Faces and "Faciality"
Abstract
The article is a chapter from the book Screening the Face (2012) by Paul Coates. The close-up of a human face is sufficiently important to figure as possibly cinema’s starting point, or default po- sition, enacting a dialectic of modernist bodily fragmentation and nostalgia for the aura of wholeness. The close-up may incarnate film’s suspension between fiction and document, as it is situated both „inside” and „outside” narrative, a near neighbour to the still. It may actors and actresses, but in the same time its privileged status may accompany an intensified directorial subjectivity or control. Referring to the theories of Bela Balazs, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, Siegfried Kracauer, and also analyzing the function of face and faciality in two case studies: Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (the face of mysterious „young man”) and The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Coates tries to find a special role of this face in the crowd (Kieślowski) and a documentary of faces (Dreyer). He also elaborates on the subject of documentary and face’s function as apparent guarantor of truth. Coates closes his essay with reference to the concepts of Søren Kierkegaard and to his category of a special human disposition, the ethical.
- The text is a translation of the first chapter (Faces and “Faciality”) from the book Screening the Face by Paul Coates, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2012. Copyright © Paul Coates and Palgrave Macmillan 2012.
Keywords:
face, close-up, bodyReferences
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Authors
Paul Coateskwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Western Ontario Canada
Profesor filmoznawstwa na University of Western Ontario w Kanadzie. Interesuje się kinem europejskim (przede wszystkim polskim), powiązaniami między literaturą a filmem, kinem dokumentalnym. Wybrane publikacje: The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema (1985), The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (1991), Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (2003), The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (2005), Screening the Face (2012). Redaktor tomu Lucid dreams: the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (1999).
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