Abstract
According to Gilles Deleuze, the Face and its cinematic close up represent critical stages in the restoration of a belief in the world. If anything of his discussions of cinematic images has the potential to engage readers with passion, it is the viscerally powerful energy of the Face. Human beings have a destiny, he argues: “to escape the face, to dismantle the face.” Dismantling the face demands going beyond the wall that separates the earth from the heavens. This phenomenon occurs in Samuel Beckett’s television drama … but the clouds …. There, the Face passes from physical space to spiritual immanence via the close-up. Beckett’s drama demonstrates that escaping the face is no more difficult than acknowledging the insubstantiality of the clouds above.
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Notes
- 1.
Murphat elaborates on the obvious: “the televisual image is not an image at all, but the illusory effect of an electron beam’s mechanical, horizontal scanning of the phosphorescent pixels on the back of the glass screen.”
- 2.
The translators observe that “proximity” is translated as voisanage, which Deleuze and Guattari draw from set theory (Thousand Plateaus 1987:542).
- 3.
See S. Homan, 68.
References
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Catanzaro, M.F. (2012). Aerial Passion, the Face, and the Deleuzean Close-Up: Samuel Beckett’s … but the clouds…. In: Tymieniecka, A. (eds) Art, Literature, and Passions of the Skies. Analecta Husserliana, vol 112. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4261-1_9
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