Despite its grand title, The Face on Film is no bubbly celebration of the beautiful countenances that comprise the history of big-screen glitz and glamor. Rather, UC Berkeley professor Noa Steimatsky investigates the ontological repercussions of capturing the human face via motion picture photography, and does so by surveying canonical film theory and criticism ... In order to reap the ... Read morerewards of Steimatskys analyses, then, readers must exercise patience ... And they will be rewarded ... her observations [are] insightful, well-argued, and poetically expressed. Especially wonderful is the chapter on the multitudes contained in Warhols deceptively, eerily minimalist portraits of Edie Sedgwick.
Michael Joshua Rowin, Film Comment
With this powerful book, Noa Steimatsky emerges as one of our profoundest observers of the possibilities of the medium of film. The Face on Film both caresses the surface and probes the profundities of the human face in cinema. Balancing a historical overview, examination of the long critical engagement with cinematic faces, and close analysis of carefully selected films, Steimatsky demonstrates the capacity of the face on film to both reveal and conceal meaning and emotion.
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
The Face on Film is a brilliant meditation on the historical importance of the face both inside and outside the cinema and the way questions of its signification and efficacy have been exacerbated in modernity and late modernity. Detailed and elegant readings of films buttress Steimatsky's compelling argument that the opacity or illegibility of the face always accompanies and subtends its legibility. She directly addresses the question of our enduring cultural obsession with this enigmatic yet central site linked to identity, expressivity, singularity and contingency. Vigorous, intelligent and lucid, this work will surely have a strong impact on current debates about aesthetics and ethics.
Mary Ann Doane, University of California Berkeley
Noa Steimatsky's intricate prose flows like blood through the capillaries of The Face on Film making its subject throb, blush, and sometimes turn pallid. Her study will be one of a handful to last as long as the filmmakers she so precisely, lovingly, longingly treats: Dreyer, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Warhol, Bresson. Without blinking, and without hesitating, Steimatsky confronts and describes-draws and draws out-the experience of the face as well as of film.
Dudley Andrew, Yale University
Noa Steimatsky's intriguing book The Face on Film oscillates between straightforward history of various cinematic tropes of the face and theoretical treatise on modernity and then postmodernity's grasp of the human face. Her study charts the transformation of mythic faces of cinema's past into a complex commercial image and existential unintelligibility within postmodernity. Refreshingly, the book offers a history of performance disguised as high theory and will pique the interest of film and cultural theorists and performers and artists alike.
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