18 October

The fascinating thing about faces is that the muscles in your face are the only ones in your entire body whose function isn’t about movement or support, or keeping you functioning. They’re there to express emotion. And emotions are always about something - you are scared of something, or confused about something, or happy or sad about something etc. There’s no such thing as just happy, sad, angry, confused. I learned this reading about film directors, and why they use so many close-ups of faces. Hitchcock was brilliant at it, Janet Leigh’s face in that shower in Psycho doesn’t just tell you she’s scared, it captures all of the terror of that moment and compresses it into a facial expression. Seeing it you don’t just think ‘she’s scared’, you imagine and feel an entire context, of being naked in a shower and some lunatic coming at you with a knife. And if your wife or husband gives you ‘a look’, you know it means a *whole* lot of things.