Therese Davis,
The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship.
Bristol: IntellectLtd., 2004.
ISBN: 1 841500 084 4
192pp
UK£19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Intellect books)

The media un-anaesthetisised: face, transience, and the site of meaning
The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship is a surprising and unusual book in its choice of critical object. It invites the reader to a discussion that is not often found in recent media writings: a discussion of the cross-reference between the face, death and recognition in the screen production. A short glance is enough to grasp the challenging nature of the undertaking: the terrain is interdisciplinary, intertextual and positively slippery and dangerous. The discussion interfaces the domains of philosophy, religion, and psychology, while simultaneously resting on the broad foundation of cultural and media studies. In addition, the very presence of the subject of death may cause uneasiness: it is not an issue we are willing to focus on. The tradition of Western media practice is to “‘anaesthetise[…]’ us to the shock of death” (1) rather than to emphasise the images’ dark power to invoke death. Yet this is precisely what Therese Davis is interested in: she has chosen to analyse the spectatorial experience of facing death on screen and – in a broad sense – the presence of death in human experience and its important role in the emergence of meaning.

For the seven essays in her book Davis has selected media events that have shaken the audience and forced it to move beyond the pleasure principle dominating the perception of mass media products. On the very first pages of her book she reminds us that even though contemporary media is saturated with images of death “we have been immune to the sight of death” (1). The repeated images of dead bodies, the moments of dying captured by the cameras in film and on television, do not lead to a greater understanding of, or more profound insight into the meaning of life and death. This prompted Davis to look for those moments in contemporary media that are able to generate philosophical contemplation, deep insights, and epiphanies. Although rare, they strip the triviality from the news reports, television talk shows, and the well-known cinematic texts, such as Chaplin’s films, and situate them in a surprisingly new context. The proximity of death is found in the most common close-ups, the moments when its presence breaks through the habitual pleasurable viewing and generates sudden alarming insights on the radical meaning of death in our lives. It is “the shock of recognition produced in the dialectic of recognition and unrecognisability [that] rehearses the experience of facing death; those unexpected moments when we are suddenly made aware of the full powers of death: finality, irreversibility, absolute otherness.” (2)

It is the human face on the screen that most often carries that message. Each chapter in The face on the screen approximates the human face in a way similar to the camera’s movement: from different points of view but always striving to cross the line of permissible closeness. The discussion moves from the ability of death to render faces unrecognizable; to the ancient and contemporary practices of physiognomy (reading the face as text); to the stamp of death on the face of a dying author (Dennis Potter); to de-facement as the symbolic destruction of a seemingly unified national space (the Mabo case); to a postmodern conception of the saint figure (Princess Diana); to the disturbing incomprehensibility of Ground Zero after 9/11; and finally, to the last image in Chaplin’sCity lights (US, 1931): the close-up of Chaplin’s face “nervously anticipating” his lover’s first sight and recognition after long blindness (108).
In other words, we are invited on a challenging, provocative, and discomforting journey which promises new experience, deeper knowledge, and an extension of the scope of cultural studies beyond its usual themes. While all the essays are grounded in particular cases, the aim of the book as a whole is more ambitious: to grasp the elusive framework of the transcendental encoded in the particularities of the everyday data and the common viewing experience. It is not even necessary to emphasise that such happenings are rare both in media practice and in real life experience. Davis takes great pains to excavate these moments from the multitude of contemporary media events and to make us aware of their impact – sometimes perceived only unconsciously – in the very midst of the everyday media experience.

