The Face as an Event

In May and June, Mona Körte and her colleagues from the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin (ZfL) will present a series of films on the theme "The Face as an Event. Facial Semantics in Film" and thus provide an accompaniment to a seminar being held at the TU Berlin. "The medium of film accentuates the face as a surface rich in events. It explores the face as a location, as a thing without a body, but also engages with the parts of it that "speak" most clearly: the skin and the eyes, the cheeks and the forehead, the mouth, nose and ears. Something occurs when the close-up and the face as a subject come together: it is here that relationships between "visualization, technology, knowledge, representation and entertainment" (Tom Gunning) are called into being, whereby the ways in which these different elements refer to one another is unclear within a cultural historical framework. The medium of film exposes uncertainties in the previous understanding of visual culture by drawing new facets from the standard physiognomic perception and the oppositions of surface and depth, interior and exterior and man and monster. In the process, the face appears less as a natural or divine apparition, but rather as a composite, destroyed or mystified one, somewhere between silent film and the horror film, between the close up and animation techniques" (Mona Körte)