say to each other things like, “You looked good, awful good, I didn’t know they made them like that anymore,” and “I guess I’m in love with you,” “I’ll do anything you want me to,” and then, “I kiss you all over.” Just so, in the final shot of Inherent Vice, only very little simulated movement of the car or the driver’s shoulder are needed to effect an illusion. A sense of repose, a clarity of being, and of being understood—​ all this is without illusions: Shasta: This feels the same way, tonight. Just us. Together. Almost like being underwater. The world, everything gone someplace else. Doc: Figured it was Sortilège just settin’ us up. Shasta: No, she… Doc: Her Ouija board… Shasta: She knows things, Doc… maybe about us that we don’t know… Doc: This don’t mean we’re back together. Shasta: Course not.2 Their beauty is warm—​not quite the perfection of classical Hollywood stars, but the humid warmth of an “underwater” southern California. Their bit of dialogue echoes, reverses, and resolves an earlier, extensive sequence shot which threads Shasta’s erotic monologue and the sex that follows with a comparable piece of conversation. The lines were swapped the first time around as it was Shasta saying, “This don’t mean we’re back together” and Doc who responded, “–​Course not.” The final two-​shot, somewhat like the mellow aftermath of sex, might have followed this directly, but instead an entire violent dénouement—​comprising several different sequences, and right through the policeman and private eye’s last face-​to-​face—​takes place in-​ between. The two-​shot close-​up is prolonged for a while past their last lines, and carried into Chuck Johnson’s singing “Any Day Now.” What it offers, and what it leaves out—​t he unsaid, the hidden, some things best forgotten, “the world, everything gone someplace else”—​a ll this 1  Hawks’s and Godard’s framing and editing of such driving sequences are all different, but also comparable in achieving an effect of intimacy through faces at once celebrated and private, open and masked, discrete and together. 2  Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice, based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, Final shooting script (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, August 7, 2013), 126–​7; accessed online.

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seeps through the shot, which still achieves its feeling of repose, its intimate enclosure, and its openness. 3 The world of Inherent Vice, ​at once historical and hallucinatory, h​ as in fact been weighed with dialogue, voice-​over narration, layerings of consciousness, perspectives only loosely anchored. Public events are personalized; history is inhaled; television addresses you in person; your fantasy is spoken—​even broadcast—​by others. With the fog, things blend at the seams. The post-​ modern idiom rises to the occasion like the humid atmosphere itself, where nothing is securely contained within its defining outlines: roles, period costumes, motivations, encounters, identities match only to a point—​everything spills over in a barrage of words and images that do not presume to possess their objects, or to subjugate the principal personae. Our grasp of them wavers, then, between their strong physicality, bound up with a flawed but stubborn (sometimes caricatured) self-​sameness, the imaginative affinities and circumstances that bring them together, and the embracing yet hazy knowledge of Sortilège’s narrating voice—​one that, they suspect, knows things about them that they themselves do not know. Their faces in the final two-​shot shore up any such knowledge against the sands of uncertainty: the vital unknownness that Stanley Cavell saw in the cinema’s inhabiting of persons’ (and lovers’) fundamental condition to each other. What can we know of people on film, and how do their faces participate in such knowledge—​while also signaling its limits? Not every film foregrounds this question as part of its compositional devices. Each of the films on which I have dwelled in this book works through this question seriously, in its own way. Inherent Vice offers some privileged snippets of knowledge verbalized in the free indirect discourse of Sortilège’s voice-​over, as narrator extraordinaire: a minor character present in only few scenes, she is at once participant and omniscient. Which of these is inner and which is outer—​w ith regard to the diegetic world, and to these characters’ consciousness that she seems to know, even to invent, from within? How can we presume to know what is behind these faces on film? The long-​take two-​shot is not intent on pinpointing what each one is thinking or feeling exactly. They seem to pass a range of expressions back and forth between them—​l ike a joint. The impression is at once all-​embracing and somewhat diffuse: for the way in which they appear to be available, both together, to our look suggests a way of knowing that oscillates, but then exceeds the sum of the parts. One might call it a two-​shot illumination. In its course I recognize that the two-​shot obliges my attention to waver and split—​for I feel called upon to look at each of them, not to lose them just yet. The film’s VistaVision format—​ perhaps unspectacular from a contemporary mainstream perspective, but still remarkable for its fine photographic grain within the generous aspect ratio, and consistent with Anderson’s dedication to actual film stock—​seems a good way to hold two people together, not too close, not too far apart.4 But as I see this projected on the vast screen of the Castro Theater (not a movie-​at-​a-​glance on a small hand-​held gadget), I become aware that struggling to follow the

3  The shooting script dictated, in fact, additional voice-​over narration that would follow Doc and Shasta’s dialogue: a superb bit of Pynchonesque, almost-​Joycean prose streaming through the freeway traffic and surface streets of Los Angeles. But Anderson must have judged its literary weight excessive. 4  While VistaVision is now rarely used, and mostly for certain special effects, its primary connotations for the film buff would be 1950s Hollywood—​H itchcock or maybe Jerry Lewis might have been on Anderson’s mind. This choice must be considered also formally: classical Academy ratio, almost unthinkable in feature fiction films today,



