Interface

Fay

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

by

disfigured

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

The Author

Patrick Adamson

disfigured

The fourth and final blog in our Halloween series, written by Paddy Adamson, brings together the key themes of Hollywood and disfigured faces. As a researcher in film, and a member of Face Equality International’s Lived Experience Group, Paddy brings a unique perspective to the topic. Don’t miss the rest of the series, starting with Fay Bound Alberti’s introduction, Sara Wasson’s blog on Les yeux sans visage and Lauren Stephenson’s analysis of The Eye. Let us know what you think!

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

One of the best-known scenes in all of silent cinema unfolds about halfway through Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Young soprano Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) has been carried down into a suite prepared for her in the cellars under the Paris Opera House by the Phantom (Lon Chaney), a mysterious masked composer who haunts the venue. He promises her a great career, providing she can devote herself to following his orders.

But curiosity about what lies beneath her mentor’s disguise gets the better of her. Stealing up behind him as he plays “Don Juan Triumphant” at his organ, peering over his shoulder as he faces the camera, she snatches the Phantom’s mask away, revealing directly to the audience a cadaverous face of sunken cheeks, protruding teeth, and flared, elongated nostrils. When he turns to look at her, intrigue gives way to screams; the film cuts between the Phantom’s true face and the terror and disgust it inspires in hers.

Said to have led to screaming and even fainting among moviegoers of the day, the Phantom’s unmasking is a shocking spectacle of physical difference and an iconic moment in horror film history – the unveiling of a face that has continued to fascinate in the near-century since. Created by Chaney himself, an actor famed for his extreme transformations, the villain’s look was kept secret until release. Today, his elaborate make-up can be imitated for the price of a high-end Halloween mask.

“Feast your eyes”

Yet, for all that the Phantom’s command as he forcibly turns the cowering Christine’s face toward his – “Feast your eyes – – glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!” – could equally be directed at the film’s audience. There is more to the scene than the thrill of seeing Chaney’s make-up artistry paraded on screen. It provides a revelation vital to the story. Confirmed by the disclosure of his deformed face is the Phantom’s monstrous true nature. The corrupted body of this gruesome physical spectacle befits the corrupted soul of this dangerously deranged outcast from Devil’s Island, his disfigurement the outward expression of the ugliness within.

Film still from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

For me, as a disfigured viewer, this is the most striking aspect of this iconic moment. Not only is it testament to the longevity and pervasiveness of an all too familiar tendency, unavoidable at this time of year – the imitation of appearance-altering conditions in the name of a “spooky” costume – but it is an uncomfortable reminder of what it means, in the codified world of Hollywood cinema at least, to be facially different.

Physical Appearance as Cinematic Shorthand

Filmmakers have long exploited the meaning-making potential of distinctive physical characteristics, using non-normative appearances as an expedient shorthand for character. The most notorious example of this physiognomic logic is the prevalence of facial scarring among movie villains. Examples range from the monstrous of horror cinema – the burn-scarred Freddy Kreuger foremost among them – to the crime lords and Sith Lords of the latest James Bond and Star Wars blockbusters. Visible evidence of a past gone awry, stated or otherwise, their scars offer a convenient rationale for the malevolent course they now follow.

At the same time, there can be little doubt that the appeal of figures from the Phantom to Kreuger owes also to a fascination with such bodies and the uncomfortable feelings they are supposed to excite. They are the frightful icons behind many a Halloween costume, after all, evidence of a pleasure found in the display or performance of physical difference that can be traced back through the history of film and the freak show. Chaney made something of a career of it, earning the nickname “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for the lengths he went to: strapping his lower legs to his thighs to play a double amputee in The Penalty (1920); labouring under a skin-tight rubber suit and seventy-pound hump as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923); and apparently combining his famed make-up skills with painful wire hooks to create his iconic Phantom.

LOn Chaney

The Man Who Laughs

Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) typifies this marriage of exploitation and empathy, using the non-normative appearance of its protagonist to directly interrogate conventional ideas about the face and the role it plays in how we understand ourselves and others. Originally planned as a Chaney vehicle, this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel stars Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, a travelling show attraction famous for his wide frozen grin, carved into his face as a child by a Comprachico surgeon under orders from the King of England.

While his condition does not, in theory, preclude his entry into the spaces and pursuits enjoyed by the masses, Gwynplaine’s world is circumscribed by his facial difference. Most welcome on society’s edges, in carnivals and freak shows where difference is a valued commodity, he internalises the daily ridicule and the aesthetic and moral judgements of a callous, grotesquely prejudiced, yet superficially “normal” public; he fears he is unworthy of the woman he loves, Dea (again played by Philbin), for her blindness prevents her perceiving the real him.

To portray a man who can only laugh, Veidt’s wide grin was held in place using a bespoke, and apparently painful, appliance that deprived him of access to normative facial expressions, along with the social cues associated with them. Where the face is conventionally seen as inseparable from selfhood, the foremost means by which we recognise each other, Gwynplaine’s face not only fails to reflect his inner self but seems to contradict it, thanks to the fixity of its lower half; when not covering his mouth via a protective gesture of sorts, he is seen to grin his way through incidents to which such a reaction rarely seems appropriate. His character divorced from his appearance to jarring ends, the result invites audiences to search for an understanding of his agony in his eyes and comportment, and, in the process, perhaps reflect on their assumptions about how a face should react and look.

