Decrypting faces rendered in bwgreyscale was involved in a lot of what I did over christmas, somehow or other.
Fassbinder's Veronika Voss arrived courtesy of lovefilm and in defiance of seasonal postal hitches on the 24th. Among the extras there's an interview w/ the cinematographer, Xaver Schwarzenberger, who chats guturally about wanting to achieve a graphische as opposed to malerische type of B/W (much guttural rumination about the predisposition of French cinematographers towards the latter, more painterly approach). Voss - played by Rosel Zech - is a washed-up Zara Leander-esque actress frozen out by the post-Goebbels industry. Zech's jowels and the wedginess of her nose phase in and out of emphasis w/ the flux of the light (which is always metacinematically strained through windshields, raindrops or panes, interrupted by ceiling fans or deflected by mirrorballs) making her look anything between milkily 16 and a haggard 60.
I was reminded of the many and ingenious proboscisectomies via airbrushing, lighting and angling performed on Erin O'Connor back when M&S ad ubiquity was but a twinkle in her sunken & girder-browed eyes, before her nose's weird convexity became shorthand for hi-fash sophistication/perversity of taste (she remains my favourite of the post-supermodel crop of Flemish and Anglo-Irish gawks incidentally). Things seem to have come full circle lately because her nose is kinda under erasure on the M&S duro-bags, which look like an oblong band of tippex has been applied to them, a reverse of Alec Guinness' Semticization in the David Lean Oliver Twist (which was on the other day, and beautiful) or Nicole Kidman donning that dopey prosthetic schnozz to win an Oscar/my eternal enmity for crimes against Woolfy.
Tempted to do a phallic women thing/quote Sterne here - not going to though, don't worry.
So M&S's bag designers used a pic of Erin with bangs tho, which I discovered was also a self-branding tool employed by my grand-paternal great-grandmother and her half sister circa their days on the music hall stage. We spent boxing day poring through a cache of photos that will most likely figure prominently in the study of bobs and bangs between Cleopatra and Louise Brooks that I very much hope to someday publish. Depicted is Dorothy (the half sister) who can be differentiated from my dad's dad's mum by way of the absence of a chincleft. The same hair and nostrils and dimples, framed by different costumes and stages, stay constant across a couple of decades, though she's especially hard to age in undated photos because she seems to have specialised in little-girlish roles long into her (and the century's) 20s.
The span of time the photos covered, in fact, is probably about the same as that which the compilation of Jaime Hernandez's Locas stories I got for Christmas covers. I won't yet try to articulate my love for this book (except to say it'll surely vex my NY resolution to love my fellow man more than printed media) but one page is reproduced above from a point in the series when Hernandez'd been drawing the character Maggie for a decade and a half. He's got so good that he can do nine panels of her hardly moving but looking utterly alive and self-identical (which impression I hope is only heightened by the pixelisation, which at least precludes plot spoilers) despite being rendered in two tones and scarcely more penmarks.