The Close-Up: A Disturbing Rehearsal

The paradox of the close-up – the face on screen – is that it simultaneously conceals and reveals the omnipresence of death. It is most visible in the phenomena of unrecognisability associated with familiar faces. A TV talk show generates strange spectatorial and aural experiences: the popular public figure of the actor Paul Eddington, his face has been effaced by a rare skin cancer disease, gives Davis a chance to elaborate on the problem of recognition/non-recognition which is associated with “the illusion of eternal sameness – the almost sacred conception in Western cultures of a unitary, transcendent self”. (9) To interpret this phenomena Davis turns to various critical concepts of the meaning of the face.
While Emmanuel Levinas sees face as a “secret language” of “transcendence”, which cuts across the “nothingness of the sensual world”, for Kracauer (Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality) the face in close-up is both a special and a temporal sign: it points to the objects around it and at the same time it refers to the experience of temporality inherent in the photographic image’s shocking ability to produce an acute experience of the “things past” and time lost. The temporal dimension of photography – revealed in the dramatic collusion of the past and present – is equally important for both Kracauer and Benjamin, who share a view on film as an equally revealing and alienating medium.

In this context, the shattered identity of the face-less Eddington on screen is both a shock and a revelation: the spectators have suddenly recognised the mortality of humans in the unrecognisability of the face. If the film medium is able to restore the magnetic qualities of physical reality and the material world, as Kracauer argues throughout The Theory of Film, at the same time it opens up the realm beyond materiality. Davis argues that the close-up allows us the closest proximity to the “inherent transience of human nature.” (17) Following Benjamin and Kracauer, she speculates on the “consciousness of time” at the heart of cinematic experience. Encoded in the banal units of TV aesthetics – talking heads – the message is both disturbing and haunting: Eddington’s case suddenly becomes one of those occasions where the collusion of past, present, and future produces a powerful shocking effect and awakens the viewer by mirroring his/her own mortality. It is these “rehearsals” that Davis refers to when she discusses the absolute Other, the radical difference, and the visual media ” as a face of death”.

The Text of the Face: The Contiguity of Character and Form

While the practice of reading the face is as ancient as the human world, it has undergone curious transformations in the course of time on its path from the doctrines of the past to the modern media. The common thread in all these practices is the notion of the face as text. Davis’s discussion leads us through various practices and theories: from the ancient Greek understanding of the face as a mirror of the soul, to the later attempts of physiognomics to interpret the finest interconnections between physicality and spirit (the face as a window to the inside), to the revival of the principles of physiognomy with the invention of the camera. In the modern times the question of the face as text has re-emerged in both film theory and philosophy and is often associated with the most common modern anxieties. While Deleuze and Guattari regard the face as simple appearance, George Simmel tries to bound dialectically the old and the new visions on the face. (“The aesthetic significance of the face”). Looking for a dialectical balance of “veiling and unveiling” Simmel conceptualises the face as both a mirror of the soul and a window to a “pure intellectuality behind the appearance.” (31) Following this trace Michael Taussig emphasises the “doubleness” of the face: “its function of both mirror and mask”, “the figure of figuration”, “the ur-appearance”. According to Davis, Taussig’s “defacement” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “defacialisations” “do not expose and thus destroy the secret at stake, but rather serve to reveal the truth of concealment.” (31)

In the history of modernity the visual culture itself is read as a face: Balazs’s The visible man and Adorno and Benjamin’s socio-cultural analyses provide multiple insights on the general social tendencies through readings of cultural texts – very much like physiognomy reads faces: “as hints for hidden processes behind them” (32). Davis looks for critical resonances between Benjamin’s writings and Schopenhauer’s method of philosophic physiognomy, and his exploration of history in Essays and Aphorisms: “Every human face” Schopenhauer writes “is a hieroglyph which can be deciphered…a man’s face says more, and more interesting things than its mouth,…it is a monogram of all man’s thoughts and aspirations…the face expresses a thought of nature…” (34). Schopenhauer’s notions of the Will, natural force, the life force, Zeitgeist, the physical, and the metaphysical, trace his efforts to assimilate the contiguity of character and form into a new level in his philosophy. It is at this point that Davis detects a resonance between Schopenhauer and Benjamin’s visions of history: while Schopnehauer reads architecture as an imprint of the spirit of the age, Benjamin reads the Paris Arcades as samples of the modern experience. Davis notes that Benjamin’s fascination with surrealism corresponds to his aim “to arrange the fragmentary details of the surfaces of things in such a way that they create a catastrophic juxtapositions”- a step that leads him closer to the theorisation of cinematic experience. (35) For Benjamin, cinema’s “optic unconsciousness” shapes narrative by the same shocking strategy, “which blasts open the surfaces of things, releasing the fragments of the past embedded within.” (36) Thus, all faces and surfaces become both ” a receptor and potential transmitter of social and historical knowledge” (36).

