The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship

In this tender, haunting, imaginative, and innovative work, Therese Davis broadens and deepens cultural theory, away from a 1990s focus on mass culture as pleasure, towards an engagement in the new millennium with the image’s darker powers: its capacity to reveal and engage with pain, illness, disease, blindness, trauma, death, mourning, loss, remembrance, melancholy. The Face on the Screen looks beyond the usual rush of the contemporary media’s image-cultures which work to conceal the powers of death, to focus on moments – in medieval and baroque art, in a Proust ‘scene’, in photography, in film, in television – when a movement between recognition and becoming unrecognisable rehearses the experience of facing death itself, forces us to think of what lifelong we never wish to contemplate, our own death’s head beneath our own faces. Davis evokes and discusses contemporary examples of images which shake us, which force upon us recognition of death’s powers, images of Princess Diana’s death and funeral, of dramatist Dennis Potter’s posthumous reflections on screen, of actor Paul Eddington’s disease-altered visage, of the shocking sight of the racist-defaced grave of Eddie Mabo whose name is forever associated with indigenous land rights in colonialist Australia, and of images of Ground Zero in New York’s September 11.

Keywords: Cultural theory