There was a time in screen culture when the facial close-up was a spectacular and mysterious image…

The constant bombardment of the super-enlarged, computer-enhanced faces of advertising, the endless 'talking heads' of television and the ever-changing array of film stars' faces have reduced the face to a banal image, while the dream of early film theorists that the 'giant severed heads' of the screen could reveal 'the soul of man' to the masses is long since dead. And yet the end of this dream opens up the possibility for a different view of the face on the screen. The aim of the book is to seize this opportunity to rethink the facial close-up in terms other than subjectivity and identity by shifting the focus to questions of death and recognition.

In doing so, the book proposes a dialectical reversal or about-face. It suggests that we focus our attention on the places in contemporary media where the face becomes unrecognisable, for it is here that the facial close-up expresses the powers of death. Using Walter Benjamin's theory of the dialectical image as a critical tool, the book provides detailed studies of a wide range of media spectacles of faces becoming unrecognisable. It shows how the mode of recognition enabled by these faces is a shock experience that can open our eyes to the underside of the mask of self - the unrecognisable mortal face of self we spend our lives trying not to see. Turning on itself, so to speak, the face exposes the fragile relationship between social recognition and facial recognizability in the images-cultures of contemporary media.

CHAPTER 1

Becoming Unrecognisable

I remember staying up through the night to watch CNN's live coverage of Yitzhak Rabin's burial service and how it was a speech given by his granddaughter at that event which brought me closest to the significance of his death. The granddaughter explained to the world watching that the memorialising images of Rabin's face was not the face she knew. This was not her grandfather we saw on the screen. On the contrary, in death Rabin was, for her, unrecognisable – 'a smile that is no longer'. While Western news services desperately tried to sustain Rabin's recognisability, to allow viewers to continue to see him 'as he was' – indeed, to allow the dead to speak again through his last public words uttered at a peace rally only minutes before he was killed – it was also reported that British actor, Paul Eddington, best known for roles he played in BBC (UK) comedies Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, died of a rare skin cancer which left him 'faceless' and 'unrecognisable'. While I make no attempt now to compare these disparate stories, it was the tension produced in the strangeness of these two faces coming together, back to back, as they did in many of the Australian television news broadcasts, that got me thinking in a new way about the face and death and the problems of recognition and recognisability.

What I saw that night after Rabin's assassination as I was switching between various news services was that just as reports on Rabin sought to restore his face in death, television news tried equally hard to smooth over the shock of Eddington's facelessness in life. For Rabin's granddaughter, the mass circulation of her grandfather's image was unbearable. Addressing her dead grandfather, she cried: 'The television does not stop transmitting your picture'. Yet, it was not these pictures that news services identified as potentially 'disturbing' but the image of Paul Eddington's apparent facelessness. In this chapter, I explore what it means to look directly into Eddington's face, to look in the way television advised us not to. For as with the strange mix of tenses in Rabin's granddaughter's speech, this direct view of the spectacular loss of Eddington's well-known face shatters the illusion of eternal sameness – the almost sacred conception in Western cultures of a unitary, transcendent self. And as I will show, to see through this particular veil is to look in the way that Maurice Blanchot suggests Orpheus did when he 'turned back': 'to look into the night at what the night is concealing – the other night, concealment which becomes visible'. Or, in this case, to look into the face at what the face normally conceals – 'the blinding non-existence of death', which our hearts, as Schopenhauer once said, tell us cannot possibly be true.

I: When People See People

Channel Ten (Australia) reported on Paul Eddington's death by showing three short grabs – two of which were images of him as he had not been seen on television before.The first was taken from the long running British television series Yes, Prime Minister, which made Eddington internationally recognisable as the face of Jim Hacker, Minister of Parliament. Here, Hacker explains: If people saw people coming, before people saw them seeing people coming, people would see people. This instance of 'Hackeresque' logic, underscored by the laughter track, becomes uncanny when this image, serving now to stand in for Eddington, cuts to the second image, a wide shot of an unrecognisable figure. Although Eddington is seen in this second shot in conversation, his voice has been muted, replaced by the voice of the news reader who reports:Of course, that's how most people remember Eddington – the bumbling MP, star of the TV comedy series 'Yes, Prime Minister'. But at the end he was almost unrecognisable – his skin blotchy and his hair falling out. The report then cuts to a final close-up shot of Eddington's silent, unrecognisable face. The reader concludes: He was suffering from a rare skin disease, which probably cost him his life.

