Screening the Face
Also by Paul Coates CINEMA AND COLOUR: THE SATURATED IMAGE CINEMA, RELIGION AND THE ROMANTIC LEGACY THE DOUBLE AND THE OTHER: IDENTITY AS IDEOLOGY IN POST-ROMANTIC FICTION FILM AT THE INTERSECTION OF HIGH AND MASS CULTURE THE GORGON S GAZE: GERMAN CINEMA, EXPRESSIONISM AND THE IMAGE OF HORROR IDENTYCZNOŚĆ I NIEIDENTYCZNOŚĆ W TWÓRCZOŚCI BOLESŁAWA LEŚMIANA LUCID DREAMS: THE FILMS OF KRZYSZTOF KIEŚLOWSKI (ED.) THE REALIST FANTASY: FICTION AND REALITY SINCE CLARISSA THE RED AND THE WHITE: THE CINEMA OF PEOPLE S POLAND THE STORY OF THE LOST REFLECTION: THE ALIENATION OF THE IMAGE IN WESTERN AND POLISH CINEMA WORDS AFTER SPEECH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ROMANTICISM AND SYMBOLISM
Screening the Face Paul Coates University of Western Ontario, Canada
Paul Coates 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33465-0 ISBN 978-1-137-01228-9 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137012289 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 I.1 The face, the mask and the Thing 1 I.2 Reading faces: Word, image and allegory in pre-sound film 14 1 Faces and Faciality 24 1.1 The close-up 24 1.2 Profile or full-face? 29 1.3 A face in the crowd : The young man of Kieślowski s Dekalog 35 1.4 The Passion of Joan of Arc: The documentary of faces 43 1.5 The moment of truth : The face, the close-up, suffering and documentary 46 1.6 Postscript: Kierkegaard and the close-up 53 2 The Fate of Contemplation: Closeness and Distance 56 2.1 Stardom, contradiction and syncretization 56 2.2 The crowd and the star: Benjamin s Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Riefenstahl s Triumph of the Will 67 2.3 Testing and transcendence: Kurosawa s The Idiot (1951) 73 2.4 Forms and functions of veiling 78 2.5 The eyes of Garbo and the face of Garbo 83 3 Masks and Metaphor: Doubles and Animals 89 3.1 Introduction 89 3.2 Visor and visage: The Dark Knight (2008) 91 3.3 Adaptation, dream and mask: Eyes Wide Shut (1999) 94 3.4 The Conversation (1974): De-personalized pronouns 102 3.5 The animal mask 105 3.6 Mirror relationships: Animals and sacrifice in Eisenstein and Renoir 109 3.7 Animals, allegory and the death s head of sin: Greed (1924) and Cat People (1942) 115 v
vi Contents 3.8 The animal mask between fairytale, myth and metaphor: La Belle et la bête 121 3.9 Animals, eyes and masks: Chris Marker s Zone 127 4 Invisibility, Medusa and the Mask 133 4.1 Some introductory theses 133 4.2 Trauma and the invisible 134 4.3 The face of genocide and the unseeable 145 4.4 Medusa and her deconstruction: Dekalog 6 (1989) 148 4.5 The skull beneath the skin: The Face of Another (1966) 152 5 Dissonance and Synthesis: Persona, the Face, the Mask and the Thing 158 5.1 Towards Persona (1966): Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and the meaning of shame 158 5.2 Both sides now: Framing the face in Persona 163 5.3 The human face divine : Face and/as mystery in Persona 166 5.4 Persona mirrored in reality and fiction 176 5.5 Hierarchy and the mask: Two prisons 178 Works Cited 182 Index of Names 188 Index of Themes 194
Acknowledgements An earlier, Polish-language version of part of the second section of the introduction appeared as part of an article entitled 1915 1925: Alegoria, realizm, Mr. Griffith i Mr. Keaton in Kino ma sto lat: dekada po dekadzie, ed. Jan Rek and Elżbieta Ostrowska and published by Łódź University Press (1995). An earlier version of the first section of Chapter 5 was published in Scandinavian-Canadian Studies Vol. 19 (2010), forming part of an article entitled Doubling and Redoubling Bergman: Notes on the Dialectic of Disgrace and Disappearance. vii