New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 2017.
Call No: 747.7 STE
Author: Steimatsky, Noa
Edition: 2017
Place: New York
Publisher: Oxford Univesity Press
PubDate: 2017
PhysDes: 280 p. : illustrated ; 26 cm
Subject: FACE IN FILMS; AU HASARD, BALTHAZAR (FR/SW, Robert Bresson, 1966); ANTONIONI, MICHELANGELO; BARTHES, ROLAND; BAZIN, ANDRE; BENJAMIN, WALTER; BRESSON, ROBERT; EISENSTEIN, SERGEI M.; DREYER, CARL TH.; PROCES DE JEANNE D'ARC (FR, Robert Bresson, 1962); GODARD, JEAN-LUC; HITCHCOCK, ALFRED; SEDGWICK, EDIE; WARHOL, ANDY; OUTER AND INNER SPACE (US, Andy Warhol, 1965); WRONG MAN, THE (US, Alfred Hitchcock, 1957); FUNNY FACE (US, Stanley Donen, 1957)
Notes: 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? -- publisher's web site
ISBN: 9780199863167
Contents: Acknowledgements -- Preface: Face Moving Image -- A Dispositif -- An Ur-Image -- The Face Against the Image -- Itineraries Chapter One: We Had Faces, Then -- Expressivity in the 1920s -- Joan of Arc, Inevitably -- The Face and its Voices -- Glamour/Anti-Glamour Chapter Two: Roland Barthes Looks at the Stars -- Towards “Visages et Figures,” and circa 1953 Excursus on the Face in Language -- Into the Movie Theater -- Ultra-Face Excursus on the Mask -- From Cult to Charm: Funny Face Chapter Three: Face-to-Face (with The Wrong Man) -- What Godard Saw -- What the Clerk Saw Excursus on Anthropometrics -- Not a Mirror, Not a Lamp Chapter Four: Pass/Fail: Screen Test, Apparatus, Subject -- The Antonioni Screen Test Excursus on the Portrait -- Outer and Inner Space, and the Pathos of Time -- Fail Better Chapter Five: In Reticence (Bresson) -- The Epidermal and the Written -- The Image Against the Face -- Not an Open Book, but a Door Ajar -- Postface: The Two-Shot: Inherent
