Table Of ContentFACES ON SCREEN
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FACES ON SCREEN
New Approaches
Edited by Alice Maurice
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial
and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more
information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Alice Maurice, 2022
© the chapters their several authors, 2022
Cover image: Under the Skin (2013) Directed by Jonathan Glazer Shown:
Scarlett Johansson. A24/Photofest
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon
by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 9378 9 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9380 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9381 9 (epub)
The right of Alice Maurice to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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CONtENtS
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction: Facing Forward, Facing Back 1
Alice Maurice
PART I THE SUM OF ITS PARTS: FEATURES, CODES, PRACTICES
1. The Generic Face: Galton, Muybridge and the Photographic
Proof of Race 15
Genevieve Yue
2. Mad Faces: Coding Features and Expressions of Female Madness
in Physiognomy Texts, Asylum Photographs and Early Cinema 30
Elyse Singer
3. Elastics of the Film Mouth 47
Andrea Gyenge
4. The Problem of Recognition: Celebrity Faces, Photogénie and
Facial Recognition Technologies 60
Aaron Tucker
5. Emptied Faces: In Search of an Algorithmic Punctum 75
Stefka Hristova
PART II REFRAMING THE CLOSE-UP
6. ‘A Landscape of Faces’: The Farewell and Ecologies of the Face
in Independent Asian-American Film 93
Iggy Cortez
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CONtENtS
7. The New Transactional Face: Rethinking Post-cinematic Aesthetics
through The Neon Demon 109
Jenny Gunn
8. Black Faces Matter: Close-ups in Selma, Fruitvale Station
and Moonlight 123
Delia Malia Konzett
9. ‘Sheer Epidermis’: ‘Face Politics’ and the Films of Lynne Ramsay 138
Paula Quigley
10. Facing Life in the Open: The (Post)humanist Worldmaking of
My Octopus Teacher 150
Angelica Fenner
11. Bête Noir(e): Animality, Genre and the Face in Border 165
Alice Maurice
12. Hejab as Frame in Ten and Beyond 181
Sara Saljoughi
PART III MAKING FACES: CELEBRITY, PERFORMANCE, SELF
13. The Faces of Ginger: Beauty Makeup, Facial Acting and
Hollywood Stardom 195
Adrienne L. McLean
14. At Face Value: Consuming the Star Image 211
Koel Banerjee
15. The Face is the Lie that Tells the Truth: Renée Zellweger and
the Mediated Politics of Age, Self and Celebrity 223
Brenda R. Weber
16. Mediating the Human in Facial Performance Capture 239
Tanine Allison
17. Becoming a Woman: The Many Faces of Candice Breitz 256
Hannah Parlett
18. The Face as Technology 273
Zara Dinnen and Sam McBean
19. From Holy Grail to Deepfake: The Evolving Digital Face on Screen 288
Lisa Bode
References 303
Index 322
vi
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FiguRES
1.1 Francis Galton, ‘The Jewish Type’ 18
1.2 Francis Galton, ‘Conventional Representation of the Horse in
Motion’ 20
2.1 The hair of a madwoman 33
2.2 ‘Elephantine features’ from Comparative Physiognomy 34
2.3 Imitating Black dance through wild hair 39
2.4, 2.5 Hands-up gesture to indicate female madness in two
French melodramas 40
2.6 Delsartian Anguish, a Salpêtrière hysteric, Sarah Bernhardt 41
5.1 A sample photograph from the UTKFace data set 76
6.1 Billi walks past a mural of faces in The Farewell 96
6.2 Billi nuzzles her face in her mother’s (Diana Lin)
shoulder in The Farewell 104
6.3 The ensemble cast in The Farewell 106
7.1 The film’s spectacular first image of Jesse on a modelling shoot
in The Neon Demon 112
7.2 Jesse’s narcissistic transformation by the titular Neon Demon 115
7.3 Medium close-up of Jesse on a modelling audition in
The Neon Demon 116
7.4 Medium close-up of Jesse reminiscent of fashion ad aesthetics
in The Neon Demon 117
8.1 Martin Luther King in prison with harsh medium close-up
assimilated into the background in Selma 126
8.2 Grainy and raw close-up of Oscar passing his gaze onto Tatiana
