The Face on the Screen: Questions of Death, Recognition and Public Memory

There was a time is 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 dr...