A Damaging Reliance on Disfigurement

And yet, for all the nuance, or at least ambivalence, that The Man Who Laughs brings to its handling of disfigurement – being, at once, indebted to and critical of the exploitation of facial difference – the film’s enduring place in the popular consciousness again owes overwhelmingly to the unusual look of its protagonist. In 1940, a photograph of Veidt in make-up as Gwynplaine was used by DC Comics artists as a model for a new villain: the Joker – flamboyant nemesis to the noble, honourable Batman.

A staple Halloween costume today, the Joker has gone through numerous incarnations in the intervening eight decades, with the extent and cause of his scarring and famous malevolent grin being repeatedly reimagined. The latest, in 2022’s The Batman, finds him with full-body scarring and a permanent smile attributed to a congenital condition. Director Matt Reeves explains, “…he’s had this very dark reaction to it, and he’s had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way…and this is his response.”

Nearly a century on from the unmasking of Chaney’s Phantom, and in a world where media images are routinely decried as a source of body dissatisfaction, Reeves’s comments illustrate the extent to which popular cinema’s damaging reliance on disfigurement as a visible expression of inner corruption or evil continues to go unexamined in many circles. Moreover, they speak to the unique challenges faced by the facial difference community and how these extend beyond the cosmetic and the medical, beyond even the more overt forms of discrimination and abuse to which many of us have grown up accustomed.

Everyday Prejudice

Yet, for all that characters with facial differences are disproportionately given (often lurid) backstories involving some kind of “dark reaction” to what is treated as an inevitable social stigma, the toll such everyday prejudice can have on the life experiences and mental health of those affected by it has rarely been addressed via bespoke legal protections or support. Recent years have, it should be highlighted, seen some more promising signs on this front: the British Film Institute’s 2018 commitment “to stop funding films in which negative characteristics are depicted through scars or facial difference”, and the ongoing efforts of Face Equality International, a global alliance of NGOs working around disfigurement, advocating the overdue recognition of facial difference as a human rights issue in its own right. These are significant steps and, in their being so, reminders of how much remains to be done.

Author Bio

Patrick Adamson is an editor and independent film researcher who lectured at the University of St Andrews from 2021 until 2022, having received his PhD from there in 2020. Specialising in silent Westerns, early popular historical filmmaking, and universalist discourses in 1920s Hollywood, he has been published in journals including Film History and received awards for his research from BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) and SERCIA (Société pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche du Cinéma Anglophone).

He is a member of the Face Equality International Lived Experience Working Group.

Further reading

view all

‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

by

‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

The Author

Dr Lauren Stephenson

This piece on transplantation and The Eye (2008) is the second blog in our series on Halloween, Horror Films, transplantation and the face. In this installment, Lauren Stephenson (York St John) explores the tensions between science and the body, and matters of the soul and the self. Catch up with the other blogs in the series, by Fay Bound Alberti, Sara Wasson and Paddy Adamson. Our final blog in the series, by Paddy Adamson, will be released next week

‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

The Eye (2008) is a U.S. remake of the earlier Pang Brothers film Jian Gui, released in 2002, which arrived in theatres as the Hollywood penchant for adapting successful (and sometimes notorious) East Asian horror films reached its zenith. As such, it is perhaps most often discussed as part of a debate regarding remake culture in the U.S., within which fans and scholars alike tend to become combative over the superiority of the original texts, and uninhibited in expressing their disappointment with their often cynically marketed remakes.

What becomes lost or minimised during this debate, however, is how both films (original and remake) attempt to re-examine our relationship with our corporeal selves, passing commentary on the ethics of transplantation by focusing not on the procedure itself, but rather the protracted process of adjustment and recovery which follows it. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll be focusing in particular on the U.S. remake of this transplantation narrative, which reveals an ambivalent stance towards medical procedure, but demonstrates tangible anxiety regarding notions of selfhood and identity after transplantation has occurred.

A ‘haunted organ’

The film begins by introducing us to our protagonist, Sydney (Jessica Alba). Sydney has been without sight since she was 5 years old, when an accident with fireworks damaged her eyes. In the opening moments of the film, Sydney monologues about her desire for sight and vision; a musician by profession, Sydney comments; ‘I bet music looks beautiful’ – an interesting comment which seems to suggest that even predominantly auditory experiences are, for Sydney, incomplete without her sight (an ableist narrative which is equal parts challenged and reinforced throughout the unfolding film).

This desire to regain her sight and restore a ‘complete’ experience leads Sydney to attempt a bilateral cornea transplant (the representational accuracy of which is questionable). We learn later that this isn’t the first time she’s undergone the procedure, with her first transplant corneas rejecting during a procedure when she was 12 years old. Following a successful second attempt, the film begins to shift consistently between a conventional third person perspective and Sydney’s first-hand POV, hypothetically placing the audience in the position of a recovering cornea transplant patient. Sydney’s vision is, to begin with, blurred, and it is here where the film’s central conceit – that of the ‘haunted organ’ – begins to exploit the recovering organ and patient as facilitators for horrific ambiguity. Sydney, and by extension the audience, begin to witness blurry figures and unexplainable visions; it quickly becomes clear that Sydney’s eyes have not only given her sight in the conventional sense, but have left her with the ability to see what others can’t: the dead.

