Sightlines · Theme course
The Face in the Mirror: A Century of Selves Made, Stolen, and Reclaimed
Cinema has always had one uncanny power no other art possesses: it can hold a human face close enough, and long enough, that you watch a self being assembled — or coming apart — in real time. This course follows that power across nearly a hundred years, asking the question the movies keep asking in different accents: is who you are something you're given, or something you make, and who gets to watch you make it? The arc runs from a woman's face interrogated by men who hold all the power, through decades in which identity is revealed as a performance — forged, imposed, rehearsed, policed — and arrives, finally, at films where the person being looked at turns around and looks back. Every station on this line borrows a tool from the one before it and turns that tool to a new purpose. Watch them in order and you can see the baton pass, hand to hand, from 1928 to 2019.
Everything starts here, with a technical decision so radical it still feels experimental: Dreyer and his cameraman Rudolph Maté build almost an entire feature out of enormous close-ups of one woman's face — no makeup, no flattering light, shot on new film stock sensitive enough to record skin like weather. Deliberately, you can never quite map the room: the usual rules for where people stand in relation to each other are suspended, so Joan's inner life becomes the film's only real location, while the churchmen judging her loom in from odd angles like weather systems of their own. The subject is a woman on trial partly for dressing as a man and claiming an authority no institution granted her — which makes this, decades before the vocabulary existed, cinema's first great film about a gendered self standing against the machinery built to define it. The instrument invented here — the held close-up as a landscape of interiority — is the single most borrowed tool in this course: Bergman will take it up directly in Persona, and Sciamma will invoke it in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Watch for the tear that crosses Falconetti's cheek: the camera is close enough that a face stops being an actor's mask and becomes an event.
Twenty-two years later, at the polished height of the Hollywood studio system, the question flips: not what a face reveals, but what it can counterfeit. Mankiewicz's backstage drama opens with an awards ceremony and then circles back through competing, self-serving recollections — a structure borrowed from the decade's flashback-heavy thrillers — so that the film's very architecture teaches you to distrust every account of who anyone is. At its center is a young woman at a stage door, rain-damp and rapt with devotion for a great actress, and the film's engine is that you cannot tell devotion from its imitation; neither can the woman being adored. Where Dreyer's close-up promised access to a true self, Mankiewicz's glittering dialogue and shifting light — glamorous pools of brightness giving way to something closer to shadow — propose that for a woman with ambition and no other avenue, a self might be something you manufacture, wear, and discard. Almodóvar will lift this film whole, title and all, half a century on — and treat its central insight not as a horror but as a liberation.
Hitchcock takes the counterfeit self and asks the brutal follow-up: what if the forger is the man doing the looking? A retired detective is hired to follow a woman through San Francisco, and the film's first movement is nothing but watching — long, nearly wordless pursuits in which the camera drifts after her as he does, teaching us to share his fixation before we've thought to question it. Then, in the second movement, comes the sequence to study: a man taking a living woman through dress shops and hair salons, remaking her piece by piece to match an image in his head, while cinematographer Robert Burks floods the screen with unnatural green — the color of ghosts, of longing, of something being conjured rather than loved. This is the definitive anatomy of what All About Eve only glanced at: identity imposed from outside, a woman constructed to a man's specification, and the film is honest enough to make the construction feel simultaneously romantic and monstrous. The French critics who worshipped this film became filmmakers; everyone after — Fassbinder, Haynes, Sciamma — is in some way answering it.
Bergman closes the loop back to Dreyer — his cinematographer Sven Nykvist strips lighting down to windows and skin, and returns the enormous close-up to the center of the screen — but where Joan's face confronted a tribunal, here two women's faces confront each other. An actress has stopped speaking, mid-performance, and the nurse assigned to her talks into that silence until talking becomes a kind of undressing; the film is a chamber piece about whether a coherent self can survive being truly seen by another person. Its most famous formal gesture is one you should watch arrive: two faces, each lit half in light and half in dark, held and held until the screen does something no film had dared before with the human face. Bergman also opens the film by showing you the projector, the carbon arc, the film strip itself — reminding you that every identity on screen is an image before it is a person, an idea All About My Mother and Carol will inherit. If Dreyer invented the face as landscape, Bergman invented the face as question mark.
