By Zoe Beloff (Queens College, City University of New York)
A tiny, black-robed woman scurries down a deserted street and ducks into an alley overgrown with ivy. The black-and-white film flickers, as though what is left of the emulsion might crumble away at any moment. The alleyway dissolves; we find ourselves in an artist’s studio. The walls are lined with plaster heads. Are these death masks, works of art, or a gallery of lost souls?
Abruptly a young soldier standing in the foreground removes his chin to reveal a scarred hollow where his jaw once was. He reattaches the chin. A woman in military uniform appraises the fit. She is Anna Coleman Ladd (1878–1939), an American sculptor and former socialite. This is the Studio for Portrait Masks, where, as the soldiers put it, you come to get a “tin face.” A bearded sculptor holds up the cast of a head. As he turns it, the profile switches from classical elegance to terrible deformity. He is Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926), an artist who pioneered the use of masks to hide the destroyed faces of the men who fought in World War I.
The film shows Ladd dipping a sculpted ear into a chemical solution and adjusts the current. The ear, plated with copper, will then be attached to a soldier. To make the attachment, a cast was made of his disfigured features (after his wounds had healed), a suffocating ordeal. The sculptor used the cast to re-create the man’s missing parts and prewar appearance. Details such as eyebrows or mustaches were made from real hair or slivers of tinfoil and glued on. It was difficult to paint masks to convincingly resemble flesh, despite the skill that went into their creation. Children were known to flee in terror at the sight of a masked veteran.
Soldiers are routinely maimed in war, but trench warfare dramatically increased facial injury. These galvanized copper masks offered a way to “face” the world. The psychological toll was enormous. Some men went on to become cinema projectionists, hiding from the world in the darkness of the projection booth. It would surely have been disturbing for them to view again and again films of profound paranoia, centered on the face and shifting identities, in contemporary films such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14), in which Paris is terrorized by a criminal mastermind who with the help of fake beards or facial prosthesis could become any- and everyone, or Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922), another master of disguise.
Plastic Reconstruction inverts the ideals of Western art. The plaster casts of classical Greek sculpture that adorned the nineteenth-century sculptor’s studio are replaced by casts that denote the wreckage of those ideals of beauty and symmetry. We see a young woman painting the tip of a soldier’s nose. She appears to be flirting with the handsome mustachioed officer, shown in profile. The image recalls The Corinthian Maid (1782–84), a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, based on a story by Pliny, in which a Grecian girl traces the silhouette of her departing lover on the wall, substituting an image for the man she is about to lose. Plastic Reconstruction, in contrast, looks to a mythic future where man is no longer quite human. Beyond L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man, these soldiers of flesh and metal, hidden behind reproductions of themselves, anticipate the androids and cyborgs that would populate science fiction yet to come.
After the war people stopped paying attention. The war wounded became just another part of the human landscape. The last image in Plastic Reconstruction is of a soldier who literally takes off his face. He turns directly to the camera, fixes us with his one good eye, and the film abruptly ends. We are left with an indelible afterimage: a “faceless” man.
| Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland where she studied painting and drawing. In 1980 she moved to New York to study at Columbia University where she received an MFA in Film. She is an artist and filmmaker. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. They include proposals for new forms of community; “The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926 – 1972” and “The Days of the Commune”, projects that explore relationships between labor, technology and mental states in “The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff” and “Emotions go to Work” as well as the exploration of the origins of cinema from a feminist perspective in “Charming Augustine” and “Shadowland or Light from the Other Side”. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum Biennales 1997 and 2002, Site Santa Fe, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. She particularly enjoys working in alternative venues that are free and open to the community for events and conversations. |
Bibliography
Alexander, Caroline. “Faces of War,” Smithsonian Magazine (February 2007), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/faces-of-war-145799854/
Bamji, A. N. 2000. “Dental Prosthetics & Orthotics in the Great War: The Contribution of the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup”. Journal of Maxillofacial Prosthetics and Technology. 4: 1–5.
Biernoff, Suzannah. 2011. “The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain”. Social History of Medicine. 24, no. 3: 666–685.
Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Carden-Coyne, Ana. Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Cecil, Hugh, and Peter Liddle. Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced. London: Cooper, 1996.
Scotland, Thomas, and Steven Heys. War Surgery 1914–18. Solihull, England: Helion & Co, 2012.
Tynan, Jane, and Biernoff, Suzannah. Making and Remaking the Civilian Soldier: The World War 1 Photographs of Horace Nicholls. Intellect, 2012.
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