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facial nuances of each, but both together, may be like trying to read two paragraphs simultaneously, or even like trying to grasp, at one and the same time, the absorptive effects of perspectival illusion and a pictorial surface geometry for what it is—​just a graphic surface. Recognizing that such things cannot be achieved at once is as good as appreciating the incongruity between seeing and knowing. Such recognition, that this book has traced as a cinematic experience, proclaims a truth of the face: its Möbius slippage of inner and outer, its equivocal visuality, its nudity bound up with its reticence. I see it now as a form of beauty predicated, in this final shot, not on the singular but on the two together. And so I do not select or force them apart. I hold them together in my attention, but let it waver—​or tremble, as Barthes would say—​between states of being: as persons, as images. It is a way of knowing that need not fix and possess its objects. Close as the shot may be, it is deliberately composed to refract the look: no windshield separates them from us; we have been let inside their space; the camera is suspended just about where the rear-​v iew mirror would be. The variable lights alternate between warm yellows and a few brighter flashes, simulating reflections through that rear-​v iew mirror and prompting subtle shifts of Phoenix’s glance. The upper part of his face then catches the brighter lights which sharpen his features and focalize especially his right eye. Appearing in these instances to glance at the mirror, his look achieves unique clarity—​it is in fact directed straight at the camera. The entire configuration—​looking outward at the foggy world, glancing back (and as if also in time) through the rear-view mirror, which is also the invisible zone of the camera, and thereby, with all due mediation, offering us his look as at once absorbed and reflective—​a ll this is probably as good an allegory of cinema, and of being together, as can be. Their togetherness is palpable and the two-​shot inhabits it very well. It reminds us that we are, ultimately, outside of them, which is how we can see them contained, and content, together—​a feeling underscored by the paucity of movement, the lack of gesticulation, the relaxed features, the leisurely duration of the shot. This is not about “emoting,” or expressing oneself, or identifying. It is rather an inspired instance of the cinema conveying, in a disposition and an image, how people are still themselves when they are together; how they are themselves even when they dissimulate; and therefore how they can still be themselves in front of a camera, and in a fiction film. This is why, when they talk about being together—​about their past extending into the present, and even as they gesture toward a future—​t hey agree to call it: “This don’t mean we’re back together,” and project motivation outward, as it were, to Sortilège or her Ouija board. One gathers that even their respective human limits tweak their enchantment: their mutuality is based on some such cultivated understanding, taking turns for the upper hand and not putting all their cards on the table; agreeing to maintain a certain duplicity that nurtures their dedication. Does he suspect that she knows better and is playing along—​since “love’s best habit

would dictate much tighter framing of the two-​shot, even to the point of discomfort—​u nless further removed, or else resolved in a kiss that, effectively, joins two bodies as one. A wider aspect, like Cinemascope or some contemporary equivalents, could easily tear two figures apart. Yet one recalls André Bazin’s striking observation in his review of Edgar Morin’s The Stars—​“Le ‘Star-​s ystem’ est toujours vivant,” France Observateur 377 (August 1, 1957)—​t hat Cinemascope may well serve to rediscover the close-​up after its relative decline in the 1940s: “it is not the décor or the landscape that will be the essential beneficiary of Cinemascope but the actor, and in particular the actor in closer shots.”

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is in seeming trust”—​or that she might know how to play such games and know what they mean even better than he does?5 It suffices that they are in agreement on this point—​t heir faces say as much, and no more. The autonomy that they now reclaim is also their separateness from their own narrator, as from their filmmaker—​to whom they have lent their bodies, their persons, their faces, for the duration. And while they need not “make faces” and need do nothing-​in-​particular, while their countances seem open and available, we find ourselves at the limit, the inaccessible plane of the image that has now run its course. We cannot fathom more, but only what has been entrusted to this situation of the two-​shot close-​up: a minimal but sufficient figure of commonality. It cannot be for one face alone. July 2015, San Francisco

5  The phrase is from Shakespeare’s incomparable Sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she is made of truth,/​I do believe her, though I know she lies… .”