Ten's story attempted to compensate for the shock of Eddington's apparently sudden unrecognisability by projecting on to him an image not simply of a former self but a fictional self. Eddington speaks not as himself, that is, as actor, but as character. It would seem that Ten preferred to confer on to Eddington a fixed, fictional identity, to have him speak from the grave as another, rather than face the mystery of his facelessness, or, worse, perhaps, allow for a faceless figure to speak. Not that I'm suggesting Ten's effort should be deplored. While their 'before and after' approach may be regarded as somewhat tacky, so called tasteful approaches taken by some other news services, such as ABC (Australia), for example, were equally problematic. Tiptoeing around the subject of his disfigurement by showing him only in character, the ABC spoke of Eddington's facelessness in the hushed, holy tones of tragedy. Descriptions of the effects of skin cancer as a tragic situation were, I am sure, intended to give some kind of 'deeper' significance to this disconcerting calamity. But in an interview shown on Australian television a week or so after the above-mentioned news report, Eddington describes his condition in very different terms, referring to it as an 'absurd situation' and claiming that the look of his face is nothing less than 'grotesque'.

The grotesque is most easily defined as an un-natural excess. The grotesque face is overblown and distorted: it is an exaggeration of the face. What shocks us into the repulsive/attractive gaze of the grotesque, 'the embarrassed smile', as Wolfgang Kayser puts it, is the recognition of a resemblance to, or continuity between, the human form and other forms, such as animal or plant forms, or even other forms of pictorial representation. In a chapter of his influential book on the topic where he attempts to define the specific affect of the grotesque, Kayser writes: 'We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instils fear of life rather than fear of death' (185). However, in Ten's report Eddington's altered face appeared to be neither deformed nor misshapen. It did not appear overblown, nor was there any trace of animality. What appeared on the screen was a perfectly proportional face altered only at surface level – it was, to put it bluntly, a peculiarly blank face, nondescript in the way that police identikit pictures resemble faces in general but no one face in particular. Perhaps then even a term like 'the grotesque' is too general when speaking about this face, because it does not distinguish between the excessive facedness of deformity and the baffling facelessness of Eddington's sudden unrecognisability.

As if erased, Eddington's face was not so much 'monstrous', as the term grotesque suggests, but rather, quite simply, a face without resemblance, in the sense that it bore no resemblance to his former look or to any face in particular. In terms of the grotesque, disfigurement of this kind – that is, a situation in which all the unique lines, forms and textures of the face are effaced– is excessive to the degree that it makes visible a face which is a pure abstraction of face – surface. To see the face in this way, that is, as a face never seen before, brings us closer, perhaps, to the fear it instils. As Kayser says, not so much a fear of death itself, but of the uncertainties of life. Or to put it slightly differently, a face becoming unrecognisable is not of the order of the fantastic but very much of this world – the visceral, the bodily, and the social.

Clearly, the unrecognisability of Eddington's face that instils in viewers a fear of the contingencies of life constitutes a shock experience. In this way, less extreme or lasting forms of faces becoming unrecognisable might also be considered to have a similar effect. Take, for example, those everyday fleeting moments of alienation when a face we know well, the face of a lover or a child – a most adored and searched-into-and-over face – changes before our eyes. Australian artist, Joy Hester, once described these moments as, 'that fleeting mobile moment in which one sees for the first time the person and this "first" time appears all the time in Gray's (her lover's( face'. As encounters with absolute difference, the shock of a face becoming unrecognisable suspends us in the dark, where we grasp for impossible resemblances.

The idea of the face as an encounter with difference is central to Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics. In 'Ethics as First Philosophy', Levinas asserts that the experience of coming face to face with another is the primary experience of existence. He argues that becoming 'I' involves first facing up to responsibility for the Other: 'Responsibility for the Other, for the naked face of the first individual to come along, a responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have done to the Other, whatever act I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other before being devoted to myself. Or more exactly, as if I had to answer for the other's death even before being'. For Levinas, the relation of face-to-faceness constitutes a unique experience in which we recognise not that we live because the other dies, but that we live only to recognise the Other's death. This recognition is possible, he argues, because of the transcendence of the face. In his essay, Totality and Infinity, he contends that sensations can create qualities that do not require cognizance. Or, as he puts it, 'qualities without support' (188). He writes: 'sensation recovers a "reality" when we see in it not the subjective counterpart of objective qualities, but an enjoyment "anterior" to the crystallisation of consciousness, I and not-I, into subject and object. This crystallisation occurs not as the ultimate finality of enjoyment but as a moment of its becoming, to be interpreted in terms of enjoyment' (188). For Levinas, the only given in the delirious space of pure sensation is the face. The face cuts through or transcends the nothingness of the sensual world, opening up what he describes as 'the infinite relation' of face-to-faceness, which, in his view, recovers a reality that takes us beyond totalising thinking. In this way, the experience of the infinite –a space 'without proportion', as he sees it – gives rise to the secret language of the face: the demand by the face that we respond to it cancels the eyes: we respond to the call of the Other, which speaks through the secret language of the face.

