Facing a Universal Language

Miriam Hansen's work consistently contests the “linguistic turn” of structuralism, poststructuralism, and 1970s film theory. Yet the trope of language seems to return incessantly in her critical discourse as a privileged object of analysis—the concept of a universal language, vernacular modernism, D. W. Griffith's hieroglyphic language, and, not least, Babel as a structuring catastrophe of the linguistic dream. Here Doane isolates the concept of a universal language and traces its haunting of film theory in a direction that Hansen does not pursue—that of the close-up of the face, especially in the work of Jean Epstein and Béla BalÁzs. Screens, beginning with cinema, increasingly interrupt yet mime face-to-face contact. This condition is construed as a loss, similar to that of Babel and its universal language: a loss of the fantasized immediacy, transparency, and presence of face-to-face communication.