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INDEX

OF NAMES AND TITLES

Films and artwork titles given in the language by which they are best known in this country. Page numbers in bold refer to figures. Abrams, M.H., 177n34 Adorno, Theodor W., 251n38 Agamben, Giorgio, 211–​12, 212n31 Amanti celebri (Celebrity Lovers, Bolognini), 187 American in Paris, An (Minnelli), 132n71, 138 “Ancient Torso of Apollo” (Rilke), 32n11 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 266, 266–​67, 268–​69, 269nn3–​4 Andrew, Dudley, 78n95, 84n3, 85n5, 86n7, 236n12, 238nn18–​19 Andrews, Dana, 77 Angelico, Fra, 56–​57, 56, 229 Angell, Callie, 181, 213, 213n32, 226n50 Anges du péché, Les (The Angels of Sin, Bresson), 232 Ann Buchanan Screen Test (Warhol), 24, 64–​65, 65, 65n73 Annunciation with Saint Peter Martyr (Fra Angelico) 56–​57, 56, 229–​30 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 25, 179, 181–​9 9, 193, 207, 213, 225–​2 6, 232 Antonioni su Antonioni (Antonioni on Antonioni, di Carlo), 192n13, 193 Artaud, Antonin, 143, 143n1 Astaire, Fred, 131–​32, 131, 134, 136–​37, 136 Astruc, Alexandre, 236–​37, 239 Attempted Suicide (Antonioni), 183–​8 4, 183, 185 Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson), 231n5, 249n35, 254n42, 257n46, 258–​65, 258–​60, 260n47, 263, 262–​63nn49–​52 Audrey Hepburn (Avedon), 139

Auerbach, Erich, 5, 47 Aumont, Jacques, 9, 22, 23, 34, 34n16, 39–​41, 40nn31–​32, 64, 64n71, 68–​69, 68n77, 75, 78, 153n14, 199–​2 00 Avatar (Cameron), 14 Avedon and Astaire on the set of Funny Face (Seymour), 131 Avedon, Richard, 131–​3 4, 131, 132nn72–​73, 133, 134n77, 135, 139, 139, 200n22 Bad and the Beautiful, The (Minnelli), 181 Balázs, Béla, 3, 11, 23, 28–​35, 40–​43, 40n32, 43n38, 59, 62n69, 65, 69, 104, 144 Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard (Hals), 91 Barasch, Moshe, 62, 64 Barrault, Jean-​L ouis, 83, 103, 127–​28, 128 Barthes, Roland, 24, 38–​39, 39n27, 69–​70, 70n80, 74, 81–​111, 84n3, 86n7, 99nn23–​2 4, 117, 120–34, 122nn53–​55, 124n58, 127n63, 134n76, 137–​42, 141n85, 145, 181, 187, 194, 206, 208, 232, 270 on Avedon’s photography, 132–​3 4, 132n72 on Dutch portraiture, 90–​94, 91, 92, 93n14, 207 on the Folies Bergère, 95–​98, 96 on Garbo’s face, 74, 83–​8 4, 106–​10, 108, 109n38, 123, 124–​29, 125, 208 on Studio Harcourt portraiture, 102–​5, 102n29, 103, 104n32 on Valentino’s face, 105–​10, 107, 122, 124, 126, 208

274

Barthes, Roland (Cont.) on Warhol, 209–​12, 210n29, 211n30, 212n31, 218n38, 219n39, 220, 226 on wrestling, 94, 95 Bataille, Georges, 6n6, 89, 90 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 44–​45, 45, 52n53 Baudry, Jean-​L ouis, 49 Bazin, André, 3, 9–​10, 10n11, 21, 21n25, 25, 59, 59n64, 75, 77–​78, 79n95, 84, 84n3, 86n7, 117, 117n50, 142, 173, 175, 205, 205n27, 210, 210n29, 269–​70n4 on Bresson, 228–​51, 233, 233n9, 236n13, 237n14, 238n16, 238n18, 239n21, 242n26, 243, 243n27, 246n30, 257, 261 Beckett, Samuel, 180, 226 Bellissima (Visconti), 181, 181n2 Bellour, Raymond, 85n5, 146–​47n5, 153n13 Belting, Hans, 10, 111, 111n40, 173n31 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 8–​9, 32n11, 33, 61, 74, 129–​30, 129–​30nn69–​70, 141, 222–​23, 222–23n44, 225, 246n30, 248n34 Bergman, Ingmar, 14n19, 42n37 Bergman, Ingrid, 74–75, 75n90, 75, 77, 149 Bergson, Henri, 28, 28n2, 40 Bernanos, Georges, 237–​38, 238n16, 243–​4 4, 243, 247, 247n31 Bertetto, Paolo, 6n7 Bertillon, Alphonse, 155n15, 164, 165, 168 Best Years of Our Lives, The (Wyler), 77 Bible, The (Huston), 187, 188 Big Sleep, The (Hawks), 268 Big Swallow, The (Williamson), 53, 53, 70 Bloom, Harold, 235 Blow Job (Warhol), 25, 202n24, 223–​25, 224, 224n47 Blow-​Up (Antonioni), 186 Blue Liz as Cleopatra (Warhol), 219, 220 Boese, Carl, 16 Bogart, Humphrey, 77–​78, 78, 205n27, 267 Bois, Yve-​A lain, 114 Bolognini, Mauro, 187 Bonitzer, Pascal, 156, 156n16, 231n5 Bordwell, David, 47n45, 52–​53nn53–​55, 53, 68 Boucher, François, 72–73 Boyhood (Linklater), 206 Brando, Marlon, 83 Brenez, Nicole, 5n5 Bresson, Robert, 23, 25–​2 6, 142n87, 160, 179, 228–​65, 231–​33n5–​9, 233, 238nn16–​18, 240n23, 243, 246, 248n33, 249–​250, 254n42, 257n46, 258–​2 60, 260n47, 262–​63nn49–​52, 263. See also by film titles Breton, André, 239n21

