Dr Barry James Gibb
barryjamesgibb.com
As a filmmaker, I’m in the business of reading faces. And, while it would be easy to ‘go all poetic’ about this biological interface between many of our senses and the world, it’s best to start simply, with a person sitting in front of my lens.
It’s here, eye to eye, that the connection is made. Over the last decade of interviewing people as a one man unit, I’ve often had to rapidly develop a relationship with a complete stranger. To build a level of trust and empathy that is genuine and will place the interviewee at ease enough to tell me things – to tell a camera things – that they may not have told their friends.
Key to this is the face. In society, we read faces all the time and the interview situation differs only in the magnitude of attention paid. It’s akin to dating when suddenly, every pore, nuance and flicker of that person’s face becomes far more than a space where sounds emanate – it becomes a beacon, broadcasting the entire emotional spectrum to anyone who’s listening. I listen hard.
My role is to (often silently) respond appropriately to the sum of their emotional expressions – the culmination of face, voice and body language. In many ways, it feels like a dance in which the interviewee leads and I follow. Ultimately, we’ve had a one way conversation that should, ideally, feel highly satisfactory to the interviewee, leaving them with the feeling that they were truly heard.
When Dr Fay Bound Alberti contacted me to discuss ‘a project about emotional aspects of the face and face transplants’, I was immediately drawn in. Having been a scientist in my first career (neuroscience), the potential to explore the outer limits of medical science alongside the extremes of human experience was intoxicating.
My films, while often rooted in some aspect of science, are equally drawn to the poetry of human existence – in many ways, About Face is a project I was seeking without realising it.
An ongoing obsession that seems to keep creeping into my work is with time. What it is, how it’s measured and how it’s perceived. Initially, this fascination with the passing of life’s moments led me to interview a physicist and a watchmaker. Eventually, it drew me down a path that led to interviewing people with known mortality, an awareness of their own limited time on Earth.
The candour and honesty with which these wonderful interviewees speak is a privilege to behold. A man with heart failure spoke to me of his life’s regrets (many of which he had painted) while speaking of the waste of time that is television and effusing that the sunsets he observes from his garden pass at ‘precisely the correct rate of time’.
A woman with terminal cancer makes me laugh every time I see her. Not without a fight, she has accepted her inevitable passing but with a desire to, in her words, remain useful. To that end, she intends to leave her body to science and I intend to film her continuing journey.
The first time Fay and myself had a face-to-face discussion about her project was fascinating – however, I did feel a little sorry for the couple trying to enjoy their brunch at the table next to us as we discussed the finer details of mortality and how plastic surgeons practice their art on cadavers. As our surreal conversation continued, I was struck by the scale of the project’s ambition, the far-reaching implications it could have on society and, not least, the wonderful interdisciplinary nature of it all.
Since those initial conversations, I’ve started to see the face differently, to tune-in to certain news stories a little more attentively.
The BBC ran a story in October 2019, featuring a girl who had almost lost her entire jaw in an accident – six weeks prior to appearing on the television. The presenters (who I normally enjoy) interviewing the girl, highlighted the fact that any evidence of the incident was almost invisible – one could barely see the scar. And I found that profoundly irritating.
Yes, eventually the news item turned to the surgeon who had worked on her face – who was amazing in his matter of factness about his handiwork. But I was stunned by how facile a comment this was – the implication being that the return of a ‘near perfect’ appearance outweighs the fact they now have a functioning face at all, or even that they survived.
It was a stark reminder of how powerfully we respond to difference, to perceived beauty, to otherness and the pressure we all feel, to greater or smaller degrees, to fit in. A desire so powerful, it can lead people to acquiring an entirely new face.
It’s no coincidence that evolution placed the face where it is. In close proximity to our sensory nexus, the brain – it supplies the body with sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. To lose the face or part of it, is to potentially lose a profound component of the human experience. And that’s before we even get to our cultural relationship with it and the ability to simply walk along a street without being stared at.
In terms of human accomplishment, I believe receiving a new face is up there with walking on the moon. At one end of the journey, we have a human being who – often due to some great tragedy or accident – has suffered facial loss to some degree. I find the biological, psychological and social components of this near overwhelming. At the other end of the journey we have large teams of surgeons, with the myriad specialities to remove and reattach flesh – muscles, blood vessels, nerves.
But the journey doesn’t end with a successful operation. Opening the door to discussions about the emotional context and implications of this entire area of medical and human experience can only be of benefit to us all. And I’m delighted to be along for the ride.
At the end of October 2019, I headed to York to help Fay and her amazing team of artists, medical professionals and those specialising in, what I’ve now learned to call facial difference, film the launch of About Face. And what an event it was. The energy was palpable, the sense of interest, fascination and excitement as members of the public grew visibly animated as they explored new dimensions of something we take for granted.
And this is just the beginning.