This thesis examines the face as a central topos in contemporary moving image art. Specifically, it investigates how the face simultaneously figures as a locus of capture and resistance in the essay films and installations of Harun Farocki, the performance and video art of Hito Steyerl, and William Kentridge’s intermedial productions for gallery and stage. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s articulation of the face as a site of political struggle in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) provides a guiding theoretical framework for this analysis. I place this post-structuralist model in dialogue with contemporary discourses of media archaeology and critical race theory in order to interrogate these artists’ confrontations with the crimes of European and, in particular, German colonialism. In this vein, I also consider their opposition to the enduring racial and environmental violence reproduced by contemporary systems of capital and control.

Central to this analysis is the correlation of the face to both the surroundings of landscape and the managing function of the hands in the production of moving images mediated across various networks of circulation and exchange. Considering aesthetic production as a kind of metonymic hand(i)work, meanwhile, establishes a chain of connections between these practitioners and their works using a range of image-making technologies. The tripartite structure of the thesis accordingly explores three main thematic foci: the manual treatment of the face in cosmetics, the organizational management of the interface, and the work of the hands in archaeological practice. I contend that faciality provides a model for thinking about or against systems of representation, figuration, and inscription that also encode the domination of bodies and territories by intertwining systems of corporate and state control both historically and in the contemporary moment. This analysis thus demonstrates the central importance of the face to scholarship that engages with the related aesthetic and political strategies active in staging resistance and solidarity in contemporary moving image practices.