The Celluloid and the Death Mask : Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s Image Anthropology

Funereal images are characterised by a peculiar dialectic tension between presence and absence that plays a crucial role in understanding the anthropological roots of image-making tout court. Building on Bazin and Eisenstein’s remarks about the longue durée of funerary practices aimed at preserving the visual appearances of dead bodies after their disappearance due to physical decay, this essay offers a genealogy of techniques that from casting, moulding and embalming eventually leads to the recording of images onto celluloid film. The death mask, in particular, with its capacity of capturing and fixing through the imprint process the traits of a face that was once alive, seems to respond to that same need to arrest time and ‘secure phenomena’ to which photography and cinema would later respond.