•

274     Index

Buchanan, Ann. See Ann Buchanan Screen Test Buchloh, Benjamin, 139, 200, 200n22 Bukatman, Scott, 15n22 Burch, Noël, 55n57 Burson, Nancy, 152n11 Bursztyn, Igal, 5n5 Cahiers du cinéma, Bresson-​Dreyer mirroring layout, 233 Cahiers du cinéma, Diary of a Country Priest film still, 243 Calvino, Italo, 75, 75n90 Cameron, James, 14, 15 Capote, Truman, 203–​4, 204n26 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 48n47 Carné, Marcel, 128, 128 Carter, Erica, 28–​30, 28n1, 29n4, 30n6 Casetti, Francesco, 33n13 Cassavetes, John, 59n64, 60n66 Cavell, Stanley, 142n87, 188, 197, 197n16, 225, 269 Cézanne, Paul, 10, 40n31, 225 Chandler, James, 68n76 Chaplin, Charles, 108, 109, 120, 124, 126, 145, 225 Charcot, Jean-​Martin, 18, 18n23, 19 Chardin, Jean-​Baptiste-​Siméon, 254 Chatman, Seymour, 186n8, 197n17 Cheat, The (DeMille), 38n25 Chelsea Girls, The (Warhol), 212 Cheng, Joyce, 114n45 Chion, Michel, 69 Christ, 6, 7, 11, 39n28, 172–​73, 251, 252–​5 4, 252n40, 255 City Lights (Chaplin), 120 Coates, Paul, 14n19 Cooper, Gary, 77 Cowichan Swihwé mask, 117 Cramer, Michael, 59n63 Criminal identification card (New York State Bertillon Bureau), 165 Crimp, Douglas, 203n25, 224n47 Cronenberg, David, 14, 15 Crow, Thomas, 200–​3, 218n38, 219n40 Crown Fountain digital public sculpture (Plensa), 12 Cukor, George, 127 Culler, Jonathan, 177n34 Daguerreotype portrait of Andrew Jackson, 8 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 71n82 Dark Passage (Daves), 78–​79, 78 Daves, Delmer, 78, 78 Davis, Therese, 14n20 Dayan, Daniel, 152

  275

de Duve, Thierry, 39, 77n93, 265n54 De Laurentiis, Dino, 25, 182, 184–​85, 186–​87, 188 de Man, Paul, 70, 70n81 de Ribera, José, 63n70 De Sica, Vittorio, 139–​4 0, 140, 142n87 Dead Christ with Angels, The (Manet), 252–​5 4, 255 Dead Ringers (Cronenberg), 14, 15, 206 della Francesca, Piero, 48n47 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 13, 22, 23, 32n11, 40–​43, 40n33, 42n37, 57, 161n20, 178 Delluc, Louis, 34, 120 Depp, Johnny, 109n37 Derrida, Jacques, 35n18, 244n29 Descartes, René, 97, 163 di Carlo, Carlo, 184, 193, 199 Diary of a Country Priest (Bernanos), 237–8, 238n16, 243–44, 243, 243n27, 247, 247n31 Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson), 25, 228–​51, 233, 240n23, 243, 246, 249–​250, 257 Didi-​Huberman, Georges, 18, 56–​57, 118, 120, 219n39, 229, 246–​47n30, 248, 248n34 Dietrich, Marlene, 71–​73, 72–​73, 72n85, 174 Doane, Mary Ann, 23, 35, 38n25, 39, 39n30, 62n69, 71–​72 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian), 15, 17 Doe Avedon (Avedon), 135 Dolan, Frederick, 148–​49 Donen, Stanley, 24, 131–​32, 134, 136–​39, 136–​37 Dorian Leigh with bicycle racer (Avedon), 135 Dovima, 134, 134n77 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 47–​4 8, 48 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 11, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 52–​65, 52–​55nn53–​57, 58, 59n62, 59n64, 60n66, 62n68–​69, 64, 71, 72, 168, 229, 233–​35, 233, 233n9, 241, 242, 250, 250 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume, 15, 19, 65, 65n73, 66 Earth (Dovzhenko), 47–​4 8, 48 Eckhart, Meister, 211 Edie Sedgwick Screen Tests (Warhol), 226, 226n50 Egyptian mummy portrait, 7 8½ (Fellini), 186 Eisenstein, Sergei, 23, 39, 40–​52, 42–​43nn37–​38, 44n40, 45–​4 6, 51, 52n53, 62n69, 76, 86, 117, 117n50, 120, 121, 156, 211 Ekhardt, Phillip, 32n11 Empire (Warhol), 203n25, 224n47 Epstein, Jean, 23, 23n26, 34–​4 0, 34n17, 36n21, 37n22, 38n25, 43, 59, 70 Europa 51 (Rossellini), 74, 75, 150n10 Ex Machina (Garland), 18 Eyes Without a Face (Franju), 79, 79

