Cineculture Screening: Make a Face (1971)

Discussant: Karen Sperling (Director)

Make a Face is an unplaceable, enigmatic, and evocative psychodrama that follows the director and performer Karen Sperling as the expressionless Nina, an artist in an ostensibly constant state of dissociation. Critics at the time made facile comparisons to Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (1969), Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), and Susan Sontag’s Brother Carl (1971), but Make a Face is more unwieldy than those films. For one thing, it’s in color: muddy swirls of brown, beige, and orange fill every image. If anything pops, it’s because of the grey flickers of a television screen or the scant images of buildings’ white walls. Visually, shadows and bounce lighting transform an apartment into a site of mystique. Sperling is part of the Warner family—the granddaughter of Harry Warner, the daughter of producer Milton Sperling—but her film has little to do with Hollywood sensibilities. Independently funded and utterly audacious, Make a Face is built on ideas from psychiatrist R. D. Laing, constructing an experiential suspense film where “dreams, fantasy, and reality are all equal.” One of the film’s most brilliant tactics is the use of an ever-present radio, telegraphing the world’s many woes. Its never-ending presence becomes something to accept, and the way it casts dread serves as an analogue to our present-day doom-scrolling. There are also innovative scenes with hand-crafted split-screen, offering further tension and disorientation. This is, however, not a film about fact vs. fiction or of docufiction antics: it’s about the way that all these things are connected—the destructive state of the world, the collapsing of our social lives and selves. The film begins with a connect-the-dots game of Nina’s face and concludes with a close-up of it, the lighting in constant motion to blur the contours of her head. It’s unclear what emotion she’s conveying—it feels more honest that way. 90 minutes.