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Mindless faces

Mindless faces - Early cinema

Ever since the birth of cinema in the late 1880s, has the camera been seemingly fixated on, and obsessed with, the human face. However, during the early years of cinema, at least, the faces shown on-screen rarely seemed to think, or feel, or perceive. Rather, they were 'mindless'.  

In 1894, for example, Edison captured footage of one of his employees sneezing, making the short film available to the public through a peep show viewing device called the Kinetoscope. A year after, the Lumière Brothers doubled down on the idiom by famously filming the face of a baby flanked by two adult faces, before the 'mindless face' was stretched and distorted to grotesque proportions in 1901 with James Williamson's The Big Swallow. Gulp!

Click on the images below to find out more!