Face (Warhol), 181, 192, 203–​9, 204, 212, 213, 215, 219n39, Face/​Off (Woo), 14 Falconetti, Renée Jeanne, 55, 57, 61, 62, 62n68, 63, 64, 64, 72, 144n2, 234, 250 Farber, Manny, 171, 171n29, 172 Fellini, Federico, 134n76, 186, 194 “Figure humaine” (Bataille), 89, 90 Flynn, Catherine, 262n50 Folies Bergère (Gaston Paris), 96 Fonda, Henry, 77, 143, 144, 144n2, 147–​4 8, 153–​58, 156, 160–​63, 162, 169–​76, 169–70, 171–72nn29–​30, 172, 174, 178–​79 Fonda, Jane, 137, 138, 138n78, 150 Ford, John, 171n29 Foster, Hal, 226 Four Stars (Warhol), 212 Franju, Georges, 79, 79, 89n13, 116n48 Frankenstein, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 244n29 Fried, Michael, 2, 51n52, 252, 254, 254n43, 257 Friel, Patrick, 213 Funny Face (Donen), 24, 131–​32, 131, 134, 134n77, 136–​39, 136–​37, 190 Fuss, Diana, 36n20 Galton, Francis, 164–​6 6, 166, 171 Garbo, Greta, 24, 74, 77, 83–​8 4, 90, 97, 97n18, 106–​110, 108, 122–​27, 123, 125, 129–​31, 138n80, 142, 145, 194, 195–​96, 208 Garbo’s last screen test (Wong Howe), 195 Gell, Alfred, 37, 37n24, 85n4 General Line, The/​The Old and the New (Eisenstein), 46, 46 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini), 21, 21n25, 75 Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) (Picasso), 255–​56, 156 Godard, Jean-​Luc, 24, 49n50, 64, 64, 137–​38, 138, 138n78, 142, 143–​51, 143n1, 149–​50nn8–​9, 156, 161, 162–​63, 171, 172, 175, 232, 262, 263n52, 268, 268n1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 29–​30, 30n6, 41 Goffman, Ervin, 159, 168, Golem, The, 15, 16 Gorin, Jean-​Pierre, 137–​38, 138, 138n78, 150n9 Grebo mask, 115 Griffith, D. W., 42, 44 Grundmann, Roy, 202, 223–​2 4 Guattari, Félix, 13, 32, 41–​42 Guitare/​Maquette for Guitar (Picasso), 114–​16, 115, 255 Gunning, Tom, 26, 26n28, 39n27, 51n52, 62n69, 102, 152, 167–​68, 171n29

•

Index       275

276

Hadrian (Augustus) profile on Roman imperial coin, 7 Hals, Franz, 91, 119 Hansen, Miriam, 9, 61, 85n5, 108, 129, 130n70, 222–​23n43, 225n49 Harcourt, Studio, 85, 102–​5, 103, 104n32 Harris, Richard, 187 Hawks, Howard, 268, 268n1 Hayakawa, Sessue, 38n25 Hepburn, Audrey, 24, 83, 129–​32, 132n72, 134–​39, 136–​37, 134n77, 138n80, 139, 139n81, 208 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 175 Hitchcock, Alfred, 23, 24–​25, 116n48, 143–​63, 143n1, 144, 149nn7–​8, 150n10, 153n13, 155–​57, 159, 161n20, 162, 168–​79, 168n26, 169n27, 169–70, 171n29, 172, 174, 176, 177n33, 178, 178n36, 269. See also by film titles Howard, Richard, 129, 210n28 Huston, John, 187, 188 Hysterical Yawning (Londe), 19 I tre volti (Three Faces of a Woman, De Laurentiis), 182, 184, 186–​88, 192, 196, 199 Iberian sculpture of a female head, 113 Iconoclastic cross in Hagia Irene (Gryffindor), 253 Identification of a Woman (Antonioni), 182 Il grido (Antonioni), 182 Il provino/​Prefazione (The Screen Test/​Preface, Antonioni) 25, 182–​9 9, 182n5, 183, 189–​93, 195–​96, 197n17, 198, 213, 225–​2 6 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 26n28 Indovina, Franco, 184, 187 Inherent Vice (Anderson), 266–​71, 266–​67 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (Galton), 166 Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein), 44n40, 47, 51, 121 Jacobsen, Lis, 58 James, David, 221 Jarman, Derek, 251n38 Johnson, Chuck, 268 Kahnweiler, Daniel-​Henry, 114, 114n45 Karina, Anna, 24, 64, 64, 267 Keaton, Buster, 120, 124 Keller, Sarah, 34n17 Kerbel, Michael, 150n10 Kiss (Warhol), 267 Koch, Gertrud, 28–​29, 33, 77n93, 251n38 Koch, Stephen, 221–​22, 222n43

