Face as window
Face as window - Modern era
It was only from the 1910s onwards that the human visage began to acquire the particular status that it currently holds in contemporary cinema: as an kind of window, used to gesture towards the inner workings of the mind.
One of the earliest and most important experiments during this period was performed by the Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov, who famously spliced together three invariable close-ups of a man named Mosjoukine with shots of three varying objects - a bowl of soup, a deceased child, a languorous woman - thus generating the impression that Mosjoukine was thinking different things.
At the other end of the spectrum, in 1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer released what has often been defined as a film in which the human face is framed as a type of two-way mirror, reflecting the inner mental impulses of the central character/actor (Maria Falconetti) outwards, towards the eyes of the spectator.
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