Fassbinder, the volcanic center of the New German Cinema, seals the inquiry inside a single room: a fashion designer's bedroom-studio, all mannequins, wigs, and a vast bed, where a famous designer falls for a younger woman while her silent assistant watches everything from the margins. The revelation is in how Michael Ballhaus's camera moves — gliding laterally behind mannequins and bedposts, shooting the women through obstructions and reflections, so that every declaration of love arrives already framed, staged, watched. Fassbinder took his blueprint from glossy 1950s Hollywood weepies about trapped women and turned the trap literal: there is no door in this film that leads anywhere, and every romantic bond is exposed as a hierarchy — tyrant and servant, worshipper and idol — with the same woman occupying every rung in turn. Note that this is a film about desire between women made by a man as a hall of mirrors; the two films that answer it most directly in this course — Jeanne Dielman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire — will be made by women, and will open the windows. Watch the floor: nobody in this film stands fully upright for long, and that choreography is the whole argument.
Then a twenty-five-year-old Belgian filmmaker changes the terms of the entire conversation. Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte lock the camera down — low, frontal, square to the kitchen and the corridor — and simply refuse to cut away while a widowed mother cooks, cleans, shops, and keeps her household running over three days of screen time. No close-ups fishing for feeling, no music telling you what matters: the radical invention is duration itself, the insistence that peeling potatoes, filmed whole and head-on, is as worthy of the screen as any duel. Where every previous film in this course located a woman's identity in her face or her performance, Akerman locates it in her labor — the invisible, unpaid, endlessly repeated work that no camera had ever thought to watch — and then lets you feel, through the tiniest disruptions of routine, the pressure building inside the schedule. It is the course's great hinge: after this film, holding a shot becomes a feminist act, and Sciamma will say so almost explicitly in 2019. Watch the second day closely, and notice how a gesture falling slightly out of rhythm can land harder than a scream.
The course's American independent turn begins with a mirror: a young person in Nebraska binds his chest, tucks a sock into his jeans, sets a cowboy hat at the right angle, and practices the walk — and Peirce's crucial decision is to shoot this as craft, not con. Drawn from a real story and made within the scrappy late-90s independent scene that had just given queer filmmakers their first real foothold, the film treats masculinity as something built with the hands: the swagger, the dare, the truck, each one a learned move you can watch being rehearsed and perfected. Jim Denault's cinematography holds two registers in deliberate tension — grainy, available-light realism for the trailers and convenience stores, then sudden lyric passages of time-lapse sky and highway light, as if the flat land itself could dream. Where Vertigo showed a self imposed on a woman from outside, this film shows the opposite miracle: a self authored from inside, at enormous risk, in a world with no room for it. It is the course's rawest film, and its bravest.
The same year, from post-Franco Spain's explosion of color and freedom, Almodóvar takes everything this course has treated as tragedy and reorchestrates it as generosity. His title openly steals from Mankiewicz — a mother and son watch All About Eve dubbed into Spanish in an early scene — and the film keeps restaging that inheritance: women watching actresses from the wings, roles passed between performers, lives borrowed from plays and plays borrowed back into lives, all shot by Affonso Beato in reds so warm they feel like central heating for the soul. Its populated world of mothers, actresses, nuns, and gloriously self-made women proposes the course's most radical idea in its sunniest voice: that a performed self can be more authentic than a given one — as one unforgettable character announces from a stage, you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being. Where Fassbinder's mirrors imprisoned, Almodóvar's mirrors multiply; where Eve's forgery was predation, here self-invention is an act of love. Watch how often someone is framed watching a performance — the film is a relay of gazes, each one tender.