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276     Index

Koepnick, Lutz, 72 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 146–​47, 146–​47n5, 252n40 Kracauer, Siegfried, 33 Krauss, Rosalind, 130 Kuleshov, Lev, 31, 31n8, 41, 120, 152, 153, 157, 158, 160, 160nn18–​19, 161, 163, 225n48, 257 Kwakiutl Dzonokwa mask, 118 La Chinoise (Godard), 263n52 La dolce vita (Fellini), 134n76, 186 La Hardiesse (Boldness, Le Brun), 164 La notte (Antonioni), 187 La strega bruciata viva (The Witch Burnt Alive, Visconti), 187 La terra trema (Visconti), 75–​76, 75, 181n2 La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth As Seen from the Moon, Pasolini), 187, 187n9 L’amore (Rossellini), 192n12 Le Tempestaire (Epstein), 36 Lacan, Jacques, 33, 62n69, 156n16, 169n27 Ladmiral, Nicole, 241–​43, 233, 243, 248n33 L’Ange Blanc (White Angel, Lipnitzki), 95 Laydu, Claude, 233, 242–​43, 243 Lajer-​Burcharth, Ewa, 72–73 Lang, Fritz, 16, 171n29 Lant, Antonia, 116n49, 123 Lastra, James, 166–​67 Latin Lover (Indovina), 187 Latour, Bruno, 252n40 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 29–​30, 30n6, 31, 41, 164 Lavers, Annette, 107n35, 129 L’avventura (Antonioni), 182, 187 Le Brun, Charles, 163–​6 4, 164 Le Plus vieux métier du monde (The Oldest Profession), 186 Le Prat, Thérèse, 104n32 Le streghe (The Witches, De Laurentiis), 186–​87 L’eclisse (Antonioni), 188 Leone, Sergio, 171 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, Bresson), 232, 235, 246–​47n30 Les Enfants du Paradis (Carné), 127–​28, 128 Letter to Jane: an Investigation about a Still (Godard&Gorin), 137–​38, 138, 138n78, 150n9 Lévy-​Bruhl, Lucien, 41 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude, 84, 112, 116, 117–​18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 10, 10n12, 13, 13n16, 88, 146, 146–​47n5, 175, 265, Lewin, Bertram, 49, 49n50 Lewis, Jerry, 15, 15n22, 17 Liebman, Stuart, 34n17, 36n21

  277

Linklater, Richard, 206 Lombroso, Cesare, 164 Londe, Albert, 19 Longhi, Roberto, 48n47 Love in the City (Zavattini), 183, 186 Lubitsch, Ernst, 127 Magnani, Anna, 74, 181, 181n2 Mailer, Norman, 216 Malevich, Kasimir, 251n38 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 251 Mamoulian, Rouben, 15, 17, 108, 108, 194, 196 Man Escaped, A (Bresson), 238n18, 261 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Hitchcock), 178n36 Manet, Edouard, 252–​55, 254–​55, 254n43 Mangano, Silvana, 187 Margulies, Ivone, 184 Marilyn Diptych (Warhol), 199–​2 03, 201 Marilyn Monroe, actress, (Avedon), 133 Marion, Jean-​Luc, 10, 10n13 Marks, Laura U., 116n49 Marnie (Hitchcock), 149 Mars Needs Moms (Wells), 20, 20 Mauss, Marcel, 93–​94, 198, 198n18, 211n30 May Irwin Kiss, The (Heise/​Edison), 267 McElhaney, Joe, 75n90, 149, 149n8 Medusa, 3, 111, 111n41 Meltzer, Françoise, 62, 62n68 Melville, Jean-​Pierre, 232 Memling, Hans, 7 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 40n31 Merry Peasant, The (van Ostade), 92 Metropolis (Lang), 16 Metz, Christian, 37n23 Michelson, Annette, 47, 150n9, 225n48 Miles, Vera, 144, 150n10, 162, 176–​78, 176, Minnelli, Vincente, 132n71, 181 Mitchell and Kenyon factory gate films, 26, 26n28 Mitchell, W. J. T., 251n38 Modern Times (Chaplin), 225 Monroe, Marilyn, 133, 133, 190, 199, 200–​3, 201, 209–​10, 217, 219 Montaigne, Michel de, 262n50 Moore, Rachel O., 37n22 Morgan, Daniel, 97n19, 150n9, 175, 197n16, 224n47 Moriarty, Michael, 83n1, 94n16 Morin, Edgar, 84–​85, 84–​85n3, 86n7, 199, 199n20, 269–​70n4 Moses with the Tablets of the Law (Rembrandt), 146–​47, 147 Mosjukhin, Ivan, 31, 160n18, 161

