In the Bergman's movie, the expression carries the theme of distorted reality induced by schizophrenia (in its adaption, the Scanner Darkly, the delusions are secondary to psychotropic drug use).
I'm not sure if C.S. Lewis was conscious of 1 Cor 13:12 when he wrote "Till We have Faces" . But it interlocks the themes of masks, blurred perceptions and reality. It is a re-interpretation of Lucius Apuleius Platonicus' Metamorphoses, the Greek myth about Psyche and Cupid. Its working title was originally "Bareface" (according to Wiki).
Lewis veils his characters and they are blind to certain truths. The narrator, Orual, cloaks her ugly face from the world and her self-justifications to the gods have an undercurrent of self-delusion. Cupid initially hides his face from his beautiful lover Psyche, visiting her only at night. When Orual visits her sister Psyche's stately palace, the finery and splendors were invisible to her mortal eyes. C.S. Lewis writes in a letter to Dorothea Conybeare:
| How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona. | ” |
[cited at Constance Babington Smith, Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay, 1964, 261; also at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252] (Wiki)
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