ABSTRACT
The filmmakers overtly call upon the painter's presentation of blurred, sexualized full-length bodies, yet their invocation of Bacon's style also invites consideration of the artist's distinctive style of portraiture, where he subjects heads and faces to an often-violent mode of representation. Francis Bacon's paintings are precise interrogations of the forms and pressures that might be violently exerted and inflicted upon bodies. Bacon's paintings provide a valuable framework for the consideration of Coriolanus, because Bacon's project engages in a process of physicalization and body-consciousness similar to that working through the text of the play. This essay focuses on Bacon's dismantling and remaking of heads and bodiesin light of the process that Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari refer to as 'facialization' to consider Coriolanus's head and face. One hopes to show that the play and the film focus on the difficulty that those around Coriolanus experience when trying to ascribe a human face to his clearly flesh-and-blood body.
