The Face on Film

Buch | Softcover

296 Seiten

2017
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-986316-7 (ISBN)

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The human face was said to have been rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures, in which it was often viewed as expressive locus, as figure, and even as essence of the cinema. But how has this modern, technological, mass-circulating medium revealed the face in ways that are also distinct from any other? How has it altered our perception of this quintessential incarnation of the person? The archaic powers of masks and icons, the fashioning of the individual in the humanist portrait, the modernist anxieties of fragmentation and de-figuration--these are among the cultural precedents informing our experience in the movie theatre. Yet the moving, time-based image also offers radical new confrontations with the face: Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Donen's Funny Face, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, Bresson's Au hazard, Balthazar, Antonioni's Screen Test, Warhol's filmic portraits of celebrity and anonymity. Such intense encounters, examined in this book, manifest a desire for transparency and plenitude, but--especially in post-classical cinema--also betray a profound ambiguity that haunts the human countenance, confronting interiority as opacity, treading the gap between image and language. The spectacular impact of the cinematic face is uncannily intertwined with a reticence, an ineffability; but is it not for this very reason that--like faces in the world--it still enthralls us?

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

CHAPTER ONE: WE HAD FACES, THEN; CHAPTER TWO: ROLAND BARTHES LOOKS AT THE STARS; CHAPTER THREE: FACE-TO-FACE (WITH THE WRONG MAN); CHAPTER FOUR: PASS/FAIL: SCREEN TEST, APPARATUS, SUBJECT; SITTING FOR THE PORTRAIT IS THE PORTRAIT; CHAPTER FIVE: IN RETICENCE (BRESSON); POSTFACE: THE TWO-SHOT

Erscheinungsdatum	11.03.2017
Zusatzinfo	193 screenshots
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	251 x 178 mm
Gewicht	612 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-986316-4 / 0199863164
ISBN-13	978-0-19-986316-7 / 9780199863167
Zustand	Neuware