Response: The art of making faces

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Amateur Photographer (24 July 1885), p. 242. 2 On the ability of the new camera technologies of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to ‘penetrate’ reality see Tom Gunning, ‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film’, Modernism/Modernity 4∶1 (1997), pp. 1–29. 3 On the work of Le Brun and the court style of Louis XIV see Brewster Rogerson, ‘The Art of Painting the Passions’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XIV (January 1953), pp. 68–94; Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun's ‘Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 4 René Descartes, ‘Passions of the Soul’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a brief but helpful discussion of Descartes within the context of nineteenth-century adaptations of physiognomy see Gunning, ‘In Your Face’. 5 As cited in Sandra Kemp, Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation (London: Profile Books, 2004), p. 56. 6 Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), p. 112. On the use of physiognomy in art see E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art’, in M. Mandelbaum, ed. Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 1–46, and Richard Brilliant, ‘The Metonymous Face’, Social Research 67∶1 (Spring 2000), pp. 25–46. 7 See Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–8) and subsequent editions as cited in Brilliant, ‘The Metonymous Face’, p. 34. 8 See John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901. Volume Five: 1900 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1997) where he argues that the lantern slides were the origins of the film ‘close-up’. 9 On expression and gesture in nineteenth-century theatre see Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 10 J. R. Creed, ‘The Art of Making Faces’, Pearson's Magazine, IV (July–December 1897), pp. 628–31. Facial contortionists were a popular turn in music-hall programmes in the years around 1900; see, for example, Ludwig Amann, Facial Mimic, who performed at the Empire Theatre, London, 29 April 1901. Museum of London Archives ‘Entertainment B16’. For variations on this genre see C. Lang Neil, ‘Chapeaugraphy: Or, Many Faces Under One Hat’, in The Modern Conjurer and Drawing-Room Entertainer (London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1903), pp. 331–49. 11 On the early film genre of ‘facials’ see Joe Kember, ‘Face-to-Face: The Facial Expressions Genre in Early British Film’, in Alan Burton and Laraine Porter, eds. The Showman, the Spectacle and the Two-Minute Silence (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2001), pp. 28–39. Also Rachel Low and Roger Manvell, The History of the British Film. Volume 1 1896–1906 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1948), pp. 75–6. 12 Hepworth Manufacturing Company, Cat. 1906. Cited in Low and Manvell, History of the British Film, p. 76. 13 As cited in John Hagan, ‘Erotic Tendencies in Film 1900–1906’, in Roger Holman, ed., Cinema 1900–1906 (Brussels: FIAF, 1982), p. 232. On The May Irwin Kiss, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 118–9. 14 See Kember, ‘Face-to-Face’, p. 30. 15 The film was produced by Wallace McCutcheon and photographed by A. E. Weed. In the copy submitted for copyright purposes to the Library of Congress it is forty seconds long. It can be viewed at www.chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/movies/movindex.html. 16 On ‘Prison Portraits’, see Bill Jay, Cyanide and Spirits: An Inside-Out View of Early Photography (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1991). See also Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15–45, and Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 3–64. 17 Arthur Bowes, ‘Crime and the Camera’, Photography (21 November 1889), p. 649. 18 Georg Simmel, ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’ (1901), in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 277. For discussion of Simmel's essay in the context of portrait photography, see Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Lincoln's Smile: Ambiguities of the Face in Photography’, Social Research, 67∶1 (Spring 2000), pp. 1–23.