Magical History Tour – Close-up: Face (2)

This month the Magical History Tour will again be dedicated to the "face" as a filmic event. Based on sixteen films, we will show examples of the depiction of the human face throughout the history of cinema and present positions of individual directors in regard to representations of the face. In some of this month's films, the emblematic faces in close-up of stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Jean-Paul Belmondo – based on which the September program retraced the tensional relationship between narration and projection – will be juxtaposed with lay actors, whose in a cinematic context still "blank" physiognomies became the necessary foil for the directors. During the history of cinema, the originally unknown (film) faces of Maria Falconetti in LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC or Enrique Irazoqui in IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO soon became the unmistakable "faces" of films and historical characters, thus entering into the canon of media faces. The mask-like "second" face made unrecognizable through make-up is another focus of the Magical History Tour. The representation of the face in Ingmar Bergman is also highly instructive. He saw the true quality of cinema in the closeness to the human face. We will screen several of the full-length films together with shorts by Karø Goldt, Stephen Dwoskin, as well as Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, which despite or perhaps because of their short format are impressive formal examinations of the human face.