The Auteur: Between Death and Immortality

In her essay “Extreme Fidelity” Hélène Cixous writes:

I have always dreamed about the last text of a great writer. A text written with final energies, the last breath. On the last day before death, the author sits on the edge of the earth, feet light in the infinite air, and looks at the stars. Tomorrow the author will be a star among stars, a molecule among the molecules. The last day is beautiful for those who know how to live it, it is one of the most beautiful days of life. On that particular day (…) one sees the world with the eye of the Gods: I am finally going to become a part of the worldy mysteries. Sitting on the edge of the earth the author is already almost no one. The phrases which come from the heart to the lips are released from the book. They are beautiful like the work, but they will never be published, and before the imminence of the starred silence, they hasten assemble, and say the essential. They are a sublime farewell to life; not mourning, but acknowledgement. How beautiful you are, O life, they say. (Seller, S., Writing Differences: Reading From the Seminars of Hélène Cixous, 1988:9)

This quotation can be the perfect introduction to, and summary of, the Dennis Potter chapter in Davis’s book. Dennis Potter, a prominent TV drama writer, suffering from an incurable form of cancer, gave his last interview on television. The programme produced a seismic effect on both the interviewer and the audience. It is this “moving and rocking” effect that Davis examines in chapter 3 of her book. At this point Davis’s discussion takes one of its most interesting turns when she associates her major line of argument – death/face/recognition – with the concept of authorship. A basic concept in media studies, the notion of the auteur in visual media has witnessed perpetual ups and downs throughout the last century, cutting across all areas of media studies. Although Davis does not mention these names, her discussion oscillates between Barthes’ dead author, “diminish[ed] like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage” (“The death of the author”) and Foucault’s merciless question “What matter who’s speaking?” (“What Is an Author?”) in order to contextualise Potter’s claim for recognition and immortality. The issue is complicated further by the fact that we are dealing with an auteurin television, the most controversial and ephemeral form of authorship.

The dramatic response to the Potter interview is not all that surprising, keeping in mind that the final confession of a dying man, his reflection on life, death, and creativity seldom features on television. The programme has a touch of “the last breath” “before the imminence of the starred silence” and this transforms the trivial close-ups and the repetitive patterns of talking heads into what Davis called “an innovative programme”. The producers of the programme chose a minimalist style and reduced the camera movements to an almost constant focus on Potter’s face, thus picking up and enlarging his almost invisible facial movements and expressions, a technique which strips the masks from a human face. It was the sign of death inscribed in Potter’s face and transmitted during 95% of the screening time that made it possible for the medium of television to transcend its triviality and to reveal “something of the unique temporal properties of television” (54). Davis argues that the interview has re-vitalised the notion of the author’s immortality as opposed to the modern aesthetics of the “death of the author” and the “faceless text’. Potter’s writings are often defined as a “combination of modernism and popular entertainment [which] yields a new postmodern television idiom” (Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 1990: xvii) Within the ephemeral television medium, his claim to the status of auteur is even more fascinating, considering the events that followed the interview: his last two TV series became an event, building a kind of symbolic memorial. Both the interview and the posthumously produced TV drama series became Potter’s “sublime farewell to life, not mourning but acknowledgement”; a re-claiming of the immortality of the author in the media age that consistently obliterated authorship as institution. (45)