Ang Lee — a Taiwanese-born director working inside the most American of genres — makes the Western confess what it had always carried and always denied: that its central image is two men alone together in a wilderness. Rodrigo Prieto shoots the mountain sequences wide and unprettified, two small figures dwarfed by indifferent country, so that the intimacy that grows between two ranch hands over a summer of herding sheep feels smuggled into the landscape rather than blessed by it. The film's real subject is the masculine code itself — manhood as silence, self-denial as duty — studied over twenty years of clipped phone calls, unfinished sentences, and marriages conducted in the spaces the code leaves empty. Formally it is the course's great study of restraint: where Boys Don't Cry showed identity built gesture by gesture, this film shows identity withheld gesture by gesture, the cost paid in everything not said. Watch the reunions: what the bodies do in the first three seconds tells you everything the dialogue never will.
Haynes — a veteran of the same early-90s queer independent wave that produced Peirce — returns to the 1950s of All About Eve and Sirk's weepies, but shoots it through glass. Edward Lachman filmed on grainy Super 16mm and built the entire visual scheme around obstruction: the two women — a department-store clerk with a camera and the elegant customer who catches her eye — are seen through rain-streaked cab windows, storefronts, condensation, reflections, their faces partial and doubled, so that you watch them exactly the way their era forced them to watch each other. The invention here is to make period repression a property of the lens rather than the script: nobody needs to say what is forbidden, because the glass says it in every frame. That the younger woman is a photographer matters — this is a film about learning to see someone clearly in a world engineered to blur her — and it consciously answers both Sirk's trapped heroines and Fassbinder's mirrored cage, while setting the terms Sciamma will complete. Watch for the moments when, briefly, a face comes through the glass clean: the film spends its whole length earning them.
Jenkins splits one life into three panels — a boy, a teenager, a man, each carrying a different name — and lets the gaps between panels do the work a lesser film would fill with plot. The structure itself is the argument: identity as a series of masks pressed onto one person by poverty, by the drug corners of Miami, by a code of Black masculinity as strict as any Western's, and the film asks you to find the continuous soul underneath by looking hard at three different faces. James Laxton's camera is the course's most sensuous — a Steadicam that orbits conversations rather than cutting them apart, close-ups that float faces against dissolving color — and its debts run through Hong Kong and Paris as much as America, folding the international art film's languor into a story its genre neighbors would have told with guns. The scene to hold onto is a swimming lesson: a man supporting a boy in the ocean, one hand under his back, the camera staying and staying until the holding becomes the meaning. It is Dreyer's held face and Akerman's held time, inherited by a filmmaker using both to protect a character the movies had never protected before.
The course ends where it began — a woman's face, held — but with the power reversed. On an eighteenth-century Breton island, a painter is hired to produce a portrait of a woman who refuses to sit, and so must study her by stealth: cliff walks, sidelong glances, features memorized and reconstructed at night. Claire Mathon's camera makes looking itself the drama — shots held long enough that you feel who is watching whom, and what it costs — and then the film performs its great reversal: the subject agrees to sit, takes the stool, and turns her eyes directly back into the gaze that has been taking her. Sciamma has absorbed the whole lineage — Dreyer's face, Akerman's patient duration and rooms run by women, Carol's study of forbidden looking — and resolves it into something genuinely new: a portrait made not of a woman but with her, observation transformed into collaboration between equals. Watch the sittings: every session renegotiates who holds the brush, who holds the gaze, and what consenting to be seen actually means.
Run the thread back through and the shape is unmistakable. Dreyer invents the held close-up and aims it at a woman judged by men; Mankiewicz and Hitchcock discover that the self under that scrutiny can be forged — by the woman herself, or forced upon her by the man looking. Bergman turns the close-up into a hall of mirrors between two women; Fassbinder builds the mirrored room; Akerman blows the walls out by insisting that a woman's unwatched hours are the true epic. Then the modern films take up every one of those tools in the first person: Peirce films gender as a craft you practice, Almodóvar recasts performance as the most honest thing a self can do, Lee counts the cost of the mask, Haynes builds repression into the glass of the lens, Jenkins splits one soul across three faces, and Sciamma — gathering Dreyer, Akerman, and Haynes into a single gesture — finally lets the person being looked at look back. That is the century's whole journey in one motion: from the face as evidence examined by others to the gaze as a conversation between equals. The tools stuck; the power moved. Watch all twelve and you'll never see a close-up innocently again.