Recovery

Sydney’s status as a recovering transplant patient means that her authentic experiences of her new eyes are readily dismissed as hallucination or a failure to adjust post-op. Medical professionals are conspicuously absent from the narrative, with the most consistent representative of the medical field being a Dr Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), a post-transplant specialist whose behaviour throughout the film vacillates between gaslighting and romantic interest. As Sydney’s sight improves, so too do her supernatural visions become more vivid. Seeking help from Dr. Faulkner, his troubling and flippant response seems to suggest that Sydney’s vision are not only imagined, but a device to maintain her sense of self as ‘special’ following her op:

Faulkner: ‘You just discovered that you’re like the rest of us’

Sydney: ‘You know, when we first met, I didn’t think you were such an ass’

Faulkner: ‘That’s ‘cos you didn’t know how to spot one. See? Progress.’

Denying Subjectivity

The reframing of Sydney’s ongoing trauma as something self-inflicted and self-interested poses an interesting ethical question; Faulkner’s response denies Sydney subjectivity, autonomy and respect in her recovery, delineating her instead as a gothic heroine and hysterical woman (Showalter, 2000: 190). In framing Sydney’s narrative within the confines of transplantation, and with a fixity on eyes and vision, the film makes explicit the conventional use of the unreliable narrator; Sydney’s recovering vision means that what she witnesses can easily be derided or explained away.

The donor’s eyes thereby become a narrative metaphor for the routine marginalisation of women’s voices and experiences. The donor’s death, we learn later, was at the hands of her community who failed to heed her supernatural warnings of an imminent factory fire, later blaming her for the incident once lives had been lost. When these become Sydney’s eyes, the shared vision of donor and recipient combines to present a reasonably compelling account of the systemic dismissal of women’s accounts and experiences. However, this allegory comes at the expense of dramatising and exploiting the very real disorientation, dissociation and loss of selfhood associated with transplant recovery.

Credit: Richard Foreman/Lionsgate

An ‘ideal’ horror heroine

With this in mind, despite the ways in which the film draws upon established conventions of the ghost and the body to create its impact, some of the most unsettling moments within the film come not from scenes of overt horror (though there are several) but from the way in which Sydney, her regained sight and her recovery are treated by her friends, her doctors and colleagues in the first act of the film. In one early scene, Sydney returns to her home post-surgery, only to find it filled with family and friends, hosting her a ‘surprise’ welcome home party. As faces, some of which she’s never seen before, swim before her, we experience a sense of overwhelming claustrophobia – an experience which eventually drives Sydney to retreat into the kitchen, away from the crowds.

In another instance, Sydney’s conductor becomes noticeably agitated and frustrated when it appears she cannot immediately adjust to playing her violin sighted after the operation. It would appear that the timeline for Sydney’s recovery, and indeed the way she processes that recovery, is consistently framed within the expectations of others. Her recovery is either not fast enough, not full enough, or not simple enough, to sustain investment from any of the other principal characters within the film, and this creates an isolation that sustains her as an ‘ideal’ horror heroine.

The Body and the Self

Later in the film, Sydney is shown a photo by her sister, and realises that the woman she is seeing in the mirror isn’t her (this recalls a moment in her opening monologue, where she comments that she doubts she will even recognise herself once her sight is restored). The woman Sydney sees in the mirror is in fact her donor, and the dissociation this speaks to, however clumsily, seems to demonstrate some fear or anxiety surrounding the nature of the body itself, and its relationship with the person, soul or being that inhabits it. This is particularly pronounced in that the organ here is the eye; the ‘window to the soul’.

Notions of ownership and selfhood are explicitly challenged here; Sydney’s eyes work in tandem with her body, yet they show her images, visions and events past and present, not all of which belong to her, and none of which she has control over. Indeed, in the final act of the film, Sydney embraces her role as a kind of ‘custodian’ of her donor’s eyes, allowing to be guided by the premonition she has been seeing in excerpts throughout the film. She saves countless lives in doing so (thereby inferring that this was the correct and heroic thing to do) but also sacrifices her sight once again to ensure the safety of others.

Sacrificial Heroine

In the end, the supernatural and a pseudo-religious belief in the soul and afterlife trump science in The Eye. Unlike many ‘surgical horrors’, which characterise science as ‘the deus ex machina, promising to restore limbs and faces that have been irremediably lost’ (Aldana-Reyes 2014: 147), The Eye, and Sydney as its protagonist, regard science as a means through which to restore something less tangible – Sydney’s relationship with her donor eyes restores justice and peace to her donor and delivers dozens of people from death at the hands of a freak accident.

In its complicated relationship with the ethics and responsibilities of the transplant industry, the film eventually side-lines a consideration of transplantation itself in favour of casting Sydney as saccharine sacrificial heroine; one whose relationship to her new eyes is happily relinquished in the interest of saving others.