The critical reaction to the Potter case reveals how slippery the terrain of authorship theory can be when situating the site of meaning. Davis briefly comments on several critical responses: while some critics ascribe the shocking effect of the programme to its textual qualities (John Cook) others emphasise the “importance of the viewers as the place where the meaning of the text ultimately (…) resides” (Rosalind Coward). (47) Balancing the strengths and the limitations of both views, Davis outlines the major strategies contemporary media authors use to reconstruct the figure of the auteurin the public space, using the same “effacing” media devices that obliterate authors’ faces. Potter’s “final statement” acquires the status of an allegorical object in Benjamin’s sense: allegory as “a form of expression” rather than a singular rhetorical figure: “The allegorical object does not (…) signify (designate), but it reveals in its two-facedness the process of signification”. (53) The deadheads in the last Potter’s TV series were transformed into allegorical object, which points to the two-facedness of the process of signification. They both refer to, and reveal the history behind, both Potter the man and the collective consciousness that accommodates, shapes, and interprets this image.

The Nation: An Imaginary Unity

While Potter aspired to build a face that would transcend death, Mabo’s case refers to the violence of defacement. The chapter on Mabo associates Davis’s argument to one of the Australia’s founding myths, terra nullius. It is true that for viewers outside Australia the documentary Mabo – Life of an Island Man (1997, dir. Trevor Graham) may mean very little, if anything at all. However, the general socio-cultural implications of the case, which portrays a supposed unified nation space as a site of internal tension and dangerous subterranean dissociations, are not unique to Australia. The Mabo case has become one of the primary Australian symbolic narratives associated with the now famous issue of the indigenous land rights and native title legislations. The documentary is for Davis a form of prosopopoeia – a figure of speech related to personification, the representation of an abstract idea or thing as a person. In his essay “Autobiography as De-facement” Paul de Man claims that an epitaph can be considered as a prosopopoeia, a trope which allows an entry into the world of the dead. It has the power of making death speak; a “repetition of the loss, [the prosopopoeia] seeks to conceal that art is also already a restoration of mortality” (59). Graham’s work consolidates all these in its effort to re-create Mabo’s face and personality after the desecration of his grave. The process of restoring his face re-constructs the figure of Eddie Mabo as a legendary tragic hero, a sage, a profit, a visionary, even a ghostly mythic figure. The “facialising techniques” of the camera seek to establish different connections between the name and the face, and to close the gap between them. But Davis suggests that “it is also possible to view this film through the very gap it seeks to conceal” and to “recognise the origin of the traumatic history of non-recognition of Indigenous Australians”. (69) Thus the notion of recognition/non-recognition re-appears in the discussion – this time – in the broader context of the imaginary unity of national discourse. In Davis’s discussion the issue remains open to ambivalences and controversies and is coloured by tragic tension. With her focus on naming and representation, she implies a chain of arbitrary significations in the very definition of nation space, conceiving it – like Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities – as a field of cultural, social, historical, and political narratives, rather than a primordial formation.

