Issue 9: Book Reviews
The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship
By Therese Davis
Bristol, UK & Portland: Intellect, 2004. ISBN 1-84150-084-4. 8 b&w illustrations, v+122pp. £19.95
A Review by Maria Walsh, Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, UK
In the 1960s Andre Bazin could claim that "the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death" (What is Cinema?, University of California Press, 1967:10). The (photographic) image keeps the subject alive in our memory. In The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship, Therese Davis examines the significance of the image of the face in contemporary media culture where the image's capacity to preserve or embalm time is questionable given the logic of speed and transience that dominate our technologies. Davis poignantly articulates this condition in a short chapter on the image of Princess Diana's face which loomed large in the collective imaginary preceding and following her tragic death, but was quickly relegated to the scrap heap of televisual media, a demise accelerated by her anniversary coinciding with the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. However, this was not simply a case of one media event overshadowing another, but more a question of how television's speed of transmission makes us forget figures and events. Televisual media ascribe a second imaginary death to the 'real' one.
Rather than this being an occasion for pessimism, the premise of Davis' book is that there is still some criticality inherent in the facial close-up. While the mystery Bela Balazs celebrated in relation to the cinematic close-up of the face has evaporated, Davis argues that by way of a certain kind of unrecognisability, the "talking heads" of televisual media engender, if not a "new mode of perception", then a new mode of recognition (1). In either becoming literally unrecognisable or disappearing from the cultural imaginary like Princess Diana, these televisual faces reveal what their proliferation attempts to conceal, i.e. "the powers of death" in contemporary representational technologies (75). Davis develops this point by threading a series of different televisual heads together. As well as Princess Diana, this includes: a television report of the death of comedy actor Paul Eddington, his face disfigured by a rare skin disease; screenwriter Dennis Potter's last televised interview, his face bearing the signs of dying of an incurable form of cancer; a documentary of the late Australian indigenous land rights leader, Eddie Mabo, whose grave was desecrated, a large gash remaining in the place of his life-size bust; and an analysis of Charlie Chaplin's face in City Lights (1931). The critical resonance of these faces is explored by way of early twentieth century theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer with the main emphasis of the book being given over to extensive, albeit selective, exegesis of Walter Benjamin's ideas, which presume some prior familiarity by the reader.
In balancing her idiosyncratic selection of mediatised 'talking heads' with theories of modernity dominated by Benjamin, the book's otherwise passionate argument tends at times to slightly unravel. While Davis' forays into less well-known aspects of Benjamin's ideas are lively and written convincingly, I would question whether Benjaminian redemption is the best model for conceiving of faces which make visible "the underside of the mask of personalisation" (69), i.e. a non-redemptive illumination of mortality and trauma. On the plus side, Davis offsets the weightiness and perhaps inappropriateness of Benjamin in considering contemporary televisual phenomena by her personalised readings of examples. Benjamin is an appropriate partner here with his notion that historical knowledge transmitted by shock encounters affects the viewing subject's sensorium rather than simply being occasions for the interpreting critic to read "cultural forms as images of social truth" as in his colleague Adorno's approach (35).
For Davis, in proffering transience and disappearance, televisual media can evoke personal and social memories that might other wise have remained hidden. This is most apparent in the opening chapter on Paul Eddington. The particular facelessness rendered by his skin disease evokes Davis' memory of her dying grandfather's face. What occurs in this televisual moment is the peculiar temporality of suspended time characteristic of the imminence of mortality. Usually, this moment is repressed in television where death is continually presented and where one death easily replaces another, but Davis, as cultural user of images, here makes a link between the public and private that exceeds the usual boundary between screen and viewing subject. Confrontation of Eddington's "facelessness" leads Davis to consider Levinas' philosophy where "recognition of death in the face of the other is first and foremost an ethical experience" calling us to respond to the other (12). However, contrary to Levinas' emphasis on blindness in this encounter, his is still a philosophy of (mirror) reflection and Davis rightly raises some doubts as to whether it can help us understand the viewing experience of recognising death in the dialectic of recognition and unrecognisability set off in media reports of Eddington's facelessness. Davis explores another mode of recognition connected to memory and objectivity. Extending her memory of her dying grandfather's face with an example from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past where the narrator describes seeing his grandmother from the viewpoint of a stranger, Davis links this kind of recognition to Kracauer's notion of "crude existence" (14). In this trajectory, we get a glimpse of Davis' struggle between the messianism of Benjamin for whom the image can redeem the past and Kracauer for whom the photographic image reminds us of our material contingency.
