ABSTRACT
In the short essay in Mythologies with the title ‘The Face of Greta Garbo’ (written in 1955), Barthes discusses Garbo’s onscreen face in the role of Queen Christina (the 1933 film re-released in Paris in the early 1950s). He sets out an argument in which Garbo’s face becomes the archetype of the human face, ‘a Platonic idea of the human creature’. He plays with a specific contradiction between the rigidity of the ‘mask’ and the humanity of the spatial arrangement of the features. Yet this is an image from twenty years previous, and Barthes goes on to argue that the face now represents the ‘fragile moment when cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty’. Somehow, Barthes has transformed the single image into something dynamic that spans a time-based process. Finally, he compares Garbo’s face to a contemporary (1955) image—the face of young Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s face is ‘individualised’ partly because she offers a social type—(‘woman as child’, ‘woman as kitten’)—but also because Hepburn’s face is capable of ‘an infinite complexity of morphological functions’—in other words, she does not present us with a mask, that traditional mode of playing as archetype. The essay has presented ‘Garbo’s face’—or, more accurately, the signification of the transition from one kind of cinema to another—as a ‘myth’ circulating in French society in 1955.
