In Visible Man (1924), early film theorist Béla Balázs predicted that the cinema would rescue the face from illegibility. Through the close-up, people would ‘relear[n] the long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions’ and man would ‘become visible once again’. Now, nearly a century later, it would seem we have learned this language too well. Whether we consider the digitally created and manipulated faces of Hollywood cinema or the social media filters, ‘face apps’ and surveillance software of everyday life, reading ‘face language’ has become the seemingly endless task of humans and machines alike. For his part, Balázs dreamed of a time when ‘academics [would] perhaps realise that we should turn to the cinema so as to compile a lexicon of gestures and facial expressions on a par with our dictionaries of words’, adding that academics would in fact be unnecessary for the project of compiling this ‘new grammar’ because audiences would ‘go to the cinema and learn it themselves’. Indeed, as we trade animated GIFs of expressive faces and punctuate our sentences with emoji, we seem to have become fluent in the face language that Balázs imagined. Or have we? With faces flying across our screens as a form of communicative currency, we find ourselves not in a utopian Esperanto of gesture, but rather in a kind of facial alphabet soup. Is this what all our cinema-face training has come to? This collection seeks to contextualise and decode the many ‘face languages’ that have proliferated on screens and, in so doing, to rethink the meaning of the face in film and media.

This is an odd moment for faces. With the world having recently emerged from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, it might seem that the face is also emerging – coming out from under the mandatory medical masks that became the norm around the globe in 2020. And yet, in many ways, the face became even more prominent during the pandemic. Very early on, as the virus spread, we were told to ‘stop touching our faces’, which of course only made us more aware of the desire to do so.