This struggle is further played out in the chapter on Eddie Mabo. Mabo's name, standing for indigenous land rights, resonates for Australians coming to terms with a history of colonial violence. Trevor Graham's film Mabo -- Life of an Island Man (1997) sets out to personalise the man behind the name, but Davis' analysis shows that what surfaces in the film is a non-redemptive wound in relation to colonial violence which is exemplified by the absence of the figurehead that marked Mabo's grave and the unfillable hole in the cemetery on the mainland where his body was initially buried. However, it is in this chapter that Davis gets most carried away with Benjaminian metaphors, here mapping "intimacy as adjacency", a relation to the other without possession or unity suggested by Benjamin's angel of history, onto our relation with Mabo (69). Davis illuminatingly shows how Benjamin's notion of the other being 'beyond reach' is based on Benjamin's experience of unrequited love, which preserves the proximity of the lover from a distance. By contrast, in Davis' astute analysis of Mabo -- Life of an Island Man, what comes across is an irredeemable series of defacements and an absolute destruction of cultural traditions that cannot be rescued in the present.
In asking how we can deal with here-and-now transience in material terms, Davis sets herself a difficult, but worthwhile, task. At the end of the first episode of Dennis Potter's posthumously produced drama series, Cold Lazarus (1996), a human head suspended in a large tank of liquid nitrogen confronts a montage of image and sound projected onto a giant liquid screen, memories of a past life as it makes the transition from the world of the living to the dead. The images 'embody the modern experience of mediated existence: grabs from televised football finals, memorable key images from Potter's drama series, such as Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, the unforgettable spectacle of carnival and early cinema' (53). Davis relates these fragments to the allegorical mode of revelation enabled by Benjamin's fossils, but it is difficult to see how what Davis refers to as 'a spectacular event for the duration' (54) opens onto the temporality of Benjamin's fossils.
A more poignant and perhaps apt metaphor for the confrontation with death that appears paradoxically via its disappearance in televisual media is suggested in the final chapter, which reads Chaplin's City Lights along with a series of testimonies and meditations on blindness. Davis recounts an example from German psychologist M. von Senden of a case from 1810 where a deaf and blind 14 year old boy builds circles of stones placing himself in the centre. According to von Senden, this blind perception of space differs from sighted consciousness of a circle in being based on touch sequences whereby the construction of a circle rather than being held whole in the mind is determined by the "temporal structure of change in perception", i.e. one stone after another and so forth (101). Davis compares this receptivity to change to how we as viewers organise "the shock effect of film", i.e. cinematic montage (101). However, we have long since recuperated any such shocks that cinema might have offered in Benjamin's day. That said, the disappearance of 'talking heads' into the archive of televisual history that Davis articulates might have something to do with the sequential nature of blind seeing. Discussing 'America Remembers', a media event on the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks which commemorated victims by recalling the names of dead, Davis observes that "television reproduces the names of the faceless only to then efface them yet again" (92). This form of 'public memory', which assures us that nothing goes away, reproduces the very process of disappearance that it seeks to cover over. Encapsulating this sentiment is an image of a firefighter's father wearing a poster-size photographic portrait of his missing son along the bottom of which were the words 'Remember Me'. According to Davis, it is too late to remember once the image is incorporated into the kind of defacement television engenders, yet this technology is one of our main sources of information and historical knowledge. The recent or the long-forgotten past returns in the televisual archive only to disappear again, but, in returning, another stone may be added to what can only ever be a partial picture. Television makes blind seers of us all, as the faces of the dead return to haunt us without hope of redemption, but proffering the injunction to narration. The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship opens much needed debate on the aesthetics of television in relation to memory, history and death, an aesthetics which has tended to be repressed in cultural theory. While television is on the one hand complicit with the social repression of death, in asking how a possible antidote to this might occur in those very faces that disappear into the ether of electricity, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship offers an important revaluation of contemporary media's ability to preserve "the subject from a second spiritual death".