Jacques Aumont, The Face in Close-up

The face in film is double because the film actor represents both himself and another: this initial theme
gives rise to a subsidiary one. (...)

The face is double because it superimposes a kind of transparent mask on another face that is deeper,
thus more real. This implicit and perhaps unconscious refference to the Rilkean “earlier-face” describes
it as follouws: that which the face reveals and conceals at the same time is what is under it – the
invisible that it makes visible. The face provoques vision, is vision.

If the face is actually two faces, surimposed or based one over the other, it is also multiple in a a
completely different sense, because it is capable od expressing several emotions at the same time.
There is says Balázs, a poliphony of the face, which expresses the “cord” of emotions, in the musical
sense of the word. Just as poliphonic music follows several paths, several lines concurrently, the face in
film can say several things at a time because, playing in space and in time, it is not condemned to the
linearity of writing. (130)

Interminable doubling of the face: it unites de individual and the “dividual” but this first double is still
further split in silent films by the polyphonic play of expressions. All of this, presented for viewing as
it is maintained as visible and stricly visible, as immeeiate and truthful as possoble, as organic. (131)