That the final scene of the film imagines Sydney as more complete and fulfilled without her donor eyes than with them speaks volumes; transplantation here is seen as a means to a narrative end – in The Eye, matters of science and the body are no match for matters of the soul and self.

Works cited:

Jian Gui (dir. Pang Brothers, 2002)
The Eye (dir. David Moreau & Xavier Palud, 2008)
Reyes, X.A. (2014). Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror
Film. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).
Showalter, E. (2000) ‘Dr. Jekyll’s Closet’ in Ken Gelder (ed.). The Horror Reader. (London: Routledge).
p.190.

Author Bio

Lauren Stephenson is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media & Communications at York St. John University, U.K., where she teaches across the fields of Film, Media, Literature and American Studies. Her research interests include Horror cinema (in particular, British, American and New Zealand Horror), Gender and Horror, and women’s friendship in cinema. She is the co-founder of the Cinema and Social Justice project at YSJ (@cinemajustice) and has most recently written on folk horror, the Fear Street series and its adaptations, and First Ladies in U.S. disaster movies. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenrachel11.

Further reading

view all

Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

by

Interface

Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

The Author

Sara Wasson

Interface

This is the first blog in our series on horror, Halloween, transplant and facial surgery. It explores the 1960 French-language horror film Les yeux sans visage or Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju. Based on the novel of the same name by Jean Redon, it revolves around a plastic surgeon who is determined to perform a face transplant on his daughter, who was injured in a car accident. Catch up with AboutFace PI Fay Bound Alberti’s introduction to the series, and keep an eye out for next week’s installment from Lauren Stephenson. 

Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

Silence … unbearable tension … and seven people faint, overcome by what they see on the screen. So the tale goes of the screening of Georges Franju’s film Les yeux sans visage at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1960. Although that story might be apocryphal, there is no denying that Franju’s melancholy, ponderous film invites viewers into a compelling and claustrophobic contemplation of a face transplant gone awry. 

Yet the film does many things beyond shocking an audience. Like all ‘horror’, whether film, book or game, Les yeux does cultural work. It can show us prevailing anxieties, but it can also be ‘speculative.’ As critic Kelly Hurley says of earlier Gothic work: it can help us consider things which might be hard to contemplate in other cultural arenas. Les yeux is a haunting example of a film which invites us to contemplate unbearable and unspeakable things: guilt, family dysfunction, despair, as well as thinking about the mysterious practices of surgery and face transplant.

Surgery

First: surgery. After chloroform and other general anaesthetics entered use in the 19th century, surgery underwent a dramatic shift in the way it has been thought of and represented. Prior to the emergence of sweet analgesic oblivion, surgery was an act of violence and pain; in the moment of surgery, the experience could evoke butchery or vivisection. General anaesthesia mercifully removed much of the pain, and also crucially changed the surgical context, both in practice and in popular imagination. 

Surgeons became a kind of secular priest, leading within a  quiet and fundamentally unknowable space, a place which lay people could not enter. The person at the centre of the event —the patient—is mercifully unconscious of what occurs there. The poet Karen Fiser speaks of the ‘white space’ of anaesthetised surgery, for if it works as planned, the lapse of time is blessedly blank. The patient hopes to be spared their own body’s suffering under a blade.

The famous surgical scene of Les yeux takes us into that ‘white space’ of surgery, while relentlessly withholding any distractions or solace. Without music, the camera focuses on the shining tables and instruments, the movements of the scalpel, and profound stillness and attention. The shock of the scene stems not from gore, but from the extended, silent, meticulous attention and precision of the surgical act. Scalpels, silence, and stamina.

Emotionally Charged

In addition to its fascinating representation of surgery, the film offers many other provocations for reflection. Any form of tissue transplantation may become emotionally charged for the receiver, the family of the donor, or the donor themselves, and face transplant is consistently a form of tissue transfer which garners particularly intense emotion. Indeed, long before transplantation became medically viable with the pharmaceutical launch of cyclosporine in the 1980s, face transplant inspired a vast range of creative work and discussion. Nowhere was this more true than in France. Gaston Leroux’s novel 1909-1910 Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera), serialised in 1910, and Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel L’Homme qui rit (The Laughing Man) published in 1869, are just two of many French works which contemplate the emotional challenges of facial injury.

The critic Stefanos Geroulanos has discussed how, during the twentieth century, the horrors of World War I trench warfare intensified awareness of the subjective burdens of facial wounding due to the deep suffering of the gueles cassees, soldiers facially mutilated during the nightmare of trench warfare. The face was explored in philosophical writing, too, with philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes and Emmanuel Levinas reflecting on the cultural significance of faces and the way they mediate social connection. Given this wealth of interest in the trope of facial surgery and transplant, it is perhaps fitting that France was the first country to achieve a successful face transplant in 2005.

