Although the effort was launched by the clothing industry to better understand the modern French physiognomy, the campaign has also become a way to remind the populace of their true size.

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He argued that film editing was a kind of pictographic syntax, that in acting physiognomy was more important than psychology, and that the sound and colour design in a film should be treated as fully expressive elements in their own right.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

For much of the 20th century, Mr Hirschfeld's drawings were there to be savoured in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, where one's appreciation of his gift for spearing a performer's physiognomy co-existed with a weekly hunt for the Ninas that is to say, the number of times Mr Hirschfeld had the name Nina embedded in almost every drawing, as a tribute to his only child.

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