For Deleuze, every face "has a coefficient of turning away and turning towards" (Cinema One, 104):
turning away [détournement] is not the opposite of 'turning towards' [se tourner]. Both are inseparable; the one would be rather the motor movement of desire, and the other the reflecting movement of admiration. . . . [T]hey are not opposed to each other, they are both opposed to the idea of an indifferent, dead and fixed face which would obliterate all faces . . . (Cinema One, 104).
The path of the face, then, like the path of desire, admiration, or, as Deleuze points out also, the path of the planets, can only be discerned in terms of towards/away if one considers it in relation to a fixed point. The relative coherence of cinematic shots is dependent on the establishing of this fixed point, however provisional. But even when the face is involved--and the face is one sure way to establish fixed, human point of view--there is a potential eruption of the absolute, which Deleuze always contrasts with the relative structuring of shots. In fact, the face, as a locus of affection, draws on the powers of that which can not be incorporated into the real connections the film establishes, only those virtual ones which belong to the whole. For the face, and the affection-image for which it is the medium, the image has two aspects, "two states of power qualities," (Cinema One, 102) only one of which refers to a fixed point. The fixed is the "real" connection, the circuit between objects and characters. That which does not refer to these fixed points expresses what Deleuze calls a "virtual conjunction" outside spatio-temporal co-ordinates.