February 2: Noa Steimatsky on Barthes, Warhol and the Face

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 2 to welcome Noa Steimatsky (UChicago) for her talk, "Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face." Scott Durham (Northwestern) will provide the response. The CFS will be held, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307 of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave.

Thursday, February 2 at 6:30pm
Noa Steimatsky, UChicago
"Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face"
Respondent: Scott Durham, Northwestern

Steimatsky describes her talk as follows:

Enframed in a consideration of Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s film portraiture, my talk for the Chicago Film Seminar will dwell on Roland Barthes’s “modern anthropology” of the cinematic face. A deep ambivalence, involving de-mythifying and re-mythifying maneuvers, haunts Barthes’s reflection on the facial image, and foreshadows some of the deepest concerns of Pop in the following decade. Especially in the almost forgotten essay, “Visages et figures,” Barthes diagnoses a fallacy of “expressivity” of the contemporary movie star juxtaposed with a vision of lost plenitude (real or imagined) invested in an earlier moment of film history. The up-front material artifice of late-silent and Classical cinema is predicated on a layering and masking that endow it with cultic, auratic charge. Yet the archaic functions of the mask might still be operative in Warhol’s deployment of multiplicity and temporality in his great film portraits.

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