Another way of putting this is that in Levinas' philosophy, recognition of death in the face of the other 'dazzles' the self. Blinded, the self passively subordinates its existence to the other. Hence, recognition of death in the face of the other is first and foremost an ethical experience. But does this philosophy of ethics help us to understand the viewing experience of recognising death in the dialectic of recognition and unrecognisability set off in media reports of Paul Eddington's facelessness? And exactly what would that mean in terms of the apprehension of the face as a form of vision? Certainly, it is true to say that when first confronted by the close-up detail of Eddington's altered face I experienced a sense of the infinite of indeterminacy. But I cannot say that this experience led to 'a call of the Other' that took me outside of historical time. To the contrary, for me this image enabled a very specific recognition of time past. Confronted by an image of facelessness, I found myself unable to not look. I was drawn to Eddington's otherness with the same awe and amazement that I had once experienced before illustrations of flayed anatomical faces in my grandfather's leather-bound Book of Disease and Physiology. Yet, while the strange ('estranging') objectivity of Eddington's facelessness made it impossible to find resemblance between this face before me and images of Eddington imprinted in my consciousness, my response was neither one of horror nor disgust. Rather, I found myself thinking quite specifically about my grandfather dying of emphysema, his cheekbones protruding through his skin like scars. Looking into my grandfather's face, I had been prodded by death for the first time. Although I was only seven years old I had understood completely the meaning of what I had seen. As with Rabin's granddaughter, perhaps, I knew I had seen my grandfather's face for the last time. It's not that Eddington's face resembled my grandfather's, but rather that the shock of Eddington's facelessness renewed in me a very specific, forgotten childhood experience of mortality. In other words, the indeterminacy revealed in the sight of a face becoming unrecognisable 'exposed' – like some lost photographic negative – a final image of my grandfather's face imprinted within me in some deep, unconscious way. And for this reason, I would describe the viewing experience not in terms of the eternal time of Levinas' ethics but rather as a shock of recognition that enables consciousness of what Benjamin calls 'missed experience', a sensation akin to Proust's notion of the mémoire involontaire.

There is a section of Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film – The Redemption of Physical Reality where he associates the objectivity of the photographic nature of film with Proust's notion of mémoire involontaire. Here, Kracauer quotes a long passage from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, in which the narrator enters a room in which his grandmother is seated and, remaining unnoticed, sees for the first time that she has aged:

I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence ... Of myself ... there was present only the witness, the observer with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in a vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life our eye charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible ... I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing room which formed part of a new world, that of time, saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know. (14) (My emphasis)

In this evocative passage, Proust compares the narrator who sees his grandmother with a newly acquired objectivity to a photographer: seen photographically the grandmother appears to the narrator as an unrecognisable 'stranger'. More than this, the grandmother's unrecognisability effaces the narrator's loving memory of her. He is thrust into a new viewing position: a photographic viewpoint, in which she appears, 'red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman ...' There are of course a number ways to read this scene. On one hand, this description is charged with sexual difference: it is a kind of primal scene that reveals a history of men's idealisation of woman. The narrator is crushed when he sees his grandmother for the first time in her mortal state. Putting this question of gender to one side, we can also see that this is a scene of self-knowledge, for it is not only the grandmother who is transformed in the narrator's experience of unrecognisability. We learn that the experience of seeing his grandmother 'photographically' also transforms the narrator: he too becomes a stranger in his own home – 'an observer with a hat and travelling coat'. The shocking sight of his grandmother's aging takes the narrator out of the comfortable space of the home and transports him into what he calls, 'a new world, that of time'. If, as Kracauer suggests, for Proust, 'photography is the product of complete alienation' (15), then this alienation is also always a temporal experience –a shock experience in which the narrator finds himself caught between past and present, a temporality similar to the stilled or suspended state of the awareness of mortality we commonly refer to as 'facing death'.