From the Shot/Reverse Shot to the “Face to Face”. The Figuration of the Gesture in Carol

Abstract

In Carol Todd Haynes, 2015), the desire that Therese and Carol feel for each other arouses in the events of separation, whenever there is a (physical) distance between them. The following paper addresses the figuration of the gesture that is built between the gaze of both heroines in the shot/reverse shot, which Haynes draws upon at the beginning and at the end of the film. Borrowing the possibilities of classic melodrama for this purpose, Haynes confronts the viewer with a renewed idea of the shot/reverse-shot in which there is no look that submits to the other, but each one possesses its own subjectivity. The act of looking becomes in Caro a “face to face”, in terms of Emmanuel Levinas, where the Other takes the significance and infinity of the discourse of the self. Gaze, desire, face to face, face, caress. The concepts with which Levinas defines the phenomenology of Eros emerge in Carol as the figures that allow a rereading of Hollywood system concerning desire and the invention of an erotic gesture wrought in the time of the visibility of the other.