'Sheer Epidermis': 'Face Politics' and the Films of Lynne Ramsay

Abstract

Wrapped in curtains, fishing nets, plastic bags; hidden by hair or completely cut off; faces in Lynne Ramsay’s films are often absent, incomplete or inaccessible. Framed in tight close-up they can be no less remote, distanced by the preference for an opaque performance style. Similarly, motifs of facial doubling, coupled with a tendency to play with point of view, disrupt notions of the face as the guarantor of individual identity and the gateway to subjectivity. Nevertheless, Ramsay’s films are regularly noted for their ‘immersive’ qualities, inviting ‘a proximate, tactile look that produces a sense of intimacy with the image’.1 This begs the following questions: how does the destabilisation of the face as an expressive focal point in Ramsay’s films intersect with their ability to evoke ‘a visceral spectatorial response’?2 And how might this, in turn, reflect on the ‘face politics’ visible from portraiture to film and photography and further complicated by the eminently mutable face of the digital sphere?3 If, as Jenny Edkins and others argue, following Deleuze, the ‘face’ is where discourses of individual subjectivity and sovereignty coalesce, then a politics which ‘dismantles the face’ and replaces a principle of separation with that of relation may be difficult to articulate within current paradigms of representation.4 With this in mind, and focusing on Ramsay’s four feature films in the context of her wider filmography, I wish to explore the ways in which Ramsay’s films recalibrate our existing relationship to the face on film through a reimagining of its role in the mise-en-scène and, in so doing, move us towards an uncanny encounter with the ‘other’ on screen.