info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Samuel Solé, « The Digital Face on the Screen: Continuity and Rupture in the History of the Face in Cinema », HAL-SHS : histoire de l'art, ID : 10670/1.oir79q
The advent of computer-generated images in the late twentieth century marked a major turning point in the history of the face in cinema. An initial interpretation of these aesthetic changes might suggest that digital faces break with traditional representations of faces in films, which would disappear in favor of a simulacrum. However, this paper shows that the relations between digital faces and human faces are increasingly ambiguous, paradoxical, and multifaceted, shaped by both continuity and rupture. Drawing on the work of Jacques Aumont, according to whom the history of cinema is also the history of the defeat and undoing of the face, I argue that digital images do indeed break with the history of the face in cinema, not because they have completely defeated the face, but precisely because they have recreated and revived it within the very media responsible for its disappearance.