The faces of the king

Some ideas on the power of portraiture in cinema

Abstract

This article invites us to think of the encounter between cinema and portraiture as a unique intersection where image and society, the individual and the collective, come together and seem to find a dialogue, an exchange. For this reason alone, the portrait would be of interest to think about visual culture, but also, in the historical narrative that contemporary cinema concretizes, it has a special value linked to rewriting and the power of the imagination linked to the audiovisual narrative of the past. A portrait is a testimony that confirms the existence of a life, as well as proposing an approach to unspoken discourses, assimilated in the image of the person portrayed, about ethnicities, socio-economic differences, sexual genders, cultural diversity.

I propose to consider Niles Atallah's film Rey (2017) as a kaleidoscopic portrait of Orélie Antoine de Tounens, a film that, through the conjunction of different "media of the body", shows multiple selves of the portrayed: faces, landscapes, masks congregate as possibilities of memory, imagination and fantasy from which cinema can bring closer, hallucinate and expand the past.