Any Face, Whatever Body
Arts
Film 194A The Face: A Film Theory Seminar
Any Face, Whatever Body, is an experimental short that functions simultaneously on personal and theoretical planes. On the personal level, it is an expression of processing an instance of racial trauma I experienced years ago when a White woman told me I was a “deer person or something” because I’m indigenous. This piece is meant to illustrate how such violence becomes internalized and self-affirmed. Theoretically, this project employs Kuleshov montage theory alongside the photogenie of the close-up to inspect a tension between Levinasian and Agambenian conceptions of the facial encounter under a lens of racial “othering”. Furthermore, I aim to enter the discourse on "colorblind" racial ideology with this project by interrupting the editing rhythm with multi-ethnic face collages. Their instantaneous visibility repurposes an experience explained by scholar Mark Hansen as "pure", de-racialized affect to call attention to how the identification of a face is an inherently raced process that cannot be solved by color blindness.