Mouchette (Bresson), 240, 249, 260n47, 261 Mulvey, Laura, 72n84, 85n5, 124n58 Mukarovsky, Jan, 47n45 Musser, Charles, 167 My Hustler (Warhol), 214n34 Naftalis, Sarah, 138, 138n79 Nagel, Alexander, 246–​47n30 Nancy, Jean-​Luc, 4–​5 Naremore, James, 72n85, 2n1 Ninotchka (Lubitsch), 127 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 174 Notorious (Hitchcock), 75n90, 149, 149n8 Novak, Kim, 150n10, 177 Nutty Professor, The (Lewis), 15, 17 October (Eisenstein), 47 Oedipus Rex (Pasolini), 187 Old and the New, The/​The General Line (Eisenstein), 46, 46 Olympia (Manet), 252–​53, 254 Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone), 171n29 One A.M. (Chaplin), 120 Orlan, 15, 17 Ostade, Adriaen van, 91, 92 Oudart, Jean-​Pierre, 257, 257n46 Outer and Inner Space (Warhol), 25, 181, 205, 207, 212–​22, 213n32, 214, 214n34, 218, 219n39, 223, 224 Panofsky, Erwin, 33n13 Paradine Case, The (Hitchcock), 151 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 48n47, 141, 187, 187n9, 263n52 Passenger, The (Antonioni), 182 Passi, Federico, 12 Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), 23, 24, 27, 30, 52–63, 52–​56nn53–​58, 54–​55, 58, 59nn62–​6 4, 60n66, 62nn68–​69, 64, 71, 168, 233, 233, 234–​35, 250, 250 Passions, The/​The Quintet of the Astonished (Viola), 15, 18 Perez, Gilberto, 47 Persona (Bergman), 14n19, 42n37 Philipe, Gérard, 83, 103, 127 Phoenix, Joaquin, 266–​67, 267, 270 Photographing a Female Crook (Weed/​A merican Mutoscope&Biograph) 167–​68, 167n23, 168 Picasso, Pablo, 112–​16, 113, 114nn44–​45, 114n47, 115, 116n49, 120, 155n15, 255–​56, 256 Pickpocket (Bresson), 261 Pierrot le fou (Godard), 268

•

Index       277

278

Pietz, William, 126n60 Pigsty (Pasolini), 263n52 Pipolo, Tony, 232n6, 233n9, 246–​47n30, 262n49 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 51 Pitassio, Francesco, 11n15 Plantinga, Carl, 2n1 Plato, 97, 97n19, 108, 129, 143, 146, 150n9, 212 Plensa, Jaume, 12 Pompadour, Marquise de, 72–73 Poor Little Rich Girl (Warhol), 181 Porena, Rita, 196–​9 7, 197n16 Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (Hals), 119 Portrait of Maria van Strijp (Verspronck), 92 Portrait of the Actress Maria Yermolova (Serov), 45–​4 6, 46 Pound, Ezra, 26n28 Prefazione/​I l provino (Preface/​The Screen Test, Antonioni). See Il provino Price, Brian, 231n5, 232n7, 260n47 Psycho (Hitchcock), 177n33 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 31, 160, 161 Pynchon, Thomas, 266, 269n3 Quaresima, Leonardo, 3, 3n3, 30n6 Quayle, Anthony, 177n33, 178 Que Viva Mexico! (Eisenstein), 50, 51 Queen Christina (Mamoulian), 108, 108, 109, 110, 194, 196 Quintet of the Astonished, The/​The Passions (Viola), 15, 18 Rastier, François, 86–​88 Red Desert (Antonioni), 186–​87 Reformation iconoclasm, Utrecht Cathedral (Arktos), 252 Rembrandt, van Rijn, 145, 145n4, 146–​47, 147 Rhie, Bernard J., 93n14 Ricciardi, Alessia, 186n8 Riegl, Alois, 93n14 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 32n11 Rimbaud, Arthur, 251 Rivette, Jacques, 232 Robbe-​Grillet, Alain, 256 Rodowick, D. N., 5n5 Rossellini, Roberto, 21, 36n21, 75, 76, 150n10, 192n12 Rowlands, Gina, 59n64 Ruskin, John, 11n14 Saint Matthew writing, Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne (Bourdichon), 245 Saint Veronica (Memling), 7