Tissue Rejection

es yeux draws attention to another historical reality, too: tissue rejection. Until pharmaceutical immunosuppression was developed at the end of the twentieth century, any transplant led to acute rejection (except between identical twins). Unless immune-suppressed, the body recognises transplant tissue as genetically ‘other’ and attacks it, killing the tissue, and the recipient then succumbed to both the loss of the transferred organ and the poison of the decaying transferred tissue 

Some of the most haunting images of the film are from the sequence of still photographs in which Christine, the transplant recipient, stares miserably at the camera while it records the failure of the graft. Since the time the film emerged, immunosuppression has transformed the arena of transplantation, and tissue recipients are no longer so inevitably afflicted. 

Rejection remains, however, an inevitability in face transplant, although many periods of rejection can be treated. Yet through these emotive, silent images, the film gives the viewer a vivid sense of the suspense, dread and disillusionment that accompanied the decades of experimental failures. Scientific writing has to be detached, but nonetheless the 1960s and 1970s saw emotional language used by scientists and surgeons, describing ‘dark days’, ‘black years’, and ‘clinical heartbreaks’, as acknowledged in analysis by Reneé Fox, Judith Swazey and J. Dosselor. Cinematic moments such as this—albeit in a fantastical film—can help us feel the emotion inside surgical history. 

Inspiring work like the AboutFace project, led by Professor Prof Fay Bound Alberti, explores the many facets of tissue transplantation. In addition to surgical scenes, there are so many human elements to transplantation practice, including the experiences of donors, donor kin, recipients, caregivers, surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, physiotherapists, and more. In addition, one can consider the administrative apparatus of tissue allocation and management nationally: the algorithms of waiting lists, the icebox, the management of donor death, and more.

Horror and Transplantation

I haven’t described the film’s plot, and that’s not accidental. Any summary of the film’s plot makes it sound like it must appear on screen as a frantic bloodbath, scarlet splashed on celluloid. So many murders. So much death. But reducing the film to the plot would miss the most powerful thing about it: the soporific, restrained delivery, remarkable silences, and the lost, drifting quality of the protagonist, Christine. Iain Sinclair has critiqued the film’s ‘funereal’ pacing—‘all that plodding up staircases’, but as I suggest elsewhere, the plodding is perhaps the point: the film has a dream-like melancholy, confronting the viewer with Christine’s sadness guilt, and exhaustion. 

Films such as Les yeux do not offer realistic representations of contemporary transplantation, but they do give us an opportunity to dwell with, and think through, surgical histories of transfer and our own cultural imagining around it. Transplantation is an extraordinary feat. Yet, like any human practice, it may also at times involve elements of grief, pain, inequalities of access, and other difficult histories both personal and social. Even today, there can be challenging emotions around transplantation for recipients, donors, donor kin and caregivers, and these emotions deserve compassion. The Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart (PITH) project in Toronto, Canada, explores some of the emotional and conceptual challenges that can attend tissue transfer. Works such as Sheryl Hamdy’s Our Bodies Belong to God, Megan Crowley-Matoka’s Domesticating Organ Transplant and Lesley Sharp’s Strange Harvest all invite us to recognise some of the complex mixture of emotions around these processes. 

In the service of such nuance, horror film and fiction can be a surprising, but useful, ally to imagination. Horror may help us listen to histories that are hard to hear.

References

Crowley-Matoka, Megan, Domesticating Organ Transplant (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

Dosselor, J., ‘Transplantation’, in P. Terasaki (ed.), History of Transplantation (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1971), pp. 295-306 

Fiser, Karen, Losing and Finding (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003)

Fox, Renée and Judith Swazey, Spare Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Fox, Renée and Judith Swazey, The Courage to Fail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)

Geroulanos, Stefanos, ‘Postwar facial reconstruction’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 31:2 (2013), 15-33 

Hamdy, Sherine, Our Bodies Belong to God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)

Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Les yeux sans visage, dir. by Georges Franju (Champs-Élysées Productions, 1958; US release 1960).

Sharp, Lesley, Strange Harvest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

Shildrick, M., A. Carnie, A. Wright, P. McKeever, E. Huan-Ching Jan, E. De Luca, I. Bachmann, S. Abbey, D. Dal Bo, J. Poole, T. El-Sheikh and H. Ross, ‘Messy entanglements’, Medical Humanities, Online First (2017), 1-9 

Sinclair, Iain, ‘Homeopathic horror’, Sight and Sound, 5:4 (1995), 24-27

Wasson, Sara, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)

 

Author bio:

Sara Wasson is Reader in Gothic Studies at Lancaster University. She is the author of Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine (2020) and Urban Gothic of the Second World War (2010), which won the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize of the International Gothic Association. With Emily Alder, she co-edited Gothic Science Fiction, 1980-2010 (2011), editor of a special issue of Gothic Studies exploring Medical Gothic (2015), and primary investigator of the UK AHRC-funded project Translating Chronic Pain. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Medical Humanities, Gothic Studies, and other publications.

Further reading

view all

Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

by

Interface face

Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

The Author

Fay Bound Alberti

An introduction to our October blog series, exploring the ties between transplantation and the horror film genre. Don’t miss blogs on Les Yeux sans Visage, The Eye, and Hollywood’s negative representations of facial difference.

Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

At InterFace we work according to a strict code of ethics around respect for human life and dignity. We care about the language that we use to talk about facial difference and appearance, and about the emotional, ethical and socio-economic challenges of transplantation. That work and care, takes place within a wider cultural context in which the major themes of our research – facial difference and transplantation – are not always treated with sensitivity or regard for human experience. Indeed, as the founder of Face Equality International and our own Sarah Hall has shown, facial difference is associated with negative personality traits in popular culture; Hollywood “baddies” carry facial scars that mark them out as separate from (and antithetical to) civilised society.

Transplantation is also a subject that has, since its inception, generated considerable public interest and anxiety. Transplanted organs, as historians of literature, film and ethics, have shown, are invested with a wide range of meanings, whether it’s the Hands of Orlac (1924) which an experimental graft gives a concert pianist the hands of a murderer – who continues to murder. Or Face/Off (1997) in which FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and master criminal Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage) change faces, and with it their entire social and familial identity. Stories of body swapping, organ harvesting and enforced donation have been part of the literary landscape since the 1960s, and these influence, and contribute to, broader social and political concerns about bodies, citizenship, and personhood.

Throughout October, and as an antidote to the casual exploitation of horror narratives around appearance and the limits of the body, we will be reflecting on transplantation narratives in fiction, with a series of fascinating guest blogs: Sara Wasson will be writing about Eyes without a Face (1960), a film that invites audiences to contemplate ‘unbearable and unspeakable’ around transplant ethics; Lauren Stephenson will be writing about The Eye (2002), a film that, like Hands of Orlac, continues the fear of the ‘haunted organ’; and Paddy Adamson will be exploring the Hollywood’s exploitation of spectacles of facial difference. Thank you to all our contributors.

Further reading

view all

Artificial Intelligence and Facial Discrimination

by

AI

Artificial Intelligence and Facial Discrimination

The Author

Phyllida Swift

Phyllida Swift

This blog on artificial intelligence and facial discrimination is the fourth and final installment of our series on facial recognition. Don’t miss our first blog by AboutFace PI Fay Bound Alberti, about what history can teach us about technological innovation, our second by guest author Dr Sharrona Pearl, on human facial recognition, face blindness and super-recognisers, or our third by George King at the Ada Lovelace Institute, on regulating facial recognition technologies.

Artificial Intelligence and Facial Discrimination

Over the past couple of years, here at Face Equality International we have experienced increasing numbers of requests from academics, policymakers, government bodies and businesses to input into commentary and research on artificial intelligence, and in particular ethical considerations around the effect of AI technologies on the facial difference community. The most obvious technology of concern is facial recognition and its potential for bias, exclusion and censorship. All of which are issues with a growing evidence base, but with little progress or acknowledgement of such evidence from technology companies, regulators, or businesses adopting AI into their practice.

At Face Equality International (FEI), we campaign as an Alliance of global organisations to end the discrimination and indignity experienced by people with facial disfigurements (FD) around the globe. We do this by positioning face equality as a social justice issue, rather than simply a health issue, which is all too often the case.

For any equality organisation, the public dialogue on how AI has been proven to replicate and reinforce human bias against marginalised groups is deeply concerning. Granted, it’s reassuring to see increased recognition in society, but this is not without great fear from social justice movements that generations of advancements could relapse at the hands of unregulated AI.

Because as it stands, AI is currently unregulated. A regulatory framework is in development for Europe, but ‘the second half of 2024 is the earliest time the regulation could become applicable to operators with the standards ready and the first conformity assessments carried out.’

Back in March, I was invited to share a statement at an event attached to the United Human Rights Council led by Gerard Quinn, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This came off the back of a thematic report into the impact of AI on the disabled community. The themes in this blog will follow similar lines as the statement, in less formal terms.

AI and the disabled community

It’s unsurprising that the most apparent AI-related threat that is relevant to us is facial recognition software. For an already marginalised and mistreated community, AI poses the threat of further degrading treatment. For instance, we already see constant abuse and hate speech on social media, where people with facial differences are referred to as ‘sub-human’, ‘monster’, or ‘that thing’. But algorithms often fail to pick up on such slurs as being derogatory to the facial difference (FD) community, which should fall into the protected group under disability policies.

Social media also poses the problem of censorship through AI, where on several occasions we have seen photos of people with disfigurements blurred out and marked as ‘sensitive’, ‘violent’, ‘graphic’ content. When reported, platforms and their human moderators are still failing to remove these warnings.

There is growing evidence to demonstrate the extent of harms caused by AI software in disadvantaging certain groups. Such as when Google Photos grouped a photo series of black people into a folder titled, ‘gorillas’. We know that several FD community members have reported having their photos blurred out and marked as sensitive, graphic or violent on social media, effectively censoring the facial difference community and inhibiting their freedom of expression to post photos of their faces online.

We know from research that many people make assumptions about someone’s character and ability based on the way they look. A study in America from Rankin and Borah found that photos of people with disfigurements were rated as significantly ‘less honest, less employable, less intelligent, less trustworthy’, the list goes on – when compared to photos where the disfigurement was removed.

