Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) opens with a close-up shot of a young woman's pallid face, her long, unkempt blonde hair accentuating a visage utterly absent any affect or movement.
And so goes the event, with thousands of people drinking sangria and absinthe at sunrise, the "Rolling Elvi" scooter-riding Elvis/matador hybrids, and hundreds of wheeled women putting on snarling visages as fearsome as any ever donned at a downtown singles bar.
But there is of course no peer-reviewed literature on the thermonuclear implications of a miraculous resurrection.Hence, perhaps, the cautious but far from anodyne words of the new pontiff, who draws some unexpected conclusions from the Shroud, almost implying that it does not make any difference whose visage appears on the cloth.
It's a hard word to avoid, however, in any description of the documentary Faces Places (Visages Villages), directed jointly by the French director Agnes Varda and the French photographer who goes under the pseudonym JR.
By now, any Afghan with a computer has seen the victims' cherubic but lifeless visages on Facebook, and the images have been passed around on cellphones.
(She has a new film forthcoming, "Visages, Visages," which she co-directed with the photographer JR).
Death has many visages, none of them enticing.
These sagging, lumpen visages show the skull under the bone.
The work of individuals can be represented in more than their visages.
All these Caucasian visages, laughing and talking about the blues sweeping into their lives, subtly speak more about what has happened to the music than any of the more declamatory statements in the films by the other directors in this overreaching and uneven series: Mr. Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Charles Burnett, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders.
"I realized I didn't want 100 visages of Jesus staring down at me".