The Postmodern Saint: Looking for Virtues

Examining the face of an international media icon – Princess Diana – Davis makes another unexpected turn in her narrative, this time to the intersection of star theory and the concept of sainthood. Reflecting on the star status of Diana, Davis resorts to the notion of the saint to explain the Princess’s powerful presence in the public space. Once again, a TV event is at the center of the discussion – the 1995 BBC Panorama interview. According to Davis, this programme was a carefully designed and perfectly performed show, which reinforced the implication of saintliness in Diana’s image. Comparing Diana’s performance with Maria Falconetti, (the actress in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film La passion de Jeanne d’Arc), Davis claims that it is Diana’s confessional tone, the refusal to conceal her personal pain and suffering, the stamp of innocence as part of her “self-infantilisation” performance strategy that contributed most to the construction of the saint-like appeal of her face and personality. What defines saints, according to Edith Wyschogrod, is the recognition of “the primacy of the other person and the dissolution of self-interest.” (Saints and Postmodernism, 1990: xiv) It is not accidental that the images from the 1995 interview re-appeared in the days following Diana’s death, further multiplying the implications of saintliness – the broadcasters promoted them as an “authentic image of Diana” (78) – as if the profane and agnostic medium of television suddenly had been illuminated by Kierkegaard’s suggestion: ” describing the saint’s life meant ‘making the movement after him'”(Wyschogrod, 1990:3) The broadcast of Diana’s death and funeral is among the prime examples of “performing” the spectacle of death in the media where death “is experienced only as an image”. At one point Davis asks a most interesting question: Why was it Diana who gained so much popularity and public admiration and not the other saint who died almost at the same time, Mother Theresa? The question is left unanswered in the text, which is a pity, because a comparative argument of that nature could provide further insights into the phenomenon of the postmodern saint and its moral implications. Not surprisingly, soon after the funeral the media icon was almost forgotten. Diana’s case is an embodiment of the “modern image hunger [which] conceals death through its complex logic of speed” (81).

9/11: The Face of the Ground

If Diana’s face gets the viewer/reader in touch with saintliness, the reminder of Ground Zero after the 9/11 attack brings back the experience of the sublime. Here the media emerges in a double function: (1) as a constructor of the “terror and pain” inherent in the sublime experience (Edmund Burke); and (2) as an instrument of memory, and memorialisation – the art of memory in Frances Yates’s words.

It is not news that television has often been discussed as an instrument which promotes terrorism since publicity is among the primary aims of terrorist movements. “Television’s status as primary information medium”, its “liveness and immediacy”, its capacity to “dramatis[e] local and world events” has formed what Martin Essler designates as “an organic connection” or “‘symbiotic’ relations” between television and terrorism. (86) Media theorists define the 9/11 broadcast as a television event of a second genre: “disaster marathon”, in contrast to the first type of events, whose coverage is pre-scripted and even rehearsed before the broadcasting. In the case of “disaster marathons”, television can be taken by surprise, as it is not known in advance what might happen. The CNN live coverage of 9/11 is among the prime examples of this kind of reporting: the spectacular and sublime event that caught television by surprise and muted its most articulate commentators. While the people in the TV studio struggled to find the language to make sense of what was happening before their eyes, the shockwave from the experience overwhelmed the spectators around the world. If those who claimed that the end of the postmodern epoch ended on 9/11 were right, its end was marked by a single profound shock.

Like TV broadcasters, academics later admitted that these images affected them too, at least for some time. Acknowledging the power of images, W.J.T. Mitchell noted their ability to sweep over critical thought into a “flood of rhetorical figures”; “the event might exceed our categories of critical judgment and require some new ways of thinking”. It put on trial the very capacity of the critical speculation “to judge […], analyse and critique”. (W.J.T. Mitchell, Critical Inquiry, v.28.no. 2, p.570-1).

To the acute sense of the inadequacy of language, Davis adds a crucial absence: “there were no bodies, there was nothing to mourn”. (89) Caught in what Davis designates as a “memory crisis” television has rapidly transformed itself into a site of memorialisation, a funeral home, whose new mission became “to fill the space of oblivion, the spatial and temporal void known as ground Zero” with faces, names, memories, and recognition. Thus the live coverage of the global television event, “America Remembers”, with its excessive rhetoric, both linguistic and ritualistic, tried to replace the lack of bodies to mourn with an abundance of names to remember. Acquiring mythic proportions, death was once again rendered faceless on the TV screens. 9/11 is emblematic of the crisis of recognition associated with death. But even in this case the television medium reveals its inherent paradoxical duality: as Davis emphasises “television reproduces the names of the faceless only to then efface them yet again…; as a form of public memory, the highly planned event ‘America Remembers’ sought to assure us as viewers that nothing goes away while, at the same time, reproducing the very process of disappearance that it seeks to cover over.” (92)