Facial_Difference

AI, Dehumanisation, and Negative Bias

Sadly, we’re seeing these assumptions play out in AI led hiring practices too, where language choice, facial expression, even clothing have been shown to disadvantage candidates, whose scores are affected negatively. In a notorious Amazon example, a machine had taught itself to search for candidates using particular word choices to describe themselves and their activities, which ended up favouring male candidates who more commonly used those words. How can we expect someone with facial palsy, for example, to pass tests based on ‘positive’ facial expressions.

We have heard several cases of passport gates failing to work for people with facial disfigurements, and the same goes for applying for passports and ID online. Essentially, this is because the various software tests required to submit photos are not recognising people’s faces as human faces when they are put through. For an already all too often dehumanised community, this is simply not good enough.

Non-recognition of people with disfigurements was recorded by World Bank when it was found that someone with Down’s Syndrome was denied a photo ID card as the technology failed to recognise his non-standard face as a face. This was also apparent for people with Albinism.

There are often alternative routes to verify identity outside of facial recognition, for instance when problems arise with smartphone apps which rely on facial recognition to access bank accounts or similar services. Systems which ask the user to perform an action – such as blinking – can cause difficulties for people with some conditions, such as Moebius Syndrome or scarring. Some apps offer an alternative route for people unable to use the automatic system, but this goes against the principle of inclusive design and may be more cumbersome for people with facial differences. As is often talked about in disability spaces, the additional admin required of someone with a disability or disfigurement can take an emotional toll. Self-advocacy of this kind can be a life-long occupation.

Ethical AI?

So the problem for us is not necessarily in proving that there is a glitch in the system, it lies in making ourselves known to the technological gatekeepers. Those with the power to turn the tide on this ever-evolving issue. Whilst building coalitions with fellow organisations pushing for ethical AI, such as Disability Ethical? AI.

Princeton University Computer Science professor, Olga Russakovsky, said, “A.I. researchers are primarily people who are male, who come from certain racial demographics, who grew up in high socioeconomic areas, primarily people without disabilities.” “We’re a fairly homogeneous population, so it’s a challenge to think broadly about world issues.”

What’s interesting to note is that when we have asked our communities to relay to us their potential concerns about the growing use of AI, across every aspect of society, through polls and forms promoted across social media and via our membership, the response has been rather limited. There is often a consistent dialogue between us and our online communities when discussing issues that affect the FD community, but it appears that when it comes to AI, there has been far less of a response.

A ‘Transparency Void’

After further investigation, our team believes this could be for a number of reasons. Firstly, AI is too broad a technological term that conjures up distant, futuristic notions of robots driving our cars and taking over the planet. Which is very much what I thought of when this topic first landed on my own desk.
The second potential reason could be what we’ve started to refer to in our commentary on the issue as a ‘transparency void’. Meaning that it is far less obvious when a machine is creating barriers, bias or discriminating against an individual on the grounds that they are facially diverse, than it is if it were to be a human giving away cues in their language, their eye contact and their behaviours. In a recent Advisory Council meeting, a member spoke of the frustrations of trying to navigate automated phone lines with set questions, when your facial difference also affects speech. How does one get through to an actual human when there is no option to pass certain automated tests?

AI discrimination will continue to place the burden on the victim of the discrimination to challenge the decision, rather than on the (often well-resourced) entity using the technology. Existing research shows that the number of cases brought in relation to breaches of employment law legislation is just a tiny fraction of those which occur, so this is not an effective enforcement mechanism.

A Rapidly Escalating Issue

This is perhaps the most insidious threat regarding the negative impact of AI on furthering the face equality movement. Who do we hold accountable when AI discriminates based on facial appearance? Because we know for sure that it is already happening, as therein lies another fear for us at FEI, in that many members of the FD community will already be experiencing disadvantages at the hands of AI, without realising it, or without comprehension for how quickly this issue is escalating, with the use of AI in recruitment, security, identification, policing, assessing insurance, financial assessments and across our online spaces. These are not emerging technologies, AI is already here with us in force, and it’s growing exponentially.

It seems the crux of the issue lies in narrow data sets. In simple terms, the faces that AI is used to seeing are only certain types of faces. ‘Normative’, non-diverse, non-facially different faces that is.
We at FEI want to get to the source of the problem, and prevent further damage. It is our understanding, as a social justice organisation, as opposed to a tech company, that the best way to do this is to lend ourselves to the meaningful, robust and ethical consultation and involvement of our community. Whether it’s a question of us supporting companies to widen the pool of faces to diversify their date sets, or us continuing to feed into research and policy consultation, we are committed to making our cause, and the people we aim to serve known to the companies that so often ignore them.

Author Bio

Phyllida Swift

Phyllida is CEO at Face Equality International. Phyllida was involved in a car accident in Ghana in 2015 and sustaining facial scarring. After which, she set out to reshape the narrative around scars and facial differences in the public eye, to champion positive, holistic representation that didn’t sensationalise, or other the facial difference community any further. She started out by sharing her story as a media volunteer for Changing Faces, before taking on a role as Campaigns Officer, and later Manager. During that time, she led the award winning, Home Office funded disfigurement hate crime campaign, along with working on multiple Face Equality Days, ‘Portrait Positive’ and ‘I Am Not Your Villain’. She shared her own experiences of how societal attitudes and poor media representation impacted upon being a young woman with facial scarring in her TEDX talk in 2018. Phyllida sits on the AboutFace Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP).