•

278     Index

Salazkina, Masha, 41n34 Salt, Barry, 68, 68n74, 71 Samocki, Jean-​Marie, 14n21 Sanda, Dominique, 240n23 Sander, August, 98, 98n22 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 86n7 Scarlet Empress, The (Sternberg), 71, 71 Schamus, James, 55, 55n57, 59n62, 62, 62n69 Schapiro, Meyer, 216n35, 244n28 Schrader, Paul, 232n7, 233 Screen Tests (Warhol series), 25, 181–​82, 203n25, 222–​23nn42–​43, 223, 225, 226 Sedgwick, Edie, 181, 181n3, 203–​8, 204, 204n26, 211–​22, 214, 216n36, 218, 226, 226n50, 266 Sekula, Allan, 152, 152n11, 164, 165n21 Self-​Portrait with Skull (Warhol), 119 Serov, Valentin, 45–​4 6, 46 Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), 151 Shakespeare, William, 150, 271n5 Shanghai Express (Sternberg), 71–​72, 72 Sheik, The (Melford), 107 Siamo donne (We, the Women, Guarini), 186 Simmel, Georg, 6, 28, 28n1, 42, 104 Sitney, P. Adams, 238n17, 246–​47n30, 260, 264n53 Sleep (Warhol), 203n25, 215 Snow, Michael, 214n34 Sodelholm, James, 71 Somaini, Antonio, 33, 33n14, 40n32, 117n50 Sommer, Giorgio, 36n21 Sontag, Susan, 230, 232n7, 233 Soraya, Princess (Esfandiary-​Bakhtiari), 25, 182–85, 182n4, 183, 187–​9 9, 189–​93, 195–96, 198, 225–​2 6 Sordi, Alberto, 187 Spagnoletti, Giovanni, 240n23 Stein, Gertrude, 112–​13, 113, 114n44 Sternberg, Josef von, 71–​73, 71–​72 Stewart, James, 177, 178n36, 178 Stewart, Susan, 10n12 Stromboli (Rossellini), 36n21 Subject for the Rogues’ Gallery, A (Weed/​A merican Mutoscope&Biograph), 167, 167n23 Successful Operation (Orlan), 17 Suchenski, Richard, 60n66 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 74 Suspicion (Hitchcock), 151 Swanson, Gloria, 74 Swedish Sphinx, The (Bull), 123 Tan, Ed S., 2n1 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 11

  279

Taussig, Michael, 13 Taylor, Elizabeth, 219, 219n40, 220 Tecnicamente dolce (Technically Sweet, Antonioni), 186, 186n8 Teorema (Pasolini), 187, 263n52 Terminator 2 (Cameron), 14, 15 “Then Came Garbo” (Vanity Fair), 125 Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 223 To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock), 149 Toffetti, Sergio, 240 Trial of Joan of Arc, The (Bresson), 233n9, 235, 257 Truffaut, François, 77, 236n13 Tsivian, Yuri, 44, 44n40, 47, 48, 48n48, 160, Turkin, Valentin, 120 Turner, Victor, 36–​37, 37n22, Turvey, Malcolm, 23n26 Two-​Faced Woman (Cukor), 127 Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard), 49n50 Tybjerg, Casper, 52n53, 58 Ubl, Ralph, 63n70, 222n43, 252n41 Umberto D. (De Sica), 139, 140 Under the Skin (Glazer), 18 Valentino, Rudolph, 105–​10, 107, 122, 124, 126, 208 Vanitas portrait of a lady (Peeters), 205 Varda, Agnès, 104n32 Veidt, Conrad, 120 Verspronck, Johannes Cornelisz, 91, 92 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 116n48, 149, 150, 150n10, 172, 175, 177, 178, 178, 178n36 Vienna (Passi), 12 Vinyl (Warhol), 214n34 Viola, Bill, 15, 18 Visconti, Luchino, 75–​76, 75, 181, 181n2, 187

Vitti, Monica, 182n4, 186, 194 Vivre sa vie (Her Life to Live, Godard), 64, 64 Wagner, Anne, 202–​3 Warburg, Aby, 97 Warhol, Andy, 24, 25, 32n12, 64–​65, 65, 119, 132, 138n78, 179, 180–​82, 187, 192, 199–​227, 201, 202–​4nn24–​2 6, 204, 214, 214n34, 218, 220, 222–​2 3nn42– ​43, 224, 227n53, 258, 266, 267. See also by work titles Waterson, Katherine, 266, 267 Watts, Philip, 85n5 Wavelength (Snow), 214n34 Wegener, Paul, 15, 16 Weiner, Susan, 84–​85n3 Welles, Orson, 75–​76 Wells, Simon, 20, 20 Whale, James, 16 Wiazemsky, Anne, 258, 260, 263, 263, 263n52 Wild, Jennifer, 114n47, 239n21 Wilder, Billy, 74, Willis, Artemis, 111n41 Wind from the East (Godard), 263 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 93n14 Woo, John, 14 Wood, Christopher, 246–​47n30, 256n45 Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock), 23, 24, 143–63, 144, 149n7, 150n10, 155–57, 159, 162, 169–79, 169–70, 171n29, 172, 174, 176, 177n33, 178n36, 206, 223 Wyler, William, 77 Yampolsky, Mikhail, 120, 160n19 You Only Live Once (Lang), 171n29 Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford), 171n29 Zavattini, Cesare, 183, 184 Žižek, Slavoj, 62n69, 169, 169n27 Zola, Emile, 256

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