Chaplin’s Face: Modernity’s Melancholic Hope

From this point on, Davis’s narrative of death and recognition heads to its closure: the final chapter meditates on the connection between blindness, cinema, and unrequited love, an emblem of which becomes “the most melancholic and most beautiful of Chaplin’s films, City Lights”. (97) In this essay Davis invites us into a curious inquiry into visual and tactile modes of perception and their equivalents in cinematic experience. To provide a connection Davis once again turns to Benjamin’s text: this time to his essay on the child’s experience of colour. According to Benjamin, children’s notion of colour is “fluid”, “moving”, “a perception of change rather than of form”, a process of “cancel[ing] out intellectual cross-referencing, without sacrificing the world”. This is a “human point of view” which adults have lost. (“A Child’s View of Colour”)

For Davis the children’s “blindness to form” and their oversensitivity to movement are at the bottom of Benjamin’s theory of the image. In another work, Benjamin notes that the shocking effect of film perception is dominated by movement, the ever-changing images have a capacity to replace the spectator’s thoughts and foreground sensual experience. Extending Benjamin’s observation, Davis suggests that film generates a kind of tactile perceptivity compatible with that of blind people or newly sighted patients whose first glance is incapable of recognizing and grasping objects, previously familiar only through tactile sense. In Benjamin’s words, “the film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus” which, as Davis comments, constitutes “a structural reciprocity between the shock of modernity – the massive changes in temporal and spatial relations and the constant, rapid shock effect of the film”. (100) The trauma of the “first sight” after long blindness is compared with the traumatic and yet pleasurable experience associated with the film medium. This chain of correspondences involving film experience, blindness, the tactile spatial definition, recognition/non-recognition and, finally, death, silently encoded in all of them, is Davis’s concluding point. Its overarching embodiment is what Benjamin calls ‘dialectical image’: “a moment of recognition in which the past and present collide”; “a temporal mode of perception indebted to the sense of touch.” (104) In this sense the face is always a “potential repository of past feelings, a storehouse”. In a beautiful detour Davis examines the face of the beloved through Benjamin’s notes on unrequited love – love, crossed with melancholy and trauma. It is the final close-up in City lightsthat metaphorically illuminates back the whole discussion up to this point. Davis distinguishes rich and profound levels of meanings in this image: alongside the famous melancholic hope inscribed in the face of a lover, this frame brings in close proximity the permanent crisis associated with modernity: its “loss and trauma”, “the impossibility of recovering ‘what has been alienated and lost to human experience'” (108).

Therese Davis’s The Face on the Screen leaves readers with the haunting awareness that they have gained a new understanding of both modern media strategies and spectatorship. Davis’s careful and sensitive analysis of various media events and personalities is at the same time an inquiry into the construction of meaning. It is not only class, race, gender and the cultural background, that shape spectators’ perception of, and reaction to, the media texts and their meaning. Davis’s book leaves behind these common and already widely discussed categories in media studies and seeks out new horizons to examine the image’s transformational power. Benjamin, Taussig, Kracauer, Schopenhouer, Simmel and other thinkers are her allies in this difficult and intimate conversation with the reader. Even mass culture’s inexhaustible production of pleasure and enjoyment cannot alleviate the pain of the imminent silence ahead.

Davis’s book suggests that the emergence of meaning is always combined with a permanent – although not always in the foreground – awareness of death. But even though death is a key word repeated many times in the text and there is no way to avoid the poignant and tragic dimension of the discussion, the book is all about life. It is an attempt to illuminate and to fill with meaning all those moments that precede the irreversible absolute finality. If there is anything that can summarise Davis’s unusual archaeology of the dark power of images, it is probably Barthes’ suggestion that among all human desires the most powerful is the desire for meaning.

Violetta Petrova
Victoria University, Wellington.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04