Your Face

Non-diegetic music is such a rare element in Tsai’s filmography that its inclusion throughout much of Your Face, courtesy of a minimalist score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, may immediately strike one as odd. But this highly austere film is devoted to the act of seeing familiar surfaces anew, and the use of music only heightens the feeling that we are being given almost none of the usual Tsai trademarks from which to generate meaning. Gone are the spacious wide shots, the dilapidated settings, and the sketches of urban ennui. All that is offered up for contemplation are the faces of thirteen older men and women, each marked in different ways by time. Tsai skirts any expectations of glamour lighting and exposes the real texture of aged human skin, which, through prolonged observation, metamorphoses from something concrete to something abstract—from a keeper of history and experience to a pure artistic canvas. Encompassing both speaking participants and sleeping participants, those engaged by the camera and those indifferent to it, Your Face relinquishes authorship almost entirely to its subjects.