Faces
- Date of creation : 1976
- Country : Portugal
- Artist - Author : Julião Sarmento
Description
"The film Faces, 1976, is a triptych of sorts. Two heads of hair, a blonde and a brunette, rub against one another at the bottom of the screen. This is followed by a close-up shot of two women kissing. The camera focuses on their mouths and tongues—licking, sucking, and moving in and around one another. At first glance it might seem erotic. But as time passes, and the kiss goes on and on and on, the tongues become chunks of wet flesh, the movements less sensual, or erotic, and more grotesque, becoming rudimentary in the abstraction of the close-up. Eventually, although beautifully shot, it becomes almost dull to watch. The final section depicts the two woman sitting, nude, but with heavily made up faces, one leaning her head on the other’s shoulder—a tender epilogue to the intensity of their performance.
Faces was made in Portugal just after the country had reached the end of a 41 year dictatorship—decades in which expressions of art, sex, religion and politics were censored and forbidden. Read through this lens, the film has much wider connotations of freedom, privacy, and complicity."
(Source, website, Cristina Guerra Gallery)