in Fruitvale Station 132
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FiguRES
8.3 Reciprocating close-ups of Chiron/Black and Kevin in Moonlight 135
10.1 The molluskan mistress of disguise and dissimulation, from My
Octopus Teacher 154
10.2 New bodily orientations in the ‘face’ of radical alterity, from My
Octopus Teacher 158
10.3 An interspecies tête-à-tête, from My Octopus Teacher 159
10.4 A posthuman(ist) detournement of Michelangelo’s The Creation
of Adam, from My Octopus Teacher 161
11.1 Tina’s face, the red light at the border, from Border 167
11.2 Tina connects with a fox, her face reflected in the window,
from Border 171
11.3 The makeup artists aimed for a more ‘feminine’ look early in the
film and a more ‘masculine’ look towards the end, from Border 172
11.4 Tina is often shot in profile, looking up, especially in natural
settings, from Border 174
11.5 Tina’s face erupts, from Border 176
12.1, 12.2 First appearance of young woman passenger in Ten 182
12.3 Soosan Taslimi in Bashu, the Little Stranger 187
12.4 Golshifteh Farahani in Shirin 190
13.1 Frame enlargements of Ginger Rogers 197
13.2 Ginger Rogers in Max Factor cosmetics ads 201
13.3 One of the latter-day glamour images of Ginger Rogers 207
14.1 Fan 217
15.1 Under the diagnostic gaze 225
15.2 Renee-as-Judy, from Judy 233
16.1 The similarities between actor Andy Serkis and the
computer-generated character modelled after him 243
16.2 The face of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Man’s Chest 245
16.3 The Irishman used new software to produce de-aged versions
of its stars 247
16.4, 16.5 Gemini Man utilised performance capture to construct
a fully computer-generated de-aged version of Will Smith 249
16.6 The performance of a young Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was computer-generated 250
17.1 Becoming Cameron 257
17.2 Becoming Jennifer 258
17.3 ‘Would you rescue me if I fell?’ Becoming Julia 262
17.4 ‘Becoming Legally Blonde’, Becoming Reese 266
18.1 Woman holds her face, from Under the Skin 278
18.2 Lucy’s face dissolves, from Lucy 280
18.3 Lucy becomes a computer, from Lucy 282
viii
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ACkNOwlEdgEMENtS
I wish to thank all those who helped make this collection possible. Research for
this collection was supported in part by an Insight Grant from Canada’s Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Thanks also to the Eng-
lish Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough and to the Cinema
Studies Institute at the University of Toronto for their collegial support. Ideas
for this collection were informed by presentations and audience feedback from
conferences including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Domi-
tor and the Modernist Studies Association. Thanks to my colleagues at Univer-
sity of Toronto and elsewhere for their input – especially Sara Saljoughi, James
Cahill, Karen Redrobe, Maggie Hennefeld, Noa Steimatsky, Genevieve Love and
Angelica Fenner. I am thankful to my undergraduate and graduate students at
the University of Toronto, with whom I discussed many ideas related to this vol-
ume. Thanks especially to my research assistant, Jillian Vasko, and to editorial
assistant Emma W. Johnson.
I wish to thank Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press for her enthusi-
astic support of this project from its early stages. Thanks also to Sam Johnson,
Eddie Clark, Caitlin Murphy and the entire staff of EUP, and Lel Gillingwater
and Jo Penning, for all their incredible work in guiding this book to publication. I
also wish to thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their comments
and advice.
Most of all, thank you to all of the authors who contributed their exciting
work to this collection – I am so happy to be able to bring this work together here.
Finally, thank you to Mark Rigby, for his critical insights and support while
I was editing this collection. And to my son, Oscar, for being amazing.
ix
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