Face as mask
Face as mask - Contemporary era
The 1960s have often been seen as an era of rupture for the cinematic face as much as for the cinematic mind. In 1966, for instance, Ingmar Bergman released Persona, a film effectively dedicated to exploring, and exacerbating, the facial-psychological division between two female protagonists: one blessed with an 'open' face, whose micro-movements appear to correspond, as least, to a clearly defined array of emotions, feelings, affects; the other whose face appears constantly withdrawn, inert, grotesquely still, like a mask.
A similar analogy between femininity and mask-like mystery also pervades certain films by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, giving rise to scenes such as this (in which Anna Karina plays a political militant-cover girl who eventually betrays her photographer-lover), or this (featuring the only moving image in a narrative composed entirely of photographs). Finally, a curiously feminist take on this visual trope can be found in Anna Biller's Love Witch (2016), in which the central female character, Elaine, exists as nothing other than a mask. Pure surface, pure image, pure face: her thoughts, for us, are all but impenetrable.
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