The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene.
A worthy question, and one that might well be directed at this movie, a hectic two-hour whirlwind of musical, visual and narrative artifice.
You're stripping away the artifice, the visual effects and all that until all that's left are people and relationships.
Chiaroscuro is an installation piece that utilizes light as an artifice of visual perception.
The bags, their shiny brass fittings and the impeccable white-enamel display cases achieve an intensity of artifice, tactility and visual buzz that Mr. Murakami's higher art efforts don't always muster.
(The visual rhymes of the flashbacks are artifices that have little to do with the workings of the mind and everything to do with the elegant papering-over, via illustrations, of the script construction).
Objections were raised to metal's adoption of visual spectacle and other trappings of commercial artifice, but the main offense was its perceived musical and lyrical vacuity: reviewing a Black Sabbath album in the early 1970s, leading critic Robert Christgau described it as "dull and decadent...dim-witted, amoral exploitation".
Through tomorrow The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has long blurred the line between the quick and the dead, or at least the mobile and the inert, concentrating visual perception while revealing his medium's inherent artifice.
Instead he analyses its conscious artifice, highlighting the complex network of visual relationships between painter, subject-model, and viewer: For Foucault, Las Meninas contains the first signs of a new episteme, or way of thinking, in European art.
Yet the extreme artifice of De Palma's amazingly intricate visual confections and virtuosic creations calls attention to what he does, not to how he does it.
Her use of the "language" of 1s and 0s is meant to question the nature of perceived reality, to expose it as a construction not unlike a computer program, using visual art to blur the boundaries of imagination and artifice and create a bridge between the human and virtual realms.
