What The Clerk Saw: Face To Face With The Wrong Man

In a celebrated review of Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (US, 1956) in the Cahiers du cinéma, a review titled (after Artaud) "Le Cinéma et son double," Jean-Luc Godard focuses upon certain close-ups of Henry Fonda. Such images of the human countenance epitomize cinema's capacity, greater than that of philosophy or the novel of our time, says Godard—this on the eve of his own advent into filmmaking—"to convey the basic data of consciousness" (fig. 1). In an ekphrastic feat, Godard dwells on the privileged arena of the face in motion pictures. The contemplation afforded by such close-ups, he suggests, binds revelation to mystery: the visual surface comes to enfold a promise of interiority; aesthetic and ethic intersect in Godard's tracing of how a face transpires on film.

Reaction shot and long close-up of Henry Fonda staring abstractedly, pondering, thinking, being . . . . The beauty of each of these close-ups, with their searching attention to the passage of time, comes from the sense that necessity is intruding on triviality, essence on existence. The beauty of Henry Fonda's face during this extraordinary second which becomes interminable is comparable to that of the young Alcibiades described by Plato in The Banquet. Its only criterion is the exact truth. We are watching the most fantastic of adventures because we are watching the most perfect, the most exemplary, of documentaries.¹

In the repose, the gratis moment that precedes Fonda's entry into the inexorable machinations of the insurance agency, the police, the law, of psychiatric institutions, and of narrative itself, time and space are fairly abstracted in these early close-ups. Béla Balázs has written about such freedom of spatio-temporal coordinates that allows for the facial close-up to be

Figure 1.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). Courtesy of the author.

experienced, paradigmatically, as whole.² The face may be said to counter, in this way, the threat of fragmentation embedded in the workings of cinema, most obviously in framing and editing, as in the work of the actor. In the searching, attentive perusal of that singular object—one distinct from other objects, one that compels as subject—the extended close-up affords Godard's leap from acting to being, from functional communication or narrative tool to ineffable inwardness, from the instant to the interminable, from optic to ethic. Godard further suggests that such images pierce, as it were, the fabric of cinematic fiction so that—even in filmmaking as controlled as Hitchcock's—indexical, documentary contingency works as a guarantee of authenticity, of "exact truth." The "accidental" or "trivial" detail, the subtlest facial motion transpiring in time, points toward that singular, irreducible inwardness even as it will not quite contain it or spell it out. Godard's vocabulary of "being" and "essence" aspires to exceed, or precede, any specific coded content of thought, any paraphrasable expression or communication. But even without Godard's Platonic terms one might concur, as I propose here, that it is a condition of the great cinematic close-up to signal subjectivity in epiphanic terms that exceed, by definition, the readable signs of expression. Namely, formally coded legibility will not do here, but rather a gesturing toward that margin of inaccessibility, toward the hidden: an intimation of interiority only marked by a contingent articulation of surfaces. More than any particular feature or instant that can be encompassed or defined, it is contingency as an index of temporality and change—necessary if not sufficient conditions of subjecthood—that is at work here. Since no "soul" can be fixed, grasped, made available—for that would render it as mere surface and negate it thereby—a layering of evolving surfaces will constitute a promise of interiority, subjectivity.³ It is contingency that, paradoxically, defines here the plenitude of the face as subject, and of the cinematic image as face: a privileged entity in a world of objects, one that cannot be encompassed as sheer exteriority, but only intimated in surfaces...