ABSTRACT
This project’s approach to film spectatorship takes an initial cue from Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on visual ethics. For Levinas, the event that breaks the closed loop of totality—the subject’s bounded ego—is the face. Levinas’s notion of the face contains an element of excess, a component that eludes total capture, recognition, or understanding by the perceiving ego. The face, according to Levinas (1969), “resists possession… resists my powers” (187). For Levinas, a first ethics is rooted in one’s encounter with the face. The face is a construct, a discursive visuality, which, figuratively, by revealing itself, speaks ethical obligation to the subject to respect the Other as self.
