Screening The Face

Coates presents the face in film as a place where transformations begin, reflecting both the experience of modernity and such influential myths as that of Medusa. This is exemplified by a wide range of European and American films, including Ingmar Bergman's Persona .

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.

Examines the face on screen from a variety of critical and historical perspectives

What if your phone truly helped you connect with people more than disconnect with those around you? You CAN dare to be relationally different in a screen-to-screen culture. But. . .honestly, I like my phone. So what should I do? You probably enjoy screens but don’t want them hurting your relationships with the people who matter most, right? What if you could improve your face-to-face relationships, develop deeper connections, resolve conflict, and confidently communicate with friends, parents, teachers, roommates, coworkers, potential employers…even the barista at your local coffee shop? What if you paused to think before you posted, avoiding some of the hurt and consequences that almost always lead to regret after? What if you became a master of your own screen-time instead of letting it master you? What if you became more screen-wise? 40 real-life realizations including. . . * Your phone doesn’t have an UNSEND button. *Texting is a dumb way to manage conflict. * We all need a digital detox every once in a while. * Sometimes less is more. * Phones are a great tool for connecting with people outside of the room when they don’t interfere with the people inside the room * Sometimes the people we love the most are the people we ignored all day. Author and youth culture expert, Jonathan McKee, and his daughter Alyssa McKee, uncover forty random realizations they’ve discovered over the last five years. Screens provide fun platforms to connect with faraway friends; and sometimes the people we love the most are the people we ignore all day. Jonathan and Alyssa help young adults navigate face-to-face communication in a screen-to-screen world too! Maybe they’ll help you navigate face-to-face communication in a screen-to-screen world too!

The human face was said to be rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures, in which it is often viewed as expressive locus, as figure, and even as essence of the cinema. But how has the modern, technological, mass- circulating art revealed the face in ways that are also distinct from any other medium? How has it altered our perception of this quintessential incarnation of the person? The archaic powers of masks and icons, the fashioning of the individual in the humanist portrait, the modernist anxieties of fragmentation and de-figuration-these are among the cultural precedents informing our experience in the movie theatre. Yet the moving image also offers radical new confrontations with the face: Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Donen's Funny Face, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, Bresson's enigmatic Au hasard Balthazar, Antonioni's Screen Test, Warhol's filmic portraits of celebrity and anonymity are among the key works explored in this book. In different ways these intense encounters manifest a desire for transparency and plenitude, but-especially in post-classical cinema-they also betray a profound ambiguity that haunts the human countenance as it wavers between image and language, between what we see and what we know. The spectacular impact of the cinematic face is uncannily bound up with an opacity, a reticence. But is it not for this very reason that, like faces in the world, it still enthralls us?

Examines the face on screen from a variety of critical and historical perspectives

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

This book provides basic information about the political values, attitudes and behaviors of Mexican-, Puerto Rican-, and Cuban-origin populations in the United States. It describes the extent to which U.S. citizens of Hispanic origins hold particular views and participate in specific activities.