From Face to Image

Introduction by Miriam Hansen, Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

The most intriguing passages of André Bazin’s celebrated essay on Robert Bresson are devoted to the human face, yet the Bressonian face is always in process of withdrawal, of effacement. In light of this, Steimatsky posits a notion of reticence as a modality of the face, and of the facial image as it figures the workings of cinema.

Noa Steimatsky is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Steimatsky was a faculty member at Yale University. She has received fellowship and awards including the Fulbright, the Getty Post-Doctoral Grant, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize. Her recent publications include Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), “On Some Minor Films, incl. interview with Carlo di Carlo,” Anthology on Michelangelo Antonioni, ed. John David Rhodes (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2011), and “Inarticulate Spasms and the Dignity of Signs,” Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew (NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010).