Activity: Talks and presentations › Talk or oral contribution › Other
Description
One reigning paradigm for discussions of faces in philosophy of film, especially since Gilles Deleuze’s two books on cinema, is their affective power and their technical aspect of being filmed at close range: the close-up. In this talk I discuss aspects of what faces can and cannot do once they’ve become part of a cinematic work of art. Against Deleuze, I propose to differentiate between objects in close-up and the filmic version of human faces which I examine by introducing the technical terms ‚film-faces‘ and ‚film-masks‘.
The talk considers contributions by Jacques Aumont, Bela Balász, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a number of film scholars working on early cinema (Jonathan Auerbach, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning and Frank Kessler).