Making Faces, Playing God
Making Faces, Playing God
Identity and the Art of Transformational Makeup
Wearing a mask—putting on another face—embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."
Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making—representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.
This book is entirely unique, very well written, dramatic, and, at the same time, philosophical. It is likely to appeal to a very large audience, including anybody interested in the visual arts, in film, in theater, in philosophical problems of transformation, and in the unconscious generally.
- Introduction
- Part I: The Culture and Art of Transformation
- 1. The Significance and Invention of Faces
- 2. The Culture of Transformation
- 3. The Art of Transformation
- Part II: The Practice of Transformation
- 4. The Demonic
- 5. Aliens
- 6. Disguise for Its Own Sake
- 7. Variant Selves
- 8. Impersonation
- 9. Beyond Human
- Afterthoughts
- Photo Credits
