Framework (2007) - What The Clerk Saw: Face To Face With The Wrong Man

Details

• article: What The Clerk Saw: Face To Face With The Wrong Man
• author(s): Noa Steimatsky
• journal: Framework (17/Sep/2007)
• issue: volume 48, issue 2, pages 111-136
• DOI: 10.1353/frm.2007.0017
• journal ISSN: 0306-7661
• publisher: Wayne State University Press
• keywords: "Hitchcock: Past and Future" - edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Alfred Hitchcock, Alida Valli, American cinema, Artistic Representation (Imitation), British Film Institute, Cahiers du Cinéma, Cary Grant, Cinéma et son double (1957, Contingencies, Essay), Essays, Face, Feature films, Film (Productions), Film (USA), Film theory, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Human face, Ingrid Bergman, Insurance agencies, Ivor Montagu, Jean-Luc Godard, Joan Fontaine, Joe McElhaney, Jonathan Freedman, Joseph Cotten, Kim Novak, Motion pictures, Mysteries, Narrative techniques, New York City, New York, Noa Steimatsky, Notorious (1946), Pascal Bonitzer, Paula Marantz Cohen, Police, Production techniques, Richard Abel, Richard Allen, Richard H. Millington, Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Slavoj Žižek, Suspicion (1941), Teresa Wright, The Paradine Case (1947), The Wrong Man (1956), Theaters & cinemas, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, Vera Miles, Vertigo (1958)

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Abstract

Godard's honorific attention to those few precious close-ups-singled out in a film that dramatizes the objectification of identity within a range of modern institutions, a film that also makes salient the workings of cinema in a lineage of instrumental uses of the human face - serves to launch this discussion. In the humble realist context of The Wrong Man, Godard has in fact identified a repository of values inherited from western idealist and metaphysical traditions, from the incarnation of the sacred in the Christian icon and from the humanist portrait that condenses identity in the intersection of a social sphere and an absolute individuality. It is this enchanting potentiality of the face, its openness and intimacy, its address and its mystery, that we perceive in our earliest view of our mother's features from a distance of some 45 centimeters (the perimeter of infant vision, about the line from breast to face), or in our anxious, sensitized glance upon our children's faces when they are sick, or in some Rembrandt portraits that have the power to intensify perception, to refine and mature our glance, to acknowledge the limits of knowledge, the distance between image and language.