Further reading

view all

Regulating facial recognition and other biometric technologies

by

Regulating facial recognition and other biometric technologies

The Author

George King

This blog on regulating facial recognition is the third installment of our series on facial recognition. Don’t miss our first blog by AboutFace PI Fay Bound Alberti, about what history can teach us about technological innovation, or our second by guest author Dr Sharrona Pearl, on human facial recognition, face blindness and super-recognisers.

Regulating facial recognition and other biometric technologies

Sara Wasson, Lancaster University

Our faces are unique and intimately connected to our sense of self and identity. Most of us are able to recognise a very large number of faces and take this quintessentially human ability for granted.

But this important skill is no longer limited to humans. Algorithms can do it too. Specific measurements, such as the distance between our eyes, nose, mouth, ears and so on, can be automatically captured and fed into AI systems. These systems are capable of identifying us within a database or picking us out from a crowd.

Biometric (‘biological measurement’) data is the term for any data derived from measuring our physical characteristics, and this includes our faces, fingerprints, walking style (gait) and tone of voice. Biometric technologies can be used to recognise and identify us, but they are also being used to categorise and make inferences about us.

These technologies were previously almost exclusively used within policing. However, they are now being used by a growing number of private and public actors, including employers, schools and retailers to identify but also to categorise.

This raises a number of legal, ethical and societal concerns. Our human rights, such as our rights to privacy, free expression, free association and free assembly, are potentially at risk.

Discrimination and Bias

There are also issues of bias and discrimination. Some biometric technologies – particularly facial recognition – function less accurately for people with darker skin. But even if the technology could be improved to accurately match faces from all racial groups, ethical problems would persist.

Discrimination and bias can also arise from the social context of policing and surveillance. Facial recognition may be disproportionately used against marginalised communities. Shops may disproportionately add people of colour to ‘watchlists’. Simply making the tech more accurate is not enough to make it harmless or acceptable.

To disentangle these challenges and investigate potential reforms, the Ada Lovelace Institute undertook a three-year programme of public engagement, legal analysis and policy research exploring the governance needed to ensure biometrics are used with public legitimacy.

Through in-depth public engagement research, we found serious public concerns about the impact on rights and freedoms.

Negative Impact on Rights and Freedoms

We began by conducting the first nationally representative survey on UK public attitudes towards facial recognition technology, Beyond Face Value. Respondents were given a brief definition of the technology and answered questions about its use in a range of contexts, such as policing, schools, companies, supermarkets, airports and public transport.

The survey found that a majority of people (55%) want the UK Government to impose restrictions on police use of facial recognition and that nearly half the public (46%) want the right to opt out. This figure was higher for people from minority ethnic groups (56%), for whom the technology is less accurate.

The Citizens’ Biometrics Council, a demographically diverse group of 50 members of the UK public, heard from experts about how they’re used, the ethical questions raised and the current state of regulatory oversight. After deliberating on the issues, the Council concluded that there is need for a strong legal framework to ensure that biometrics are used in a way that is responsible, trustworthy and proportionate.

However, an independent legal review, led by Matthew Ryder QC, has found that the legal protections in place are inadequate. The review shows that existing legislation and oversight mechanisms are fragmented, unclear, ineffective and failing to keep pace.

The review was commissioned by the Institute in 2020, after the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee called for ‘an independent review of options for the use and retention of biometric data’.

Building on the independent legal review and our public engagement research, we published a policy report setting out a series of recommendations for policymakers to take forward. A recording of our launch event is available on our website.

Policy Recommendations

Firstly, there is an urgent need for new, primary legislation to govern the use of biometric technologies. The oversight and enforcement of this legislation should sit within a new regulatory function, specific to biometrics, which is national, independent and adequately resourced.

This regulatory function should be equipped to make two types of assessment:

  • It should assess all biometric technologies against scientific standards of accuracy, reliability and validity.

  • It should assess proportionality in context, prior to use, for those that are used by in the public sector, public services and publicly accessible spaces, or those that make significant decisions about a person.

Finally, we are also calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of biometric technologies for one-to-many identification in publicly accessible spaces (e.g. live facial recognition) and for categorisation in the public sector, public services and publicly accessible spaces, until comprehensive legislation is passed.

Biometric technologies impact our daily lives in powerful ways, and are proliferating without an adequate legal framework. Policymakers need to take action to prevent harms and ensure that these technologies work for people and society.

This blog on regulating facial recognition was written by George King. George is a Communications Manager at the Ada Lovelace Institute, with a focus on external relations and engagement. Prior to joining Ada, George worked at the Royal College of Psychiatrists as Communications Officer in their External Affairs team, working across press and public affairs. He has worked for a range of research-based organisations, including the Francis Crick Institute.

Connect with George King (@George_W_King) and the Ada Lovelace Institute (@AdaLovelaceInst) on Twitter.

Further reading

view all