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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Noa Steimatsky The Face on Film New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 279
Text.Serial.Journal
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2019-03-01
2021-09-02
2019-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Luisella Farinotti
2019/03/01
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
32
en
Noa Steimatsky The Face on Film New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 279
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16206/16671
19
Noa Steimatsky
The Face on Film
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 279




   ‘A face is a face’. There is nothing simpler and nothing more abstract than
this affirmation which, by attesting to the real, also declares its enigma. There is
something irrefutable and obtuse at the same time in Nanà’s statement in Vivre
sa vie (Godard, 1962), an acknowledgement of the face as the pure evidence of
a phenomenon, lacking any singular quality. Precisely this abstract ‘givenness’,
this mute evidence, is indicative of something based on appearance: a surface
that shows itself and asks to be looked at, that defines the image of the subject
and its recognizable identity, therefore becoming similar to a mask. The face,
in fact, is not only the distinctive trait of an individual, but also the key part
of a performance: the façade of a socially adequate identity, which can be very
different from the truth of the subject. The face’s function lies precisely in
this paradoxical tension between revelation and concealment, evidence and
elusiveness, recognition and indecipherability: it is a familiar yet enigmatic figure,
singular but totally common, seductive and mysterious, the quintessence of the
human and of her expressive qualities but also the index of her transformations,
of the change of the very idea of humanity,
                                    ​​         of which the face — as both sign and
representation — is the most evident trace. The face is considered ‘the soul of
an individual’ precisely because of this ambivalence, its being enigmatic but also
transparent, readable.
   The Face on Film, by Noa Steimatsky, is devoted precisely to this element’s
complexity. It is an elaborate, dense study — winner of the 2018 Limina Prize for
Best International Film Studies Book — and it declares its subject immediately,
in the title: the book is indeed focused on the pivotal role played by cinema
in defining a new visibility and shape of the visage. Within a comprehensive
discussion of this ‘medium of subjectivity’ and of its different depictions —
addressing painting and portraits, scientific and fashion photography, Byzantine
icons and masks, in all their different functions and historically-situated meanings
— Steimatsky analyses the transformation in our way of looking at the human
being, our ability to recognize her, to read and to reproduce her expressiveness
through the moving image. Consistently with Visual Culture Studies, the author
combines historical and anthropological approaches as well as languages and
visual arts, with the aim of defining the configuration but also the mode of the

                                               Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


gaze. Photography and cinema mark an epistemological rupture in the way in
which we represent and experience the human. The animated face, in particular,
constitutes for Steimatsky a face-to-face between the image and the body, and
especially the body of the viewer, who not only recognizes herself in the images
but adheres to it, thus becoming the subject and the bearer of the gaze.
   As the essential ‘Ur-image’, the face is connected to precise frameworks of
visibility and recognition: by equating it to a dispositif, Steimatsky ‘posits the
face as a paradigmatic perceptual “disposition” — a flexible configuration of
attitudes relations and discourses’ (p. 3). More than ‘just an image’, therefore,
the face on film is an aesthetic and perceptual category, which reveals the
alienation of the modern subject from the self. Here this takes the form of an
image that nonetheless refers to a wider technological prison, in which the very
same cinematographic apparatus recomposes and disintegrates the human figure
— but also her truth, which is forcefully or magically captured by the eye of the
camera. The main issue is clearly addressed in the introduction:

  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 (p. 4).

   Film theory of the 1920s, which is retraced in the first part of the volume,
seizes this radical power of a visage that is opened up to a (kind of) vision.
Steimatsky re-examines Epstein, Balázs, Eisenstein’s ‘intensive face’ (p. 41) and
Kuleshov’s experiments in the light of readings by Mary Anne Doane, Jacques
Aumont, Gilles Deleuze and Yuri Tsivian: this reconstruction is as inevitable
as it is attentive, connecting the past and the present, and also testing all those
theories with the transformed social and cultural scenario of today’s cinema
and images. Therefore, by way of example, photogénie is ‘read as a precedent to
the “contemporary schizophrenia of scale”, also acknowledging its “subversive
potentiality”’ (p. 39); and Kuleshov’s experiments as the harbinger of the
surveillance techniques of disciplinary institutions.
   Barthes and Bazin, furthermore, become the main references for a comparison
of construction strategies of the face in Hollywood cinema — the seduction of
the glamour, the mythical incarnation of the stars, the wholeness of meaning that
it delivers, that crystalizes an ideal of the human face — and the anti-glamour
of the anonymous ‘man in general’ (p. 74) of Neorealist cinema. This trust in
the possibility of capturing humanity in a naked, innocent, naturally expressive
face contrasts with the careful ‘shaping’ of Hollywood, a process that Steimatsky
reads as a literal masking. Doing so, she refers to the studies on the mask and its
anthropological and cultural values.
   The most original contribution of the book lies in the analyses that constitute
the second part of the volume. They are all important and insightful readings,
especially those devoted to The Wrong Man (Hitchcock, 1956), and to screen
tests — from two episodes by Antonioni, to Warhol’s eponymous project.
128
                             N. Steimatsky, The Face on Film


These provide quintessential examples of the conditions in which the cinematic
dispositif situates the subject, that thus becomes in some way the prisoner in
a lab experiment. Both cases present the same mechanism of surrender of the
subject to the apparatus, of subjugation within an image:

  The Wrong Man offers the most rigorous dramatization of the subjugation of the
  individual to social and institutional scrutiny, of the thread to identity and its self-
  alienation under the oppressive gaze of all such apparatuses. Finally, the workings of
  cinema itself are insinuated in these measures of defining and containing the persons
  (p. 151).

   Among the several possible variations of the face, Steimatsky privileges two:
the first is the face as a single and singular figure — the single face, alone — for
which the isolation within the frame is already the evidence of attention and
attraction, of privilege and distance; this prominence becomes the scene of
excess and fascination. It is represented in the sensuous and glamorous faces of
stars, where which seduction takes the place of revelation.
   The second figure is the ‘face-to-face’, intended both as a comparison within
the image, such as the shot/counter-shot, and as a relationship between the image
and the spectator. In this mirror-image — a call that it is impossible to refuse — an
echo reverberates of an ancient fascination for the quality of the face to combine
intimacy and subjugation, which makes it the epitome of the cinema experience.
The vis à vis represents also an encounter with the constraints of the mechanical
eye of the cinema, with its powerful, controlling gaze. The reluctance, resistance
to showing, thus become forms of protection and opposition — both of the
subject and of a certain kind of cinema — to this identification apparatus. This
oscillation between resistance and surrender, power and vulnerability, evidence
and opacity convey the subject and her humanity. Beyond the mask, but within
the image.

                                     [Luisella Farinotti, Università IULM, Milano]




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