This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face
still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost
oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face
represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither
reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was
causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly
Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.
