ABSTRACT
The tension between the phenomenological and transcendent aspects of the Other is examined, bybringing together Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face and the theoretical discourse about the close-up. Film theorists like Jean Epstein (1988), Jean Mitry (1997) and Bela Balázs (1970) saw the close-up as going beyond the presentation of details unperceived by the unaided eye. The close-up allows the human face to appear in a unique way: It creates close proximity between the viewer and the character’s face, acting on the viewer’s feelings rather than on her perceptions, and revealing a dimension of subjectivity that is usually not given to the eye. In this context. I consider Levinas’s discussion of facial expression as a mode of alterity. For it was these film theorists who claimed that the close-up disclosesthe movements of facial expression in a way that prevents the face from being fully analyzed, referred to or thought about directly. By bringing Levinas’s concept of theface into dialogue with the cinematic close-up, I show how cinema can provide a concrete face-to-face encounter, one in which Otherness shows itself without being objectified.
